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MrRING Android Futureman Joined: 07 Aug 2002 Total posts: 4196 Gender: Unknown |
 Posted: 06-08-2004 19:44 Post subject: Using DNA to Prove Ancestry |
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Is this really possible? Or a scam?
Former UN Ambassador Andrew Young finds his African roots through DNA
By DANIEL YEE
ATLANTA (AP) Former United Nations Ambassador Andrew Young was hesitant to learn about his African heritage, even though the technology to trace his roots had been available for years. The 72-year-old finally yielded to a request by a company called African Ancestry, which matches DNA samples from clients with a database of more than 22,000 African lineages.
A few weeks after a simple swab of the cheeks, Young's mother's line was linked to the Mende tribe in Sierra Leone. The tribe also has roots in Sudan. The link indicates he is a distant cousin of the leader of the Amistad slave rebellion in the 1850s.
"I guess I never really wanted to know where in Africa I was from because I would decide where I was from by where I happened to be,'' Young said. "I wanted to be from all of Africa, not just a particular place in Africa.'' Hundreds of other blacks, troubled by dead-ends and yellowed records in old government offices, churches and cemeteries, have used DNA tests to reveal their ancestry to other African tribes and countries.
About 2,000 blacks including 80 in Georgia and 300 throughout the South have used the company's $349 DNA test since it was first offered in February 2003. Some of the best known include filmmaker Spike Lee and actor LeVar Burton of the television miniseries "Roots.''
Young, a longtime civil rights activist and former Atlanta mayor, has been going to Africa for 30 years, helping countless countries with his political and practical wisdom. Prior to his DNA test, Young said he felt close to the African countries of Angola, South Africa and Tanzania because those were places he actively worked to help promote economic development. But his new link to war-torn Sierra Leone and Sudan has helped provide a focus for the civil rights leader.
"This gives me more reason to be interested in involved in what's going on,'' he said. The program has its skeptics. Stanford University law professor Henry Greely warns that the tests only identify two of possibly hundreds of ancestors and can only give a person a rough idea of one's ethnicity.
But "knowing just a little bit is a lot better than knowing nothing,'' said company spokesman Michael Darden, who said the test pointed his ancestry to Nigeria.
"It's particularly important for us because our history was lost when we were taken from the continent of Africa,'' said Gina Paige, African Ancestry's president, who is black and has used the test to find DNA family links with people from Nigeria, Liberia, Angola and Portugal. "Knowing where you are from is a very central component to knowing who you are.''
STORY |
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| Vitrius Great Old One Joined: 11 Jan 2004 Total posts: 197 Location: Southernmost-ish North America Gender: Male |
| Posted: 06-08-2004 20:47 Post subject: |
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Genes get moved around so much (it's the very nature of genes), that I find it difficult to see how they can pinpoint the whole man in such a way. Almost all American blacks will have east African descent, but even then, those tribes intermarried, and there's even bound to be some European blood surrepticiously Strom Thurmond-ed in there.
The Tennesseean Melungeons come up as either Greek, Turkish, northern (Asian) Indian, Portuguese, or Arab. But that's because all those peoples share common background through trade, travel, and invasion. They're most likely just Portuguese (who are about 90% genetically "Arab").
Still, they CAN tie a single school teacher in Chedder to one of the oldest skeletons in Britain, so maybe it's not as complicated as it looks to me. |
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| Kondoru Unfeathered Biped Joined: 05 Dec 2003 Total posts: 5788 Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 07-08-2004 17:02 Post subject: |
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| Im african too! One of my ancestors was a zebra! |
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| rynner Location: Still above sea level Gender: Male |
| Posted: 22-02-2006 23:24 Post subject: |
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| Quote: | DNA 'could predict your surname'
By Paul Rincon
BBC News science reporter
Forensic scientists could use DNA retrieved from a crime scene to predict the surname of the suspect, according to a new British study.
It is not perfect, but could be an important investigative tool when combined with other intelligence.
The method exploits genetic likenesses between men who share the same surname, and may help prioritise inquiries.
