Archive for the ‘DNA Testing/Results’ Category
“The Cursed Souls” – Home Page
Intrigued with tracing my family lineage online, I was startled one night to stumble upon a supressed chapter of American founders, and for better or for worse, to discover the key to my lifelong struggle with a series of symptoms that had long mystified my doctors.
An amazing new history is emerging of a Mediterranean people, sometimes referred to as Melungeons, who settled American in the 1500′s long before the Northern Europeans first arrived. (The Arabic origin of the name Melungeon–”Melun-Jinn”–means one who has been abandoned by God–a cursed soul.) No, this tale does not begin with the early New Mexican settlers, but begins with a Southeastern lineage that has spread throughout the United States, and the rare and potentially decimating genetic disease traced to these colorful people.
Even more intriguing, this disease parallels some of the symptoms of Chronic Fatigue Immune Dysfunction Syndrome (CFIDS), fibromyalgia, Alzheimer’s, Multiple Sclerosis, and Diabetes. It also includes a group of other symptoms regularly ignored or misdiagnosed by physicians: acute chest pain, pleuritis, appendicitis-like attacks, arthritis–particularly of the feet, ankles, knees and hips, and the symptom for which it is named, a recurring high fever that lasts three to four days and dissipates. The name of this insidious genetic “misspelling” is Familial Meditteranean Fever (FMF). If your family story featured an ancestor called “Black Dutch,” “Black Scot,” or Cherokee, listen up.
Ironically, the story of the Melungeon people has been broken not by the US press, but by the BBC correspondent Richard Lister. He was astonished to find the streets of the Appalachian village he visited filled with Melungeon descendants who “would not look our of place on the Turkish coast with their dark olive skin ad straight black hair.”
Sir Francis Drake brought many of these Portuguese, Armenian, and Ottoman Turks to America after he freed them from the Spanish in 1587. Genetic studies now also indicate Jewish lineage in the Melungeon people as the Portuguese Jews were fleeing persecution.
I suspect Drake was relived to deliver this human cargo and avoid whatever strange malady these people suffered. In an era of mysterious plagues, a shipload of people running high fevers would have terrified any captain.
[...Much MORE]
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Egyptology News: DNA test to discover Tutankhamun’s parentage?
Wednesday, June 03, 2009
DNA test to discover Tutankhamun’s parentage?
Google/AFP
Egyptian researchers are using DNA tests to discover the lineage of pharaoh king Tutankhamun, whose ancestry remains a mystery to Egyptologists, antiquities chief Zahi Hawass said on Monday.
The young king, whose mummy was found in a gold and turquoise sarcophagus by English archaeologist Howard Carter in 1922, ruled Egypt between 1333 and 1324 BC.
His ancestry has been as much a source of speculation as his abrupt end.
“Until now, we don’t know who his father was. Was it Akhenaten or Amenhotep III,” Hawass told reporters at a press conference.
The antiquities chief said the testing would be done with help from experts at Cairo University’s faculty of medicine and would also include X-raying and the reconstruction of possible relatives’ features.
The testing will mostly be done in the Valley of the Kings in Upper Egypt, where pharaonic royalty was mummified, Hawass said.
Egypt’s antiquities council opposed previous efforts to test the mummies because they were undertaken by “foreigners” and the tests were to be done in laboratories “not specialising in mummies,” he said.
The result will be announced in February, he said.
via Egyptology News: DNA test to discover Tutankhamun’s parentage?.
