Last week I watched the Discovery Channel King Tut Unwrapped. In the documentary, allegedly the truth about King Tut is finally revealed; however, I think it open up more questions than it answered. One important question is what is King Tut's Y-DNA and mt-DNA Haplogroups? First I think it is important to discuss what's a haplogroup, and why do geneticists concentrate on the Y-chromosome and Mitochondrial in their search for markers? For that matter, what's a marker? "Each of us carries DNA that is a combination of genes passed from both our mother and father, giving us traits that range from eye color and height to athleticism and disease susceptibility. One exception is the Y-chromosome, which is passed directly from father to son, unchanged, from generation to generation. Unchanged, that is unless a mutation-a random, naturally occurring, usually harmless change-occurs. The mutation, known as a marker, acts as a beacon; it can be mapped through generations because it will be passed down from the man in whom it occurred to his sons, their sons, and every male in his family for thousands of years. In some instances there may be more than one mutational event that defines a particular branch on the tree. What this means is that any of these markers can be used to determine your particular haplogroup, since every individual who has one of these markers also has the others. When geneticists identify such a marker, they try to figure out when it first occurred, and in which geographic region of the world. Each marker is essentially the beginning of a new lineage on the family tree of the human race. Tracking the lineages provides a picture of how small tribes of modern humans in Africa tens of thousands of years ago diversified and spread to populate the world.
A haplogroup is defined by a series of markers that are shared by other men who carry the same random mutations. The markers trace the path our ancestors took as they moved in and out of Africa. It's difficult to know how many men worldwide belong to any particular haplogroup, or even how many haplogroups there are, because scientists simply don't know.
Likewise for Mitochondrial DNA, the string of 569 letters is your mitochondrial sequence, with the letters A, C, T, and G representing the four nucleotides-the chemical building blocks of life-that make up your DNA. Here's how it works. Like I describe for the Y-DNA every once in a while a mutation-a random, natural (and usually harmless) change-occurs in the sequence of our mitochondrial DNA. Think of it as a spelling mistake: one of the "letters" in your sequence may change from a C to a T, or from an A to a G.
After one of these mutations occurs in a particular woman, she then passes it on to her daughters, and her daughters' daughters, and so on. (Mothers also pass on their mitochondrial DNA to their sons, but the sons in turn do not pass it on.)
Geneticists use these markers from people all over the world to construct one giant mitochondrial family tree. As I can imagine, the tree is very complex, but scientists can now determine both the age and geographic spread of each branch to reconstruct the prehistoric movements of our ancestors. By looking at the mutations that we carry, geneticist can trace our lineage, ancestor by ancestor, to reveal the path they traveled as they moved out of Africa." (1)
As a result, I did a search on Google "King Tut's DNA results". I found the actual results were published in the JAMA (The Journal of the American Medical Association) that Dr. Hawass used in the Discovery Channel's documentary and King Tut's Haplogroups information is absent, perhaps because there weren't enough data to conclude this information. However, I did another Google search "King Tut's DNA results haplogroup". I found the absent of haplogroup in the published report did not stop people from trying to speculate. Consequently, we now have an unproven speculation circulating on the World Wide Web that King Tut's haplogroup is R1b. I found the source of this speculation to be someone on RootsWeb (link: http://archiver.rootsweb.ancestry.com/th/read/GENEALOGY-DNA/2010-02/1266472989) who claimed by looking at the screen shots of the video, they were able to decipher the Y-STR markers and therefore determine King Tut's Y-DNA Haplogroup. I watched the same video and no marker numbers are evident. From this now there is a great debate that King Tut and his ancestors where R1b on Rootweb and other places on the internet (some which have become racially tinged). Nowhere was the Y-STR markers published except for 2 Y-STR here's a link to the Article: http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/short/303/7/638?home. The end result from this discussion someone published the so-called y-STR markers on Family Tree DNA's y-search.org under the ID ER7RQ. I think this should be a lesson in critical thinking; if you do not have enough data don't make it up. This led to another question; what was the motivation of the person who allegedly was able to determine King Tut's haplogroup? Quoting directly from the person who started this fiasco: "Additionally, if you look at the CODIS markers for Tutankhamen which they provide in the published study and run them in OmniPop, it indicates similarity with Europeans." In other words, did he want to know if King Tut was European? Why should King Tut's ethnicity matter? What I find fascinating is the science, that we can abstract DNA from a 3,000 year old mummy and verify his genealogy! Think about it....
Source:
Genographic project: https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/genographic/lan/en/index.html
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
7 comments:
Did you read the actual study and appendixes, or just watch the documentary?
Both. In neither the JAMA paper nor in the documentary are the 16 STR's listed, only two and to put 16 STR's on y-search.org that "was not" in the published DATA is irresponsible and misleading to say the least.
Very good points you raise, Soc.
And I think it is funny that the "challenge" links back to a blogger for Heritage Key, the same people who run Zahi Hawass's "official website."
You should be flattered! You seem to have ruffled the old man's feathers! Thats a three-pointer for sure.
Given that it is an unsupported ad hominem attack (implying you are ignorant of the subject without explaining why)which is devoid of any sort of facts, perhaps "ann" is "zahi" in drag!
When I heard about King Tut's dna becoming published, I was surprised that they did not mention the haplogroups. They don't have enough data to determine haplogroup but they have enough to determine paternity. I don't know much about dna, but somehow that doesn't make sense to me. I also found those site speculating that it was european. This too doesn't make sense to me... Did Europeans come to Egypt or did Egyptians go to Europe? Anyway I wrote to both the people who published the paper (German university that I can;t recall just now) along with the famous Egyptian anthropologist (who's name I also can't recall). I asked about the haplogroup.... I never got a response. Which frankly makes me thing that they got results they did not expect and want to bury. I may be wrong... but this missing info sticks out and only raises questions. I look forward to learning more. The more I learn about dna, the more race seems to be less important... seems to me we are all from this small group of people who came out of Africa, some lost color others did not.. But we are all brothers... Best wishes
Anonymous on May 1. Some points re your post: First, when hypothetically people came out of Africa, they didn't "lose" color, they were a different color. People who have a predominance of pheomelanin are not albinos. Second, by the time of Tutankhamun human civilization was already very old. The height of the Lower Danube River Valley Civilization was around 7,000 years ago where sophisticated copper smelting took place and complex surgeries were being performed -- unlike anywhere else in the World during that period based on archeological finds to this day. R-M269 is fairly certainly the Haplogroup of Neolithic farmers who migrated into Europe, which means the Europeans built astounding megalithic structures before the Egyptians figured out how to put one brick on top of another. So I find it alarming and somewhat racist that people today cannot fathom significant travel and cross-cultural pollination between the ancestors of modern Europeans and North Africans. Frankly, Egypt was a backwater when European culture was at its peak.
I hate to break it to you gens_Normannorum, but Egypt has it's own Stonehenge that predates those so-called astounding megalithic structures. You may want to branch out your own Euro-centric research and look up a little place called Nabta Playa.
What i find so odd about the end of your post is this comment you made.
" it indicates similarity with Europeans." In other words, did he want to know if King Tut was European?
Why should King Tut's ethnicity matter? <--This is the strangest question of all.
It should not matter? At what point do we say in science... You know what, i just think it is not important to know such a question.
Odd. Very Odd. It Matters.
Post a Comment