Details of the research from the University of Leicester, UK, appear in the latest edition of Current Biology.
The technique is based on work comparing the Y chromosomes of men with the same surname. The Y chromosome is a package of genetic material found normally only in males.
It is passed down from father to son, just like a surname.
'Cut down'
"The evidence would not be hanging on the Y chromosome, all it would give you is an investigative tool to prioritise a sub-set of your suspects," said co-author Dr Mark Jobling from the University of Leicester.
Mining the information would require building a database of at least 40,000 surnames and the Y chromosome profiles associated with them.
Dr Jobling emphasises the limitations of the method; it could have some predictive power in just under half the population, after the most common surnames like Smith, Taylor and Williams have been excluded.
But he says it has the potential to cut down on the police workload.
"If you had a big enough database, it would give you from your crime scene sample a list of names," Dr Jobling, from the University of Leicester, told the BBC News website.
"That would help you prioritise your suspect list. Some investigations have very large suspect lists, in the thousands."
The Leicester researcher said police could consult the Y chromosome and surname database to help prioritise their search in cases where a crime scene sample had failed to turn up matches in the national DNA database.
"You might have a situation where the Y chromosome predicts 25 names. So you could go and see in the pool of suspects whether the names are there," Dr Jobling explained.
"If they are... you could then ask them for a DNA sample and do conventional DNA profiling to see if they match the crime scene sample."
Tested pool
Over time, the Y chromosome accumulates small changes in its DNA sequence, allowing scientists to study the relationships between different male lineages.
It follows that men with the same surname might have very similar Y chromosomes. But adoptions, infidelity, name changes and multiple founders for just one surname complicate the picture.
For the study, Turi King and colleagues from the University of Leicester recruited at random 150 pairs of men who shared a British surname and compared their Y chromosomes.
Across the sample, the authors determined that just under a quarter of the pairs had recent common ancestry.
Given the small sample size and the random recruitment, Dr Jobling said he was surprised at the strength of the signal.
Sharing a surname also significantly raised the likelihood of sharing the same type of Y chromosome, with the link getting stronger as the surname gets rarer.
Added extra
The researchers used the data to roughly test the predictive power of the method. They found the approach was most useful for less common names, with a 34% chance of prediction in the 80 least common surnames from the 150-name sample.
"This range of surnames makes up 42% of the population. So we're looking at prediction in just under half of the population. We have to exclude the Smiths and Joneses," Dr Jobling said.
The researchers extrapolated their success rate to the 25-65 no-suspect murders and 300-400 no-suspect rapes on the police books each year, and found the method could help in roughly 10 murders and 60 rapes annually.
Max Houck, a former scientist with the FBI Laboratory, and director of the Forensic Science Initiative at West Virginia University, US, commented: "I think by itself it is probably not useful - a single point of evidence - and for most evidence types that's the case.
"But if you have that and other data, it can put you more towards or more away from a particular proposition if you know the person may have an uncommon surname, and, for example, some ethnicity information.
"If it's a bit more cumulative it might push you in a particular direction," he told the BBC News website.
It was at the University of Leicester in 1984 that the technique of "DNA fingerprinting" was first developed.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4736984.stm
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| Mighty_Emperor Divine Wind
Joined: 18 Aug 2002 Total posts: 19943 Location: Mongo Age: 42 Gender: Male |
| Posted: 23-02-2006 15:00 Post subject: Re: Using DNA to Prove Ancestry |
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| MrRING wrote: | | Is this really possible? Or a scam? |
A little bit of both. This article covers the ground nicely - there are clearly people making a lot of cash from this and a lot people seeking an indentity (as well as some people tlaking out of their arse):
| Quote: | New roots
Wealthy African-Americans are using DNA kits to trace their roots - all the way back to Africa. But, says Gary Younge the results may tell them things they don't want to hear
Friday February 17, 2006
The Guardian
Oprah is a Zulu. Never mind that she was born and raised in Mississippi and her great grandparents hailed from no further away than Georgia and North Carolina, Ms Winfrey, the queen of the televised confessional, is not just suggesting her lineage might stretch back thousands of years to a specific African tribe. She is asserting it as a definitive fact. "I always wondered what it would be like if it turned out I am a South African. I feel so at home here ... Do you know that I actually am one?" she told an audience of 3,200 in Johannesburg last year. "I went in search of my roots and had my DNA tested, and I am a Zulu."
