Melungeon in America Ever heard of Melungeon's? Well, this article in Wired is one of many coming out due to a study that examines the Melungeon's claims about their ancestry. They say they might be of Mediterranean-Turkish on the exotic extreme, Portuguese when they're trying to make a plausible case-extraction, the offspring of sailors and slaves escaped from their Anglo overlords. Of course, historians dismiss this as a smokescreen to divert from possible African ancestry, saying they are a tri-racial isolate. Well, the study you can check out above seem to dismiss that they are a tri-racial isolate in 1/3 chunks via the female line. In fact, they turned out to be 5% Native American and 5% black African, which probably overestimates the quantum of non-"white" blood in them since females were mostly likely to have married white males, not vice versa. Certainly that's more non-white than the typical American, but they are a mostly "European" population. Why do I use quotes? Well, weird things like possible affiliation with Middle Eastern and South Asian groups. The Wired article hints of a relationship to Siddis, Afro-Indians, blacks imported during the Islamic period to serve the military courts of Hindu India's Muslim rulers. That's mighty peculiar, since a South Asian lineage should have some relationship with the Roma who have been spreading their genes west into as far as Wales for a thousand years. Why so much attention to an obscure group in the south? Well-because historic questions lead toward political circumstances, and politics impacts our lives no matter how much we care. On a more innocuous note-geneticists have been trying to figure our how Irish the female ancestors of Icelanders were. I did a review of the literature a few years back and it seemed somewhat inconclusive. The Irish and the Scandinavian populations are genetically too close to make it easy to differentiate them. But serious historical questions can be answered with genetics. For instance. Consider this scenario. The Greeks and the Turks have detested each other for the past few centuries. I know from the history that between the period 600 and 1000 Greece proper-excluding fortresses and towns likes Salonika were abandoned, and the center of Hellenic culture was The City (Constantinople) and fertile littoral of Anatolia (as far east as Caucasian coast where the Empire of Trebizond lasted longer than the late Byzantine Empire). The people that populated Greece at this time were Slavs, the Skalveni. With the coming of the Turks, Anatolia was slowly de-Hellenized (though the full purging of Greeks didn't occur until the 1920s). We know from genetics that the Turks aren't very Asian genetically. I don't know about the Greeks, but if it turned out that they shared a lot with say Serbs and Croatians, it could be that a lot of their ancestry is from the Skalveni, rather than the original Greeks, and they were "Hellenized" at some point after the Byzantine reconquest or during the early period of Greek nationalism. Ultimately, blood is important, and our confused and mingled bloodlines (since most ethnic rivalries are between adjacent peoples, the bloodlines are usually mingled) ultimately ameliorate some of the antagonism. P.S. On a different note-I just moved to Portland, Imbler yesterday. If someone lives in Southeast, feel free to e-mail me to have coffee if you think you can convince me of the error of my ways before the middle of this week (I'll get busy again after that). I'm pretty open-minded.