Half of European men share King Tut's DNA

Source: Reuters

Up to 70 percent of British men and half of all Western European men are related to the Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamun, geneticists in Switzerland said.

Scientists at Zurich-based DNA genealogy centre, iGENEA, reconstructed the DNA profile of the boy Pharaoh, who ascended the throne at the age of nine, his father Akhenaten and grandfather Amenhotep III, based on a film that was made for the Discovery Channel.

The results showed that King Tut belonged to a genetic profile group, known as haplogroup R1b1a2, to which more than 50 percent of all men in Western Europe belong, indicating that they share a common ancestor.

Read more: http://af.reuters.com/article/egyptNews/idAFL3E7J135P20110801

:hide:

:rofl:

... then nobody has his dna. They may have his dad's or his brother's.

As in, you share DNA with your brother and cousins, but you aren't descended from them.

Dancin' by the Nile (disco Tut)
The ladies love his style (boss Tut)
Rockin' for a mile (rockin' Tut)
He ate a crocodile

He coulda won a Grammy (King Tut)
Buried in his Jammies
(Born in Arizona)
(Moved to Babylonia)
(He was born in Arizona)
Got a condo made of stone-a
King Tut

Where's my share of the gold? :)

Guess it's not always good to be the king.

hehe

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bl5dZxA-rZY&feature=related

problems remembering ancient history on this subject.

"We think the common ancestor lived in the Caucasus about 9,500 years ago," Scholz told Reuters.

It is estimated that the earliest migration of haplogroup R1b1a2 into Europe began with the spread of agriculture in 7,000 BC, according to iGENEA.

a group that migrated not just a single person. Hey you know what the means? Many of us white folk are Arabs!

Technically, many anthropologists agree that on a genetic scale, humanity originated in Africa before spreading out to conquer (I mean "civilize") the world. But here in the states, there are some good 'ol boys from Alabama and Idaho that don't want any of that nonsensical, scientific mumbo-jumbo clouding up their perfect, divinely-created world of conservative white Christians and "them."*

* "Them" refers to any and all non-white, non-Christian, non-conservatives who exist in the world despite God's obvious preferences to the previously mentioned group of devoutly white Christian conservatives. Why God allows "them" to survive is a mystery that cannot be solved until all of "them" are purged from this Earth - in Jesus' name I pray....

I recognize that *I* am the genetic mutation. And it doesn't bother me one bit.

Arabs are generally considered Caucasian under the old physical anthropological way of doing things.

Even now, looking at allele distributions the ME is more European than it is sub-Saharan African. You get layers of immigration represented in N. Africa and in Europe. One of the oldest layers seems to say that there was immigration from N. Africa to Europe and the ME/Asia Minor very early on. A second layer in Europe seems to originate in Asia Minor--that would be the spread of agriculture; a third layer is in several sublayers, among the oldest being about the time of the spread of Indo-European languages, later ones showing up in Scythians/Sarmations, then Huns/Magyars/Bulgars.

Because of all of that most cladistic analyses actually place Europeans being just a bit closer genetically to East Asians. Europeans share some genetic innovations with E. Asians that aren't shared by other groups, even SE Asians.

I think there was a backwash from the ME over N. Africa. Only later do you get a rather small superimposed layer of obviously sub-Saharan African genetic material superimposed on the North, the NE in many ways being an exception because the Egyptian empire and the Nile made travel and communication easier so the phys. anthr. differences between Upper and Lower Egypt are rather effaced now. There's been a running debate, still unresolved as far as I know, to account for the distribution of the Afroasiatic languages. Until they work out the relative chronology of the splits it just seems likely that Semitic spread from NE Africa, but it's a persistent suggestion that somehow some AA languages spread to Africa from the Arabian peninsula.

The Lower Kingdom in Egypt was fairly good at making sure that in its iconography they were kept separate from the black population of the Upper Kingdom and the Semitic peoples to the east.

Even the massive number of slaves brought north by the Arab traders didn't amount to much; that's what you get when you *really* consider slaves beneath you (or castrate them). One sure vestige of the slave trade, actually, is a fairly good strip of the sickle cell allele that stretches up and narrows down around one of the most prominent slave trading centers, a seldom heard of place called Benghazi.

Thank you.

whose DNA might be in your wood pile. :loveya: :pals: :grouphug:

They made my Lithuanian-Jewish grandfather ride in the back of the bus in the American south. My mom was always assumed to be Irish by strangers. People thought my Russian-Jewish grandfather was a "Chinaman" and I've always looked a bit Asian with freckles like crazy every summer. So when I went redhead, there were people who actually thought it was real. Blue-eyed blondes and redheads all over my Russian-Jewish grandmother's family.

