Brit-Am Anthropology and DNA Update
12 June, 2022; 13 Sivan, 5782.
Contents:
1. Big Question: Can your environment change your DNA?
2. Early Celtic languages came to Great Britain from France during the Late Bronze Age.
3. Ancient Lapplanders (Saami) Women were the same as those of North Africa!
Saami and Berbers- An Unexpected Mitochondrial DNA Link
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1. Big Question: Can your environment change your DNA?
https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/big-question-can-your-environment-change-your-dna#:
Extracts:
....
While the sequence of DNA may not be affected by your environment, the way genes work, called gene expression, can. ... Epigenetics is the study of heritable changes in gene expression that don't involve changing the underlying DNA effectively, software changes that cause alterations in gene function.
Environmental factors such as food, drugs, or exposure to toxins can cause epigenetic changes by altering the way molecules bind to DNA or changing the structure of proteins that DNA wraps around. These structural changes can result in slight changes in gene activity; they also can produce more dramatic changes by switching genes on when they should be off or vice versa.
These changes are heritable, meaning they can be passed on from parent cell to daughter cell within the body, and from parent to child. An extraordinary study of survivors of the Dutch famine during World War II, for example, has shown that the effect of epigenetic changes caused by hunger don't show up in the survivors' children, but they do in their children's children. ....
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2. Early Celtic languages came to Great Britain from France during the Late Bronze Age.
Harvard's New Genetics Research on Ancient Britain Contains Insights on Language, Ancestry, Kinship, Milk
TOPICS:AnthropologyArchaeologyDNAEvolutionGeneticsHarvard UniversityMigrationPopular
By HARVARD UNIVERSITY JANUARY 7, 2022
https://scitechdaily.com/harvards-new-genetics-research-on-ancient-britain-contains-insights-on-language-ancestry-kinship-milk/
New research reveals a major migration to the island of Great Britain 3,000 years ago and offers fresh insights into the languages spoken at the time, the ancestry of present-day England and Wales, and even ancient habits of dairy consumption.
The findings are described in Nature by a team of more than 200 international researchers led by Harvard geneticists David Reich and Nick Patterson. Michael Isakov, a Harvard undergraduate who discovered the existence of the migration, is one of the co-first authors.
The researchers analyzed the DNA of 793 newly reported individuals in the largest genome-wide study involving ancient humans. Their findings reveal a large-scale migration likely from somewhere in France to the southern part of Great Britain, or modern-day England and Wales, that eventually replaced about 50 percent of the ancestry of the island during the Late Bronze Age (1200 to 800 B.C.).
The study supports a recent theory that early Celtic languages came to Great Britain from France during the Late Bronze Age. It challenges two prominent theories: that the languages arrived hundreds of years later, in the Iron Age, or 1,500 years earlier at the dawn of the Bronze Age.
The findings reveal a large-scale migration likely from somewhere in France that eventually replaced about 50 percent of the ancestry of Great Britain during the Late Bronze Age.
As part of the genetic analysis, the researchers found that the ability to digest cow's milk dramatically increased in Britain from 1200 to 200 B.C., which is about a millennium earlier than it did in central Europe. These findings illuminate a different role for dairy consumption in Britain during this period compared with the rest of mainland Europe. More study is needed to define that role, the researchers said. Increased milk tolerance would have provided a big advantage in the former of higher survival rates among the children of people carrying this genetic adaptation.
The newly discovered ancestry change happened around 3,000 years ago, more than a millennium and a half before the Saxon period. The team was aware of a migration into England at some point during this gap because of an observation they made in research published in 2016. That study showed that contemporary English people have more DNA from early European farmers than people who lived in England about 4,000 years ago.
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3. Ancient Lapplanders (Saami) Women were the same as those of North Africa!
Saami and Berbers- An Unexpected Mitochondrial DNA Link
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1199377/`
Alessandro Achilli,1 Chiara Rengo,1 Vincenza Battaglia,....
Extracts:
A Yakut from northeastern Siberia (27 in fig. 1) and a Fulbe from Senegal (29 in fig. 1) harbored mtDNAs that differed at only two coding-region nucleotide positions.
.... virtually all Saami mtDNAs with 16270-150 harbor the transitions at nts 16189 and 16144 seen in the Yakut mtDNA....
Such a recent common ancestry of maternal lineages found in populations living as far as 9,000 miles apart and whose anthropological affinities are not at all obvious is, to say the least, unexpected.
H1 and H3, two frequent subhaplogroups of H, display frequency peaks centered in Iberia and surrounding populations, including the Berbers of Morocco.... their frequency patterns and ages resemble those reported for haplogroup V which, similar to U5b1b, is extremely common only in the Saami ..... unequivocally links the maternal gene pool of the ancestral Berbers to the same refuge area and indicates that European hunter-gatherers also moved toward the south and, by crossing the Strait of Gibraltar, contributed their U5b1b, H1, H3, and V mtDNAs to modern North Africans.