The theory had been, and I have put it forward here, that the rough outline of Ashkenazi Jewish heritage is Near Eastern males mating with European females, mostly in the western Mediterranean before moving to the Rhine. A new study that comes out next month in Human Gene finds that implausible, showing evidence that both y-haplogroup and mtDNA founder lineages come from the Near East. The European mtDNA of the females came later and gradually. Distinguishing between founder and host population mtDNA lineages in the Ashkenazi population. The study also provides a nice "highlights" box at the beginning, even before the abstract. People like me with low attention span love these.
This study presents a method to distinguish between founder and absorbed mtDNA lineages in contemporary Ashkenazi Jews. Adjusting the sample size, absorbed lineages appear as singletons, while founder lineages show multiple occurrences. Our analysis found that less than 15 % of current Ashkenazi Jews carry absorbed mtDNA, consistent with patterns seen in many founder populations, where absorbed matrilineal lineages outnumber founder ones. However, this does not support a non-Jewish European origin for the founding generation.
Culturally, this suggests that the Western Mediterranean Jews did not arrive mostly as individual or father-son-brother groups of traders who settled and took wives willing to convert, but that a greater percentage of them arrived as families or sent for their families quickly. For an American context, this is the same as the colonial Virginia pattern of individual males arriving to seek their fortune versus the Pennsylvania and especially New England models of the arrival of whole families.
Please note that this does not support anything like the Khazar Hypothesis.
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