Should be the other way around: King Tut shares DNA with half of European men.

The really interesting information is sort of buried in the story, which is that the haplogroup Tut belongs to occurs in less than 1% of modern Egyptians. It throws into question where the pharaohs of Tut's lineage really originated.

It doesn't put much question into where the people of his time originated from - that's all been studied before. Ultimately, even those of use possessing neandertal DNA, have our ancestors in Africa. Since then, and especially since the last ice age, people have been moving around an awful lot. Some of the most interesting migrations of peoples occurred after the fall of the Roman Empire, including the expansion of Islam into North Africa and Europe. The idea that people's ancestors came from where they now live is generally false. There are exceptions: Basques, San, Ainu, but these are rare. For the most part, the ancestors of people living almost anywhere in this world only arrived in those parts a few hundred years ago at most.

For instance, as this article says, 70% of British men, 70% of Spanish, and 60% of French men belong to this haplogroup. That's not from movement in the past few hundred years - they've been in those countries for thousands of years. One of the things this has shown is that the movement of Anglo-Saxons into Britain was nothing like as large as previously thought - the population largely comes from those who have been on the Atlantic European coast for several thousand years. And the populations of China and India are similarly well established.

" Basques, San, Ainu" etc. may have been living for tens of thousands of years in the same regions. But you really need to add a nought on to your estimate.

On edit: worth pointing out this R1b1a2 is the most common in Basque men too - 75%–87% (note: they renamed R1b1b2 to R1b1a2 in 2011, just to fuck with us, I think).

I know that anglo-saxon genetic influence in Britain is smaller than previously thought, but that doesn't mean that the Celts had been living there for thousands of years. There were pre-celtic people there before them. Since this haplogroup is widespread, could that not also mean that these people were moving around a lot, as opposed to being stationary?

In any case... now I feel old and out of touch. Following this stuff used to be a sort of hobby of mine, and I realize now that I've become so bogged down in my studies that I haven't paid much attention to any of this stuff in years.

The 'Celts' have clearly been in Britain for at least 2000 years, since that's recorded history (and I don't call 20 'a few'); the only possible 'invasions' since then that could have had significant genetic influence are Anglo-Saxon and Norse, but the Y chromosome DNA results are saying those were smaller than imagined. Because of the significant links to the Atlantic seaboard, but not to central Europe (where the Celtic culture is found with the earliest dates), the most common theory now is the 'the Celts' were not a group of people who moved into Britain or Brittany from further east; it was a culture and language group that spread, but without large-scale movement of peoples.

That is, while the Welsh language is Celtic, ethnically they predate them. I didn't realize it was true of as many other people in the area, apart from Basques, who did keep their own language.

From the Wikipedia article:

Wales 92.3%
Spanish, Basques 87.1%
England, Cornwall 78.8%
England, Leicestershire 62%

Cornwall is quite Celtic - there's the Cornish language in the Celtic group, and it stayed semi-independent of the rest of England for a few centuries after the arrival of the Anglo-Saxon kings. But Leicestershire is in the East Midlands (part of the Danelaw, for instance), so that shows less incomers than had been expected.

The headline as written can be taken to imply that half of European men are descendants of King Tut, similar to other stories about descendents of Genghis Khan, for example. It should have stated "King Tut shares DNA with half of European men" which removes ambiguity.

Others have addressed the other points about resident populations and such. In terms of his origination, I was thinking about whether or not any studies had been done on contemporary, non-royal Egyptians. It would fascinating to see if there was a similar difference in the haplogroups between the royal lineage and common folk even then.

Perhaps the Sea Peoples, who were undoubtedly combined with the Hyksos and may have been Luwians, may have come from S. Europe.

Perhaps a body guard who got frisky with his employer's wife a generation or three before.

Long before Tut's time there are Indo-European names mentioned among the mercenaries hired and brought to Egypt as armies from Asia Minor: Some Hittites, some Luwians, probably other ethnicities; many probably stayed, some would have been respected warriors and perhaps generals.

But keep in mind that modern Egyptians have had a lot of influence from the Upper Kingdom. It's a conceit that the two kingdoms were ethnically identical. Life's not that simple and doesn't always satisfy modern ethno-political requirements.

