The Missing Link of Jewish European Ancestry:

[kapustin]

The question of Jewish ancestry has been the subject of controversy for over two centuries and has yet to be resolved. The
"Rhineland hypothesis" depicts Eastern European Jews as a "population isolate" that emerged from a small group of German
Jews who migrated eastward and expanded rapidly. Alternatively, the "Khazarian hypothesis" suggests that Eastern European Jews
descended from the Khazars, an amalgam of Turkic clans that settled the Caucasus in the early centuries CE and converted to Judaism
in the 8th century. Mesopotamian and Greco-Roman Jews continuously reinforced the Judaized empire until the 13th century.
Following the collapse of their empire, the Judeo-Khazars fled to Eastern Europe. The rise of European Jewry is therefore explained by
the contribution of the Judeo-Khazars. Thus far, however, the Khazars' contribution has been estimated only empirically, as the
absence of genome-wide data from Caucasus populations precluded testing the Khazarian hypothesis. Recent sequencing of
modern Caucasus populations prompted us to revisit the Khazarian hypothesis and compare it with the Rhineland hypothesis.
We applied a wide range of population genetic analyses to compare these two hypotheses. Our findings support the Khazarian
hypothesis and portray the European Jewish genome as a mosaic of Near Eastern-Caucasus, European, and Semitic ancestries,
thereby consolidating previous contradictory reports of Jewish ancestry. We further describe a major difference among Caucasus
populations explained by the early presence of Judeans in the Southern and Central Caucasus. Our results have important implica-
tions for the demographic forces that shaped the genetic diversity in the Caucasus and for medical studies.
Key words: Jewish genome, Khazars, Rhineland, Ashkenazi Jews, population isolate, Eastern European Jews, Central
European Jews, population structure
есть полная версия
http://eelhaik.aravindachakravartilab.org/ArticlesPDFs/MissingLink2012.pdf

[SSlava]

  Кстати, весьма любопытные сведения. Что вы насчет всего этого думаете?))Хотя конечно некоторые моменты спорны, но все же весьма любопытно))

[Шад]

Обсуждение этой статьи уже начиналось. Есть отдельная тема "Этногенез европейских евреев": http://forum.molgen.org/index.php/topic,4618.msg150767.html#msg150767
Про проект Эран Элхаика тоже есть тема "Khazar DNA Project": http://forum.molgen.org/index.php/topic,4190.msg138549.html#msg138549