This month in the US, Oprah has been joined by eight other African-American luminaries, including Quincy Jones and Whoopi Goldberg, in tracing their genealogy. Thirty years after Alex Haley famously traced the oral history passed down through his family back to Gambia to find his African ancestor, Kunta Kinte, who had been sold into slavery these celebrities will undertake a similar journey alongside Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr in a television series called African-American Lives. But unlike Haley's Roots, few have been able to turn to family historians in search of their genealogical narrative.
So when the stories stop and the paper trail of slaves bought and sold runs out, the participants have turned to genetic science to trace their kin. But while these journeys into the past are essentially personal, they raise broader issues about racial authenticity and the genetic basis for racial categorisations. Furthermore, it addresses the fundamental issue of whether any of us can, ultimately, really say where we come from - and what use it would do us even if we could.
Over the past few years laboratories have begun to amass a database of DNA samples from around the world, including parts of West Africa, the area from which most slaves were caught, sold and shipped to the Americas.
The technology aims either to trace a person's lineage through their genes or compile a statistical breakdown, by geographical region, of their genetic makeup. Alondra Nelson, an assistant professor of sociology and African-American studies at Yale, says results "could stretch from several thousand years to tens of thousands of years in a person's ancestry".
Mark Shriver, an assistant professor of anthropology and genetics at Penn State university, conducts geographical genetic tests on his students among others. He describes himself as white but his own tests reveal that his DNA is 86% white but also 11% west African and 3% indigenous American. "For most people it is consistent with what they thought," he says. "How the west African DNA got into my family line was never explained to me."
Another method of testing follows the genes back through gender lines. One, the patrilineal, follows the Y chromosome through your father, your father's father, your father's father's father and so on. The other, the mitochondrial, follows DNA through your maternal line - or your mother's mother, your mother's mother's mother and so on.
"It's basically a matchmaking game," Megan Smolenyak, an expert in family history research, told the New York Daily News. "I like to warn folks: be sure you can deal with the results ... Some people don't like what they find."
The science, now commercially available, has become something of a boom industry. Growing numbers of relatively wealthy African-Americans have been buying up test kits that can cost up to $350 (£200) a throw.
While other Americans could travel to towns in Ireland, Italy or Germany in search of genealogical sustenance, slavery deprived African-Americans of a clear and precise geographical bond with their own ancestry. As Gates puts it: "There is no Ellis Island for the descendants of the slave trade." Moreover, since slave-owners changed people's names, regularly split up families and banned reading and writing, the usual methods of keeping family histories have not been available to African-Americans until relatively recently.
This new science, then, seemed to offer a means of telling a story that had been denied and hidden. Even as DNA evidence was freeing many - mostly black - prisoners from death row it was also unlocking historical secrets. For example, historians had insisted for 150 years that America's third president, Thomas Jefferson, could not have fathered children by his slave mistress Sally Hemmings. Many African-Americans claimed otherwise, however, and in 1998 scientists followed the Y chromosome DNA in Jefferson's family line to establish a definitive link with the Hemmings family. Almost 200 years after Jefferson had cryptically parried accusations of the affair with the words "the man who fears no truth has nothing to fear from lies", science had exposed the facts that a mixture of prejudice and politics had kept hidden.
In reality, however, the truths this science reveals are no less selective than those you will hear from a politician. Two years ago I swabbed my cheek with something that felt like a cotton bud and sent it off to a Washington-based organisation called African Ancestry. Several weeks later it sent me a letter telling me that the "Y chromosome DNA sequence that we determined from your sample matches with the Hausa people in Nigeria ... This result means that you have inherited through your father a segment of DNA that was passed on consistently from father to son to you. This segment of DNA is presently found in Africa in Nigeria."
