This is an extremely important study. My work on what I am calling
Atlantean culture which effected a global commerce in copper along
with a palace centered trade factory distribution system covered a
time span of at least 1500 years between 2400BC and 1159BC strongly
predicts residency along the Mississippi and also into the
appalachians and up into the Great Lakes. This would take the form
o\f robust village and towns as well as friendly migrations all of
which would also be supported by extensive intermarriage.
Thus a key prediction is a significant input of Mediterranean DNA
into local populations. The time period also coincided with a
blossoming of corn culture throighout the region suggesting a
positive response to the economic stimulus provided. Otherwise
copper mining was also underttaken in the Appalachians as well as the
main event on Lake Superior. All this we have ample archeological
evidence of that is been simply ignored.
Now we have the mandatory DNA. It exists and all other explanations
are outright impossible. It means a sustained intermingling of
genetics lasting for centuries.
This was the big question. There will be many other additional
strands to unwind but these can wait until enough data exists to
provide ample resolution to easily prove the associations. We could
start with DNA for every baby born.
Anomalous DNA in
the Cherokee
July 18, 2014
The third chapter of
Donald Yates’ history of the Cherokee (Old World Roots of the
Cherokee, McFarland 2012) contains the genetic story of the
Cherokee Indians based on DNA Consultants’ 2009 study “Anomalous
Mitochondrial DNA in the Cherokee,” but it is no easy read,
being written for an academic audience.
Earlier this year
Yates published a condensation of his work in the series Cherokee
Chapbooks, called Old Souls in a New World: The Secret
History of the Cherokee Indians (Panther’s Lodge). This
publication has no footnotes, bibliography or pictures; those must be
sought in Old World Roots and scholarly articles Yates has
written over the years. But the new chapbook is affordable, quick to
read and no less groundbreaking and authentic in its research.
Here, from Old
Souls in a New World, is the amazing story of Elvis Presley’s
DNA, Indian traders and their Cherokee brides on the Southeastern
frontier, haplogroup X, Egyptian T, Berber U, Jewish J and the
personal stories of a selection from the fifty-two subjects who blew
the lid off Native American studies with their proof of ancient
Middle Eastern and Jewish lineages.
From
Chapter 4, “DNA,” Old Souls in a New World: The Secret
History of the Cherokee Indians, by Donald N. Panther-Yates (Cherokee
Chapbooks 7; Phoenix: Panther’s Lodge, 2013) ISBN-13:
978-0615892337
History does not
repeat itself. The historians repeat one another.
—Max Beerbohm
Few people know it but
Elvis Presley claimed to be Jewish and Cherokee. A DNA test run on a
rare specimen of his in 2004 bore this out. Both of Elvis’
assertions were based on the ancestry of his mother, Gladys Love
Smith. Growing up in Memphis, Elvis went to summer camp through the
Jewish community center. When his mother died, he took care to have
her grave marked with a Star of David (since removed). He studied
Judaism increasingly in later years and to the end of his life wore a
chai necklace, symbol of Jewish life. Published genealogies take
Gladys’ strict maternal line back to great-great grandmother Nancy
Burdine, a professed Jewess born in Kentucky, whose mother
was White Dove, a reputed fullblood. Through his mother’s direct
female line, Elvis was a Jewish Indian, an American Indian Jew.
Well, maybe not.
Bracketing for the moment what makes one a Jew, we have to admit that
American Indian identity is not so simple either. One factor weighing
heavily in both claims, however, is DNA.
Paleo-American
genetics is fraught with problems. According to a previous director
of Tulane’s Middle American Research Institute, the field is a
notorious “battleground of the theorists,” a controversial area
“which has snared to their downfall not a few crackpots, mystics,
‘linguistic acrobats,’ racists and even ‘famous institutions’
. . . [including] of course the anthropological profession itself.”
The DNA landscape is strewn with racist bombshells and political
dynamite.
About twenty years
ago, in a work as revered as it is unreadable, Italian-born
geneticist Luca Luigi Cavalli-Sforza at Stanford University unveiled
a tree of man based on an analysis of 120 markers from forty-two
world populations. Looking solely at female lines, he posited two
main limbs, African and non-African. The latter branched off into
Europeans (Caucasians) and Northeast Asians (Siberians and
Mongolians). Included in Northeast Asians were so-called Amerindians.