"Undoubtedly combined"????? Uh, no. You say stuff like that you better have links.

The Indo European types were chariot warriors and very much in demand as were archers and scouts from Nubia. New Kingdom Egypt was very much a melting pot. Within a generation or two foreigners become indistinguishable from native Egyptians except for perhaps an odd name or two in the family.

I don't know if you even have to go to the queen getting frisky with the bodyguard theory--although it's a fun one.

One of King Tut's male ancestors, Thutmose I, was a commoner, probably a general, who married into the royal family during the early 18th Dynasty and became king when Amonhotep I failed to produce an heir. We know his mothers name, Senisoneb (a common Egyptian name), but not his father's. It's possible that he could have been of foreign descent on his father's side. Thutmose's name is as boringly Egyptian as they come but then as now newcomers wanted to fit in and it's not inconceivable that some foreign warrior who married an Egyptian noblewoman would give his kid an Egyptian name.

Amonhotep III & Akhenaton are believed to have married Mittanian princesses as secondary wives but this would not have passed along the foreign DNA. Unfortunately Thutmose I's mummy has not been identified. His son and grandson (Thutmose II & III respectively) had DNA samples extracted in 2007 when they were trying to verify the identity of a female mummy believed to be Thutmose I's daughter, the female king Hatshepsut but my understanding is that they were unable to get usable DNA from these two bodies.

They were probably from further east. The spoke a language which is believed to be related to some Russian languages.

In those days Turkey was controlled by the Hittites. The Mittani who were related to the Hurrians lived east of there in what's now northern Iraq. They also controlled large areas of Syria and at various times fought with or allied with either the Egyptians or the Hittites. They were a great empire in their day but they didn't leave much of a physical record. As far as literature goes, there's a treatise on horse training written by a Mittani warrior named Kikuli who served the King of the Hittites around the time of Tutankhamon and a few letters written to the Egyptian court and that's about it.

This really is a fascinating period. You would have seen Semites, Indo Europeans and Nubians serving variously the Hyksos Kings at Avaris or the insurgent native Egyptian 17th Dynasty at Thebes or even the ruler of Kush to the south of Egypt. The ruler of Kush had some Egyptian allies who were desperately opposed to the Thebans. You even have a warrior queen named Ahotep who took command of the Theban armies in the name of her young son after the death of King Kamose and groomed her kid Ahmose to finally force the Hyksos from Egypt.

All of these people no doubt intermarried, some at the highest levels. For example, there was a very rich burial of a Nubian woman and child found at Thebes--possibly a wife of one of the 17th Dynasty Egyptian kings. Do we know whether a Hurrian warlord married into the royal family? Not really but it's also not beyond the realm of possibility.

And let's not forget that Set/Seth was a redhead.

Modern Egyptians are not necessarily the guys who were there at the time, are they?

Back in the mid-'80s I took two classes on hieroglyphs from a prof named Leonard DeGrassi. According to him, and I have no idea what his source for this was, the Ancient Egyptians were not Arabic or from any other Semitic group. I imagine this was based on comparing languages. He also said that the modern people closest to the A. Egyptians are the Coptic Christians. It would be interesting to see how their DNA fits into these studies.

I don't remember if he ever said what group the AE's were from if not Semitic. The classes were fun and really interesting, sadly I have forgotten almost all of the how to translate hieroglyphs part.

UPenn has the most amazing online dictionary I ever saw in my life:

http://psd.museum.upenn.edu/epsd/nepsd-frame.html

There are also downloadable Sumerian dictionaries all over the internet. But until you see the cuneiform, you don't get how amazing it all was. Or how much of our culture and beliefs are descended from the way those words were used, punned, written...amazing.

Wasn't Cleopatra actually Nubian? Or, am I getting her confused with someone else?

I wonder where the split actually occurred and when.

But that's because of conquest long after Tutankhamen.

It's very believable that they didn't marry Egyptians - consider the British monarchs, all of whom between 1714 and 1936 were married to German relatives (and the one that broke the run - George VI - wasn't expected to get the throne, so they didn't worry about him marrying a non-royal). Tie in the Egyptian belief about royalty being part divine, and the Ptolemies marrying much closer relations than the British royal family, and it wouldn't be surprising if they never married an Egyptian commoner.

If I recall correctly, Alexandria's library made it the intellectual center of the Med, while its port was a major center of commerce, and that in tun made it the place to go to find sailors and mercenary soldiers. Greek mercenaries were still the gold standard of combat efficiency at the end of the Ptolemaic era, which is the major reason why the Romans tried so hard to gently acquire as much of the old Alexandrian empire as possible, rather than conquering it (they still conquered plenty of it).