They also sent me a map showing me where Nigeria is and a "certificate of ancestry" declaring that I "share paternal genetic ancestry with the Hausa people in Nigeria". It went on,"You can display it with pride among other important family documents."
Elsewhere in the letter, however, came information that would seem to minimise the entire enterprise if not negate it altogether. "The Y chromosome may represent less than 1% of your entire genetic makeup" it said. That is to say that I had possibly been awarded an ancestry courtesy of a fraction of my DNA.
Herein lies one of the central problems with tracing ones roots through DNA. Science can only tell you so much. Stop the genealogical wheel at an inconvenient moment and some of the world's greatest black icons could be rendered not African, but European. Muhammad Ali's great grandfather was Irish; Bob Marley's father was British. According to Shriver, Gates - the most prominent black academic in the country - has DNA that is 50% European and 50% West African. Both his matrilineal and paternal lines came back to Europe.
"I've spoken with African Americans who have tried four or five different genetic genealogy companies because they weren't satisfied with the results," says Nelson. "They received different results each time and kept going until they got a result they were happy with."
"There are some people who are black who may have only 10% African ancestry," says Shriver. "It helps create an understanding that race is an illusion and that there isn't any real difference between races. They show that we're all mixes."
Critics of Shriver's work say he is actually achieving the opposite - elevating race from a social construct - a difference created to justify racism - into something that appears both real and even calculable. Paul Gilroy, the Anthony Giddens sociology professor at the London School of Economics, says: "To make all these claims is to realign science with the racial categorisations of the 18th century."
Shriver defends his work. "That is a potential problem," he admits. "The labels are arbitrary. It's a model. We have taken these four categories that mean something for New World people. But I don't respect people who don't want to explore this issue and see what happens. There's quite a lot of hubris out there when it comes to genomic work and ethics."
Neither the mixing nor the denial is exclusive to descendants of former slaves or issues of race. Everyone could claim African ancestry given that civilisation is deemed to have started there. Although Mediterranean Europeans define themselves as white, they share a long heritage with North Africans.
"Everybody is mixed, but not everybody counts as mixed," says Gilroy. "These things are interesting but the truth is that no one can say with any certainty where they come from."
Like Nelson, Gilroy does not deny the need for these tests. "Some people say knowing made them feel complete," she says. She tells of one African-American woman whose match took her to an area of Sierra Leone where many of the women were accomplished potters. This woman came from a family of skilled potters. "I don't know how you like those two facts," says Nelson. "But I know it was very meaningful for her."
Which brings us back to Oprah. Last week she gave author James Frey a dressing down on her couch for the memoir he wrote and she helped promote that turned out to owe far more to fiction than fact. Angry, and at times tearful, Oprah asked the author of A Million Little Pieces to explain why he felt "the need to lie". "It is difficult for me to talk to you because I really feel duped," she said. "But more importantly I feel that you betrayed millions of readers." Whatever Oprah's belief about her ancestry, her assertion that she is Zulu is no less misleading.
According to most historical accounts, the Zulu nation was consolidated only after the departure of slaves from West Africa to the Americas. Moreover, there is little in the way of genetic lineage that comes close to matching a particular linguistic group such as the Zulu nation. When Oprah had her DNA tested for the programme, the results suggested her most likely match was from the Kpelles tribe of Liberia. Indeed she was told that she could not have come from South Africa. None of this is likely to stop her claiming the Zulus as her kith and kin. "I'm crazy about the South African accent," she said. "I wish I had been born here."
Perhaps her new-found relations, and those of her fellow celebrities say less about the power of science than something both far more elusive and compelling - the desire for identity. |
www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,,1711821,00.html |
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| crunchy5 Great Old One Joined: 24 Aug 2005 Total posts: 1951 Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 23-02-2006 15:17 Post subject: |
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| In my trawl around the web I have seen companies advertising this service even a comparison chart for various co's doing the same. Its quite popular with African Americans, but I advise they choose which co does the job wisely there's a wide difference in the prices charged |
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| rynner2 What a Cad!
