From
the desk of
Bill
Ramey
8 28 18
COMMENTARY
& OPINION
Blue-Eyed Immigrants Transformed Ancient Israel 6,500 Years Ago
By
Mindy Weisberger, Senior Writer
August 24,
2018 07:16am ET
These
ossuaries — containers for human remains — from the Chalcolithic Period were
excavated at Peqi'in Cave in northern Israel.
Credit: Mariana Salzberger/Courtesy of the Israel Antiquities Authority
Thousands of years ago in what is now
northern Israel, waves of migrating people from the north and east —
present-day Iran and Turkey — arrived in the region. And this influx of
newcomers had a profound effect, transforming the emerging culture.
What's more, these immigrants not only
brought new cultural practices; they also introduced new genes — such as the
mutation that produces blue eyes — that were previously unknown in that
geographic area, according to a new study.
Archaeologists recently discovered this
historic population shift by analyzing DNA from skeletons preserved in an
Israeli cave. The site, in the north of the tiny country, contains dozens of
burials and more than 600 bodies dating to approximately 6,500 years ago, the
scientists reported. [The Holy Land: 7 Amazing
Archaeological Finds]
DNA analysis showed that skeletons
preserved in the cave were genetically distinct from people who historically
lived in that region. And some of the genetic differences matched those of people
who lived in neighboring Anatolia and the Zagros Mountains, which are now part
of Turkey and Iran, the study found.
Ancient Israel (then called Galilee)
belonged to a region known as the southern Levant, part of a larger area, the
Levant, which encompasses today's eastern Mediterranean countries. The southern
Levant experienced a significant cultural shift during the Late Chalcolithic period,
around 4500 B.C.E. to 3800 B.C.E, with denser settlements, more rituals
performed in public and a growing use of ossuaries in funerary preparations,
the researchers reported.
Though some experts had previously
proposed that cultural transformation was driven by people who were native to
the southern Levant, the authors of the new study suspected that waves of human
migration explained the changes. To find answers, the scientists turned to a
burial site in Israel's Peqi’in Cave, in what would have been Upper Galilee 6,500 years ago.
Unraveling an ancestry puzzle
Peqi'in is a natural cave, measuring
around 56 feet (17 meters) long and about 16 to 26 feet (5 to 8 m) wide. Inside
the cave are decorated jars and burial offerings — along with hundreds of
skeletons — suggesting that the location served as a type of mortuary for
Chalcolithic people who lived nearby.
However, not all of the cave's contents
appeared to have local origins, study co-author Dina Shalem, an archaeologist
with the Institute for Galilean Archaeology at Kinneret College in Israel, said
in a statement.
"Some of the findings in the cave
are typical to the region, but others suggest cultural exchange with remote
regions," Shalem said. The artistic styles of these
artifacts bear closer resemblance to styles common to more-northern regions of
the Near East, lead study author Eadaoin Harney, a doctoral candidate in the
Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, told
Live Science in an email.
The scientists sampled DNA from bone powder from 48
skeletal remains and were able to reconstruct genomes for 22 individuals found
in the cave. That makes this one of the largest genetic studies of ancient DNA
in the Near East, the researchers reported.
Blue eyes and fair skin
The scientists found that these
individuals shared genetic features with people from the north, and those
similar genes were absent in farmers who lived in the southern Levant earlier.
For example, the allele (one of two or more alternative forms of a gene) that
is responsible for blue eyes was
associated with 49 percent of the sampled remains, suggesting that blue eyes
had become common in people living in Upper Galilee. Another allele hinted that
fair skin may have been widespread in the local population as well, the study
authors wrote.
"Both eye and skin color are
traits that are controlled by complex interactions between multiple alleles,
many — but not all — of which have been identified," Harney explained.
"The two alleles that we highlight
in our study are known to be strongly associated with light eye and skin color,
respectively, and are often used to make predictions about the appearance of
various human populations in ancient DNA studies," she said.
However, it is important to note that
multiple other alleles can influence the color of eyes and skin in individuals,
Harney added, so "scientists cannot perfectly predict pigmentation in an
individual."
The scientists also discovered that
genetic diversity increased within groups over time, while genetic differences
between groups decreased; this is a pattern that typically emerges in
populations after a period of human migration,
according to the researchers.
A dynamic past
By presenting DNA from the distant
past, these findings offer exciting new insights into the dynamic ancient world
and the diverse human populations that inhabited it, said Daniel Master, a
professor of archaeology at Wheaton College in Illinois.
"One of the key questions of the
Chalcolithic has always been to what extent the groups in Galilee were
connected to the groups in the Be'ersheva Valley or the Jordan Valley or the
Golan Heights," Master, who was not involved in the study, told Live
Science in an email.
"The publication of the artifacts
from Peqi'in has shown many cultural links between these regions, but it will
be interesting to see, in the future, whether those links are genetic as
well," Master said.
The researchers' results also resolve a
long-standing debate about the pivotal factor that changed the trajectory of
the Chalcolithic peoples' unique culture, Shalem said in the statement.
"We now know that the answer is
migration," she said.
The findings were published online Aug.
20 in the journal Nature Communications.
Original article on Live
Science.
Ramey comments:
I
have no impressive letters that follow my name nor do I claim any scholarly
achievements, but I do believe my readers can testify that I have done my
homework in ancient history as pertaining to ancient Israel and have
demonstrated repeatedly that the grandfather of Jacob, (Israel), was walking
the earth some 4000 years ago.
How
could these "blue eyed migrants" have diluted the bloodlines of a
nation two and a half millennia before it became a nation?
Could
it be that we are viewing another piece of the deception of the "...whole
world"? (See Revelation 12:0).
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