Mr. Fred Smoot posted the following on the TN-All List. Thought you good people would find this interesting, I did. Shelta Press release of the Melungeon Heritage Association Kingsport, Tennessee, June 20, 2002 - Some of the veil of mystery surrounding the "mysterious" Melungeons was lifted today when the results of a two-year DNA study were announced. New questions have been raised, however, concerning females potentially from Turkey and northern India who are a part of the Melungeon ancestry. The Melungeons are a group of people of unknown origin first documented in the mountains of Appalachia in the early 19th century. Many believed they were of mixed racial ancestry and the Melungeons faced legal and social discrimination. As a result, they tended to live in remote areas, most notably Newman's Ridge in Hancock County, Tennessee. In the 1940's and 1950' s, sociologists and anthropologists labeled the Melungeons and other similar groups as "tri-racial isolates." Over the years, numerous myths, legends, and theories evolved to explain the Melungeons' mysterious origins. These legends often involved sailors and explorers from Spain, Portugal, Carthage, or Phoenicia who were stranded on the American continent and intermarried with Indians. The Melungeons themselves often claimed to be "Portyghee." Most researchers believed they were a product of intermarriage between English and Scots-Irish settlers, Indians, and free African-Americans, and discounted their claims of Mediterranean origin. The DNA results announced today confirmed that the Melungeons have European, African, and Native American ancestry, as well as genetic similarities with populations in Turkey and northern India. More surprising, however, is the fact that some of these Turkish- and northern Indian- like sequences have been passed through the Melungeons' maternal lines, indicating that their overseas ancestors included not only male sailors and explorers, but females as well. The results were announced today at Fourth Union, a Melungeon conference in Kingsport, Tennessee sponsored by the Melungeon Heritage Association (MHA). MHA is a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting research and understanding about Melungeons and other multi-racial groups in the United States. Dr. Kevin Jones, a biologist at the University of Virginia's College at Wise, conducted the study. The presence of Turkish and northern Indian haplotypes within the mitochondrial DNA samples taken from modern-day Melungeons indicates that women of European/Asian origin were a part of the original mixture that made up the Melungeon ancestry. Mitochondrial DNA comes from the female side of an individual's ancestry. Previous researchers had assumed that European males intermarried with Native Americans and African-Americans to produce the Melungeons. Although Native and African genes are definitely a part of the Melungeon genetic mix, women were among the overseas settlers who contributed to the Melungeon gene pool. Dr. N. Brent Kennedy speculated that the Melungeons were of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern ancestry and published his theories in a book entitled The Melungeons: The Resurrection of a Proud People, published in 1994 by Mercer University Press. Dr. Jones, a native of London, England, studied at the University of Reading, and did post-doctoral research at Louisiana State University. He is currently a professor of biology at UVA-Wise, teaching courses including cell biology and genetics. Dr. Jones undertook this DNA study in 2000 at the suggestion of Dr. Kennedy, then vice-chancellor at the University of Virginia's College at Wise. Kennedy asked Jones to analyze DNA samples taken from members of known Melungeon families. Such a study would utilize technology not available to earlier researchers. "Brent Kennedy... explained the controversy that surrounded the origins of the Melungeons [and] realized that I had the DNA expertise to look at that," Jones related in an interview with Wayne Winkler, president of the Melungeon Heritage Association and author of an upcoming book about the Melungeons. "The subjects were largely chosen by Brent Kennedy on the basis of pursuing as many of the known Melungeon lineages that existed in the area and taking advantage of his genealogical expertise. People were then asked to donate samples to the study, and in the majority of cases they kindly did so." Single hairs were taken to study the mitochondrial DNA which traces the maternal lines of the subject. In other words, the samples represented DNA, which could be traced to the subject's mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, and so on. "We also have a smaller number of samples which are cheek cells for looking at male inheritance," said Jones. "What we get from those is a DNA sequence which we can think of as being about an 600-long letter code, and we can take that string of 600 letters and compare those to what now is literally thousands of samples from around the world. We're interested both in the number of different sequences that we get from the population and also how they appear to relate to other samples worldwide." About 100 hair samples were studied for mitochondrial, or maternal, DNA, and about 30 samples of cheek cells were taken to study the Y-chromosome, or male, DNA. While more samples might have been taken, Jones said, "That's the beauty of science: one can always subsequently refine and extend the analyses." The technology available to Jones allowed him to study only the mitochondrial DNA samples; the Y-chromosome samples were sent to University College in London, England, for study. "The 'Y' is technically far harder to do, and indeed, relies on expertise in some other labs in the world to do it, so we're partly dependent on their cooperation and collaboration." Such testing is not perfect, of course, and does not tell researchers everything about an individual's inheritance. For example, neither test will give genetic information about a subject's paternal grandmother. However, the study was not particularly concerned with individual genealogies. "We're looking for patterns that exist in the population as a whole," according to Jones. "Now, obviously, each individual sample contributes to that, but I think that for an individual you can say relatively little. Looking at the patterns that occur throughout the population becomes important. And that means the number of samples that are looked at is also significant, and we've tried to do as many as is reasonably possible." Jones compared these samples to the thousands available through GenBank, an international genetics database, published scientific literature and the Mitochondrial DNA Concordance, databases containing DNA sequence information. Looking at the maternal lines of the Melungeons who were tested, Jones found considerable variation in ethnicity among the samples. "It's comparatively straightforward to link particular sequences to particular ethnic groups and different Continental areas of the world," he noted, "and the majority of those Melungeon-derived sequences were European in origin. Within those European samples, though, there is significant diversity, and some seem to reflect areas outside the traditional northern European sphere. "The ability to tie a sequence to a particular area is dependent upon the historical occurrence of any given haplotype somewhere, and the places that are easy to track are where we've had populations existing for a long time, and not being affected by a lot of different people coming in. So some, perhaps more isolated, areas of Europe are easier to track than more cosmopolitan [areas]." While the Melungeons are predominantly European in their genetic backgrounds, they are indeed tri-racial. "The appears to be a small percentage of both Native American and African-American sequences in there, too," Jones stated, "although they are certainly both in the minority. They' re both in there in about equal levels of representation as well." The long-held belief that the Melungeons originated in Portugal is neither borne out nor negated by Jones' research. "To date we've found no sequences that can be definitively traced back to uniquely Portuguese sequences. That doesn't mean that they don't exist. A large number of the European sequences are now widely spread throughout Europe, and if one of those genetic sequences happened to come from Portugal we would not detect that. We can't dismiss that theory at the moment, but we can't provide additional support for it." _______________________________ For genealogy publications for Northern Middle Tennessee and South Central KY See: Ridge Runner Publications http://ridgerunnerpublications.50megs.com <http://ridgerunnerpublications.50megs.com>