DNA Testing
The Lemba have become world famous because of genetic testing that has demonstrated the possible authenticity of some of their oral traditions. A genetic study in 1996 suggested that more than 50% of the Lemba Y-chromosomes are Semitic in origin. A subsequent study in 2000 reported more specifically that a substantial number of Lemba men carry a particular haplotype of the Y-chromosome known as the Cohen modal haplotype (CMH), as well as, a haplogrup of Y-DNA Haplogroup J found amongst some Jews, but also in other populations across the Middle East and Arabia. Studies have also suggested that there is no Semitic female contribution to the Lemba gene pool.
Among Jews the marker is also most prevalent among Jewish Kohanim, or priests. As recounted in Lemba oral tradition, the Buba clan "had a leadership role in bringing the Lemba out of Israel" and eventually into Southern Africa.
More recently, Mendez et al. (2011) observed that a moderately high frequency of the studied Lemba samples carried Y-DNA Haplogroup T, which is considered to be of Near Eastern origin. The Lemba T carriers belonged exclusively to T1b*, which is rare and was not sampled in indigenous Jews of the Near East or North Africa, but shares a similar estimate expansion time with the T1* Somalis. T1b* has been observed at low frequencies in the Bulgarian and Ashkenazi Jews as well as in a few Levantine populations.
Read more about this topic: Lemba People
Famous quotes containing the words dna and/or testing:
“Here [in London, history] ... seemed the very fabric of things, as if the city were a single growth of stone and brick, uncounted strata of message and meaning, age upon age, generated over the centuries to the dictates of some now all-but-unreadable DNA of commerce and empire.”
—William Gibson (b. 1948)
“Today so much rebellion is aimless and demoralizing precisely because children have no values to challenge. Teenage rebellion is a testing process in which young people try out various values in order to make them their own. But during those years of trial, error, embarrassment, a child needs family standards to fall back on, reliable habits of thought and feeling that provide security and protection.”
—Neil Kurshan (20th century)