Most of what we think we know about Alexander the Great comes from one Greek general who served the Romans, Arrian, who in turn appears to have based at least half of his account of Alexander's campaigns on the records the original Ptolemy left behind at he Library of Alexandria. (And we can safely assume that a good chunk of that is crap, because Arrian naively assumed that "a king wouldn't lie," and deferred to Ptolemy's account when it differed with others. The original sources Arrian used are almost entirely lost to us today.)

But of course, all of that was as distantly removed in time from King Tut as Charlemagne is from us now.

Which is what the text says, but the headline oversimplifies that.

Map B in the link below shows the frequency of this haplogroup:

http://www.plosbiology.org/article/fetchObject.action?uri=info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1000285.g001&representation=PNG_M

(Note: What was R1b1b2 in 2009 was renamed to R1b1a2 early in 2011; this is the haplogroup, M-269, we're talking about; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_R1b_%28Y-DNA%29#R1b1a2_.28R-M269.29 )

Viva_La_Revolution

and half of West European descent men are descended from Charlemagne, including me.

It's an old genealogist's trick. Go back far enough, and everyone on the planet has a multitude of common ancestors.

Ol' Ramses had about 100 kids ... he's likely the one that got the gene pool dispersin' ...

The Amenhoteps and Tutankhamen belonged to the 18th dynsty; Ramses to the 19th.

... Around 3500-3000 BCE horse bones began to appear more frequently in archaeological sites beyond their center of distribution in the Eurasian steppes and were seen in central Europe, the middle and lower Danube valley, and the North Caucasus and Transcaucasia. Evidence of horses in these areas had been rare before, and as numbers increased, larger animals also began to appear in horse remains ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestication_of_the_horse

Manetho states "during the reign of Tutimaos a blast of God smote us, and unexpectedly from the regions of the East, invaders of obscure race marched in confidence of victory against our land. By main force they easily seized it without striking a blow; and having overpowered the rulers of the land they then burned our cities ruthlessly, razed to the ground the temples of the gods, and treated all the natives with a cruel hostility, massacring some and leading into slavery the wives and children of others ... Finally, they appointed as king one of their number whose name was Salitis. He had his seat in Memphis, levying tribute from upper Egypt ... In the Saite nome he founded a city ... and called it Auaris". He named these invaders the "Hyksos" which he translated as "shepherd kings" ... The Hyksos brought with them knowledge of bronze weapons, chariots and composite bows ...
http://www.ancientegyptonline.co.uk/hyksos.html

... Horses were introduced into Egypt during the Second Intermediate Period (about 1700-1550 BC). The earliest remains of horses are a few bones from Avaris and the skeleton of a horse found at Buhen. The Buhen remains date to the early Second Intermediate Period, but this date is disputed. In the wars between the Theban 17th Dynasty and the Hyksos both sides used horses ...
http://www.digitalegypt.ucl.ac.uk/foodproduction/horse.html

... The Hyksos were an important influence on Egyptian history, particularly at the beginning of the Second Intermediate Period. Most of what we know of the nature of the Hyksos depends upon written sources (of the Egyptians), such as the Rhind Papyrus. Also of considerable importance is the systematic excavation of their capital, Avaris (Tell el-Dab'a). Aamu was the contemporary term used to distinguish the people of Avaris, the Hyksos capital in Egypt, from Egyptians. Egyptologists conventionally translate aamu as "asiatics" ...
http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/hyksos.htm

The Hyksos were a group of mixed Semitic-Asiatics who settled in northern Egypt during the 18th century BC. In about 1630 they seized power, and Hyksos kings ruled Egypt as the 15th dynasty (c. 1630-1521 BC) ...
http://history-world.org/hyksos.htm

Provide link.

Now me, I once saw a kid with the face of Akhnaten walk into my office, sit on a chair, and announce he was waiting for his girlfriend. Cafe au lait skin and I have no idea of his family history. Sure wish I'd made him spit in a cup or something, though.

What I was referring to is the genetic fact that all Europeans & Asians are out of Africa. Since Egyptians of King Tut's time looked distinctly as if they possessed African ancestry, there ya go.

And, of course, Egypt IS in Africa.

Not totally sure when that hundred years was though. Now that dogma-protecting Hawass(?) is gone, maybe scholars can take a closer look at the inconsistencies of the Egyptian timeline.

way later than the 18th dynasty of Tutankhamon.

