MY VERY, VERY GREAT AUNT KATRINE
My first known ancestor goes by the name Katrine. She lived about 16,000 years ago in what is now northeastern Italy. The map above shows the route that her ancestors took over many generations, moving out of the Near East, across the Caucasus Mountains, and into what is now southern Russia.
Katrine was the founding mother of mitochondrial DNA haplogroup K and is one of the so-called "Seven Daughters of Eve" identified in the 2001 book of that title by Oxford geneticist Bryan Sykes. Each of these seven women were the first to be born with a distinctive mutant gene that they passed on to all of their female descendants and their sons, who carry mitochondrial DNA from their mothers as well as YDNA from their fathers.
Katrine’s oldest known K descendant was Oetzi the Iceman, whose frozen body (see below) was discovered in the Alps in 1991. Oetzi was born about 3300 BC during the Chalcolithic or Copper Age. He probably came from an area in the Tyrolian Mountains near the present village of Feldthurns (Velturno) north of Bolzano, Italy. He was about 45 when he died on the Schnalstal glacier in the Otztal Alps, near Hauslabjoch on the border between Austria and Italy. Based on examination of his remarkably well-preserved remains, researchers believe that his death was caused by a blow to the head due to a fall or, perhaps, from being struck by a rock wielded by another person.
Cousin Oetzi and I are both members of haplogroup K, a classification that currently includes more than 3 million individuals. About 8 percent of the population with European ancestry including about 32 percent of all Ashkenazi Jews share the basic mutations for a K--16224C and 16311C.
Another one of Katrine’s descendants, and one of my somewhat more recent ancestors, is a woman who lived in the Rhine Valley during the 7th or 8th century. She
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established a subgroup, called a subclade, of haplogroup K identified as K1a1b1a. This subclade is largest one of four Ashkenazi lineages that arose sometime after a few families migrated into the Rhine Valley from northern Italy.
According to one source, it’s possible that the woman from whom most Ashkenazi Jews are descended may not have been Jewish herself. Jon Entine suggests that the Jews who first settled in the Rhine Valley were traders brought north by Christian nobility to help facilitate commerce in the region; in other cases they became moneylenders or tax collectors, functions barred to Christians by the Church. Some came with wives, but it’s believed that most came alone and married local women.
Entine says that while DNA evidence shows that 80% or more of Jewish males have direct Semitic ancestry, two major studies of Jewish female lineage suggest that only about 50% of females trace their ancestry back to the Middle East. The other 50% or so of Ashkenazic women today appear to be descended from gentiles. It’s possible, therefore, that wandering Jewish men, from Italy or elsewhere, took on gentile wives and raised their children as Jews. During the Middle Ages, some of these families moved eastward into Poland. Genetic databases show that a large proportion of the tested individuals who share my genetic characteristics trace their roots Russia, Romania, Poland, and the Ukraine confirming historical information about the migration of Hungarian Jews from these areas.
Sources:
Doron Behar et. al., “mtDNA Evidence for a Genetic Bottleneck in the Early History of the Ashkenazi Jewish Population”, European Journal of Human Genetics, 2004
The Genographic Project, https://www3.nationalgeographic.com/genographic/index.html
Jon Entine, “Cracking the Code”, Reform Judaism On-Line, Spring 2008, http://reformjudaismmag.org/Articles/index.cfm?id=1321
Ellen Levy-Coffman, “A Mosaic of People: The Jewish Story and a Reassessment of the DNA Evidence”, Journal of Genetic Genealogy, February 2005.
Jewish Genealogy by Genetics http://www.jewishgen.org/dna/
“Otzi the Iceman”, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96tzi_the_Iceman
Updated 7 April 2008