Great Old One Joined: 13 Dec 2008 Total posts: 21365 Location: Under the moon Gender: Male |
| Posted: 15-08-2012 10:09 Post subject: |
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Scottish people's DNA study could 'rewrite nation's history'
Evidence of African, Arabian, south-east Asian and Siberian ancestry in Scotland, says author of book tracing genetic journey
Charlotte Higgins, chief arts writer
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 15 August 2012 01.24 BST
A large scale study of Scottish people's DNA is threatening to "rewrite the nation's history", according to author Alistair Moffat.
Scotland, he told the Edinburgh international book festival, despite a long-held belief that its ethnic make-up was largely Scots, Celtic, Viking and Irish, was in fact "one of the most diverse nations on earth".
"The explanation is simple. We are a people on the edge of beyond; on the end of a massive continent. Peoples were migrating northwest; and they couldn't get any further. We have collected them."
He and his colleagues have found West African, Arabian, south-east Asian and Siberian ancestry in Scotland. "The West African ancestry mostly originates in the 18th century, so it is almost certainly to do with the slave trade," he said.
David Lammy, MP for Tottenham, whose immediate ancestors are from the Caribbean, also revealed at the festival this week that DNA analysis had shown he has Orcadian ancestry – also likely to relate to British involvement in the Atlantic slave trade.
One per cent of all Scottish men, said Moffat, have Berber ancestry – why, he says, remains a mystery, though he believes that the penetration of people from the medieval caliphate of Cordoba "must have been immensely important". Moffat said his colleagues had also discovered DNA originating from Roman-period Illyria, the area occupied by modern Croatia, which may relate to Roman occupation of lowland Scotland.
Many of Moffat and Wilson's findings are laid out in their book The Scots: A Genetic Journey. But research continues apace, and most recent finding suggests that porridge has been a crucial factor in the nation's early history, Moffat said.
Until recently, he said, it had been believed that farming arrived incrementally in Scotland, around 3,000 years ago, by a process of slow and gradual adoption, by women, of new techniques. But their recent DNA research suggests something quite different, he said: that it arrived quickly via young male immigrants from what is now Germany.
These young men, he said, brought brand-new techniques with them, planting grass-derived crops that could be turned into porridge and fed to young children. This new improved food production reduced the period, argued Moffat, that the hunter-gatherer mothers had to devote to breast-feeding, and thus increased their fertility. This led to a population explosion, he said, laying the seeds of a recognisable society in northern Britain. "It is a revelation. Porridge, and I'm not joking about this, is absolutely crucial to our history." 
Not every analysis of DNA has delivered welcome results. DNA analysis on Moffat himself – a proud Scottish Borders man – showed that his ancestry was English. "We don't offer counselling for that," he said. 
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/aug/15/scotland-dna-study-project |
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| ramonmercado Psycho Punk
Joined: 19 Aug 2003 Total posts: 17933 Location: Dublin Gender: Male |
| Posted: 15-08-2012 10:53 Post subject: |
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| 1% Shi'ites in Scottish ancestry. |
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| Mythopoeika Boring petty conservative
Joined: 18 Sep 2001 Total posts: 9109 Location: Not far from Bedford Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 15-08-2012 11:01 Post subject: |
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| ramonmercado wrote: | | 1% Shi'ites in Scottish ancestry. |
Or they could be people with a Sunni disposition. |
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| JamesWhitehead Piffle Prospector Joined: 02 Aug 2001 Total posts: 5779 Location: Manchester, UK Gender: Male |
| Posted: 15-08-2012 12:00 Post subject: |
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I don't think the idea of linking surnames with genetic characteristics is all that new. I seem to recall seeing a tv feature on the subject many years ago. The focus was on male "Robinsons" IIRC. They tended to exhibit a specific type of jaw, I think.
