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Found this of interest, thought everyone here might enjoy:
Experts find genetic Jewish-Arab link
By Judy Siegel
JERUSALEM (November 6) - DNA research carried out at the Hebrew University-Hadassah Medical School and University College in London has shown that many Jews and Arabs are closely related. Over seven out of 10 Jewish men and half of Arab men whose DNA was studied inherited their Y chromosomes from the same paternal ancestors - who lived in the Middle East in the Neolithic period in prehistoric times.
The research, to be published soon in the journal Human Genetics, was disclosed in a recent conference in New York on human origins and disease. It was carried out by Prof. Ariella Oppenheim, a senior geneticist in the Hebrew University's hematology department. Dr. Marina Faerman, Dr. Dvora Filon of the Hadassah-University Hospital in Jerusalem, HU doctoral student Almut Nebel, and Mark Thomas and others at the British university assisted. The work was also reported last week in the journal Science.
Oppenheim and her colleagues tested blood from 143 Israeli and Palestinian Moslem Arabs whose great-grandfathers were not related. Chromosome set data were compared with that of 119 Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews, and to that of non-Jewish residents of northern Wales. The researchers found that the Arabs are more closely related to Jews than they are to the Welsh, indicating a more recent common ancestry. Arabs and Jews had about 18 percent of all their chromosomes in common.
A previous study of 1,371 men from around the world by geneticist Michael Hammer of the University of Arizona, with collaboration from Oppenheim, found that the Y chromosome in Middle Eastern Arabs was almost indistinguishable from that of Jews.
According to historical records, part - perhaps the majority - of the Moslem Arabs in Israel descended from local inhabitants, mainly Christians and Jews, who had converted after the Islamic conquest in the seventh century CE, Oppenheim wrote. These local inhabitants, in turn, were descendants of the core population that had lived in the area for several centuries, some even since prehistoric times.
The results of the study match historical accounts that some Moslem Arabs are descended from Christians and Jews who settled in the southern Levant (Israel and Sinai) and came from a core population that lived in the area since prehistoric times.
"Our findings are in good agreement with historical evidence and suggest genetic continuity in both populations despite their long separation and the wide geographic dispersal of Jews," Oppenheim wrote.
jpost.com |