Queen Tiye, that looks like a twin of Lena Horne. Her father, Yuya, though, is considered by some to have beem a western Asiatic, and he was the king's Master of Horse.

The same DNA tests we're discussing also confirmed the suspected identity of the lady formerly known as KV35EL as the Great Wife of Amonhotep III Queen Tiye.

Here she is in the (rather dessicated flesh). Still impressive looking after more than 3,000 years, my mother would say she had good bones. That bent arm pose seems to have been used for Royal Women.



This is the famous wooden head.




Someone else had a bit of fun with another portrait of the queen and Michelle Obama--or maybe they're serious. hmmm.

not comes from..like you're related to your sister but you didn't come from her. We're all related in some fashion..except for republicans..they came from a petrie dish.

For instance..lol
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2010/10/barack-obama-related-to-sarah-palin-rush-limbaugh-bush.html">Barack Obama related to Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh and George W. Bush, ancestory website claims

against Cousin Mitt?

The Hyksos, a foreign group who for a couple of hundred years controlled most of Lower Egypt, included populations of people who spoke Semitic as well as Indo-European languages. The 18th Dynasty Pharoahs also encouraged settlement and acculturation by chariot driving warriors some of whose ancestors might have come from the Caucuses.

The 18th Dynasty to which Tut and his family belonged, began as a nativist revolt against the Hyksos who had taken over northern Egypt. These pharoahs, who were based in southern Egypt, practiced brother/sister marriage in order to keep the bloodline pure and to stress the divine nature of their kingship but later in the dynasty they began to marry outside the family and also to intermarry with Mittanian royalty. This is now believed by some to not be because of a genetic weakening of the Dynasty as you might think, but because the royal women were simply getting too powerful. Around twenty years after the death of the powerful Queen Hatshepsut who seized power and had herself declared King while acting as regent for Thutmose III, her nephew Thutmose III and his son Amonhotep II downgraded the position of the royal ladies and pharoahs up until Amonhotep III, married outside the family.

Amonhotep III's principle wife was Tiye, a commoner and daughter of a man named Yuya who may have been of foreign origin. He also married a Mittanian princess. The Mittians were a horse breeding Indo European people so this would work. Experts are still arguing over whether Tut's dad was Akhenaton, Amonhotep III's son by Tiye or Smenkhare, an ephemeral son of Amonhotep III by an unknown mother. There are other possible candidates. We know for example that a man who later became Thutmose I (Hatshepsut's father) married into the royal family around 100 years before King Tut & Co. when Amonhotep I produced an heir. He could have been the carrier of this DNA.

I'm no expert on DNA ancient or otherwise. Could this DNA pass through the female line or does there have to be a male ancestor whose father was a member of this haplogroup?

I imagine that this is NOT something the Egyptian government would like to have spread about. It won't be popular in Afrocentrist circles either.

iGENEA is studying human Y-chromosome DNA haplogroups; i.e., King Tut's paternal line.

Not much to look at; had to be the money that turned him into such a chick magnet.

about 9,500 years ago (ie about 6,000 years before Tutankhamen). The interesting thing is that this is a grouping predominantly from Western Europe - Spain, France and the British Isles. So it's mostly at the far end of the Mediterranean from Egypt. There are small numbers of it elsewhere, but it's very rare in present-day Egypt.

No, not the religious story, the current science.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y-chromosomal_Adam
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_R1b_(Y-DNA)#R1b1a_.28R-P297.29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_R1b_(Y-DNA)#R1b1a_.28R-P297.29

The Egyptian creation myth discusses a time "after the world was made" when the first Egyptians lived as hunter gatherers. It then describes the "gods" taking pity on the humans, and entering their world by sailing a boat up the Nile. They taught them basic construction, farming techniques, and set up the first legal system in Egypt. It also describes power struggles and murders between these "gods". The ancient Egyptians considered their pharaohs "gods" because they were descended directly from these ancient gods.

Over the centuries, people have dismissed the legends entirely, and some crackpots have tried to claim that they were everything from aliens to Atlanteans, but the answer could be much simpler. The ancient pharohnic lineage may have simply been started by primitive sailors from elsewhere in Eurasia. They found a fertile valley with a hunter-gatherer population, conquered the people, and "modernized" them. If the new government was hereditary, that could easily explain why the leadership maintained certain genetic markers that aren't shared by the rest of the population.