I can't seem to find that now online but there is a whole book on the subject from 2010:
Here be Surnames |
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| Cochise Great Old One Joined: 17 Jun 2011 Total posts: 1104 Location: Gwynedd, Wales Age: 58 Gender: Male |
| Posted: 16-08-2012 08:54 Post subject: |
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| It does seem that our impression of our history as being a successive wave of invasions (Celts, Romans, Saxons, Vkings, Normans in the case of England/Wales) does not gel very well with the DNA studies so far, but maybe we are still in the early days of such analyses. |
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| marionXXX Un-Gnoing Joined: 03 Nov 2001 Total posts: 2922 Location: Keighley, W Yorks Age: 48 Gender: Female |
| Posted: 18-08-2012 19:27 Post subject: |
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My father has had some genetic tests and he had one of my (full) sisters tested too. He is 100% Western European. He also had his mtDNA done, which doesn't tell you a vast amount except what your mother line is and his y - DNA to see if it could shed any light on the identity of his Great Grandfather, his y DNA goes back through Western European to ancient roots in the Altai Mountains. He also tested positive to the Viking marker.
My sister is 90% Western European, 10% Middle Eastern. Maybe the tales of our West African ancestry are untrue or mistaken as there would have been markers for that if it was there.
It does link you up with close relatives, my father had his cousin tested recently and he instantly came up as being closely related to my dad and sister on the database.
The company is called Family Tree DNA. |
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| rynner2 What a Cad!
Great Old One Joined: 13 Dec 2008 Total posts: 21365 Location: Under the moon Gender: Male |
| Posted: 01-01-2013 10:32 Post subject: |
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Louis XVI blood mystery 'solved'
Scientists believe they have solved the mystery of a rag said to be dipped in the blood of Louis XVI of France after more than two centuries. David Blair reports.
By David Blair
7:00PM GMT 31 Dec 2012
When King Louis XVI went to the guillotine after the French Revolution, Parisians jostled to acquire a gruesome relic of regicide by dipping garments in his blood.
For years, researchers have been trying to establish whether a genuine memento of this momentous execution in the Place de la Revolution survives today. A new DNA analysis has solved a mystery that has lasted for almost 220 years, finding that an ornate gourd almost certainly carries the bloodstains of the fallen king.
On Jan 21 1793, a Parisian called Maximilien Bourdaloue witnessed Louis's public decapitation as the postrevolutionary "Terreur" took hold. Afterwards, he joined many others in dipping a handkerchief in the pool of blood left at the foot of the guillotine.
Bourdaloue then secreted this garment inside a calabash, now in the possession of an Italian family. The rag itself has long since decomposed, but the container still carries crimson stains and an inscription recording how the souvenir was collected after the king's "decapitation".
But there was no conclusive proof that the blood really belonged to Louis. A DNA sample could not solve the riddle unless it was compared with another drawn from a relative of the king.
A new study in the current issue of "Forensic Science International" has filled in the missing link. The breakthrough came when scientists took a DNA sample from the mummified head of one of Louis's most illustrious ancestors: King Henri IV, who ruled France from 1589 until 1610.
This analysis established that Henri possessed a rare partial "Y" chromosome. Louis was one of his direct male-line descendants, separated by seven generations. The stains on the calabash also contained the "Y" chromosome, along with other matches, leading experts to conclude that the container almost certainly holds the blood of the executed king.
"Taking into consideration that the partial Y-chromosome profile is extremely rare in modern human databases, we concluded that both males could be paternally related," read the study.
"Historically speaking, this forensic DNA data would confirm the identity of the previous Louis XVI sample."
The study found "with 95 per cent confidence" that it was 246 times more likely that the owner of the mummified head and the provider of the bloodstain were related than unrelated. Both Henri and Louis came to a violent end at the hands of their subjects – and relics of both survive to this day.
How exactly Louis met his death was also something of a mystery. According to some accounts, Louis was so terrified that he had to be forced to mount the scaffold at gunpoint. Other witnesses suggested that the execution was botched and the first blow of the guillotine failed to remove his head.
The record was set straight as recently as 2006 when a letter from Charles Henri Sanson, the "chief executioner" of Paris and the man who personally beheaded the king, was finally discovered.
This described how Louis went bravely to his end after mounting the scaffold. Although he was denied the chance to address the crowd, he "exclaimed very loudly: 'People, I die innocent'."
Turning towards Sanson and the other executioners, Louis is recorded as saying: "Gentlemen, I am innocent of everything of which I am accused. I wish that my blood may be able to cement the happiness of the French".
Sanson wrote: "He [Louis] withstood all that with a composure and a steadiness that astonished us all. I remain very convinced that he had drawn this steadiness from the principles of religion, of which none appeared more deeply affected and persuaded than he."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/9773174/Louis-XVI-blood-mystery-solved.html |
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| gncxx King-Size Canary
Great Old One Joined: 25 Aug 2001 Total posts: 13561 Location: Eh? Gender: Male |
| Posted: 01-01-2013 19:15 Post subject: |
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| Now we can clone him. |
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| EnolaGaia Joined: 19 Jul 2004 Total posts: 1304 Location: USA Gender: Male |
| Posted: 11-10-2013 17:34 Post subject: |
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Well ... Maybe not ... 
| Quote: |
Royal Buzzkill: Gourd Doesn't Hold Louis XVI's Blood
A new analysis that casts major doubt on the identification of a mummified head as belonging to French King Henry IV also calls into question the origin of a possibly more bizarre artifact: a blood-encrusted gourd.
An analysis published in January in the journal Forensic Science International identified the blood as that of French King Louis XVI, who was executed by guillotine in 1793, a victim of the French Revolution. Witnesses to the death reportedly sopped up the king's blood with handkerchiefs. According to inscriptions on the bloody gourd, one of those handkerchiefs was stored inside.
Using DNA from the Y, or male, chromosome, researchers compared the dried blood in the gourd (the handkerchief, if inside, disintegrated long ago) with genetic material from a mummified head said to belong to Louis XVI's ancestor, King Henry IV. The original analysis suggested the two men were related, and that both were Bourbons, the lineage that began with Henry IV.
But a new DNA study published in the European Journal of Human Genetics on Oct. 9 argues that neither the owner of the head nor the owner of the blood were Bourbons. The original analysis was based on limited genetic material and degraded DNA, the study authors wrote.
"The blood cannot be of Louis XVI," Jean-Jacques Cassiman, a geneticist at the University of Leuven in Belgium and the lead author of the new study, told LiveScience.
Cassiman and his colleagues compared the DNA signatures from the head and blood from the gourd with the DNA of three living male descendants of the Bourbon line, all from different branches of the family. The three men's Y chromosomes matched one another, but they did not match the blood. Whereas the Y chromosomes of the living Bourbons belong to a subgroup called R-Z381*, the Y chromosome of the blood donor belongs to a group called G(xG1, G2). The most recent common ancestor of a man in the R group and a man in the G group would be 10,000 years ago at the latest, the researchers wrote.
Likewise, the owner of the head and the owner of the blood do not appear to have been related to one another. For both samples to belong to kings of France, Cassiman said, there would have had to be two secretly illegitimate sons in the line between them. Illegitimate children do occur in royal lines, but the fact that three living Bourbon males from different branches of the family share a Y-chromosome profile is strong evidence that the Bourbons did not have illegitimate children in the line.
The head's Y chromosome does not match the living Bourbons, the researchers found. And DNA passed through the maternal line further rules out Henry IV as the head's owner, they said.
Cassiman and his colleagues also found a segment on the blood owner's HERC2 gene — a gene associated with eye color — that indicates that whoever bled on the handkerchief had an 84 percent chance of not having blue eyes. Louis XVI, however, did have blue eyes.
Handkerchiefs soaked with a dead king's blood would have been hot financial commodities after Louis XVI died, the researchers wrote. It's likely, therefore, that the bloody handkerchief was a fake created by someone out to make a buck.
SOURCE: http://news.yahoo.com/royal-buzzkill-gourd-doesnt-hold-louis-xvis-blood-135400404.html
Photo of the Gourd Available at:
http://media.zenfs.com/en_US/News/LiveScience.com/gourd.jpg1357149613
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