Amerinds were closest in genetic distance to Northern Turkic, Chukchi
and other Arctic peoples. They shared a number of genetic markers
with their ancient neighbors, including a similar frequency of female
lineages. These came to be labeled mitochondrial haplogroups A, B, C,
and D.
Little did
Cavalli-Sforza and his team expect to encounter any snags in their
research, much less defunding by the U.S. Government and the United
Nations, but this is exactly what happened. The genial professor
received a letter from a Canadian human rights group called the Rural
Advancement Foundation International. They demanded he stop his work
immediately. They accused the Human Genome Diversity Project of
biopiracy. The scientists were stealing DNA.
Ever since that
slippery slope, geneticists have trodden warily around the issue of
Native American demographics and genetics.
Theodore Schurr’s
team in 1990 had matched “Amerindian” changes in mitochondrial
DNA over the last 40,000 years with those of Mongolians and
Siberians. The lines were indelibly drawn. The scientific community
laid down the law that the earliest Native Americans come from four
primary maternal lineages. Only female haplogroups A, B, C and D are
true Native American types. A fifth lineage, haplogroup X, was
admitted, provisionally, in 1997.
Elvis’s American
Indian mitochondrial type is B. What account can we make of this
haplogroup? Certain critics of the new axiom in American Indian
genetics point out that B is not associated in high frequencies with
Mongolian populations. Rather, it is Southeast Asian in
origin—something borne out by the Elvis sample having also a rare
Asian ethnic marker. B’s center of diffusion is Taiwan
and it is common, even dominant, among Polynesians, the Hopi, and
Pueblo Indians like the Jemez.
Geneticists base their
conclusions about ancient migrations on comparisons with population
data of living peoples as reported in anthropological and forensic
publications. But these are assumptions, pure and simple. Is it
certain that populations in places like Mongolia and Alaska in the
past—especially far distant past—were the same as they are today?
Numerous genetic types become extinct in the course of time.
Bottlenecks and genetic drift distort a population’s structure and
composition. Early migrants can be replaced through competition or
changed by gene flow from later arrivals. Genotyping to determine a Y
chromosome group from paternal pedigrees or the mitochondrial DNA
passed to us by our mother, looks at but two lines out of thousands
in one’s heritage. The current state of genomics cannot test
ancestry that crosses from a male to female or vice versa. It cannot
isolate the genetic contribution passed to you, say, by your mother’s
father, or maternal grandfather. Most of our genetic history lies
buried in non-sex-linked lines, the province of autosomal DNA.
Schurr’s doctrine of
the four ancient founding mothers of Native Americans was based
entirely on small Pima, Maya, Ticuna, Mexican and South
American Indian samples. A study by D. C. Wallace and
colleagues inferred an Asian correlation from evidence taken solely
from Arizona’s tiny tribes of Pima and Papago Indians. This 1985
article was the source of untold mischief. Four female haplogroups
were later “proved” to account for over 95 percent of all
contemporary American Indian populations. Geneticists fell into
lockstep to show that only a small number of founding mothers
migrated from Asia into the New World. In 2004, despite a much
shallower time-depth for calculating mutations, scientists decided
that it had to be the same story for male founders. There was a
single, recent entry of Native American Y chromosomes into the
Americas.
The underlying logic
goes like this: All our subjects tested out to be haplogroup A,
B, C, D, E or X.
All our subjects were
Indians because they were located on reservations.
Therefore, all Indians
are haplogroup A, B, C, D, E or X.
It’s as though we
claimed, “All men are two-legged creatures; therefore since the
skeleton we dug up has two legs, it is human.” It might be a
kangaroo.
About the time Rutgers
professor Elizabeth Hirschman and I were concluding our study of
Melungeon DNA, we decided to put together a small sample of Cherokee
descendants who could trace their line back to the marriage of a
Jewish merchant with the daughter of an Indian headman. Our object
was to test the ethnicity of those Cherokee who blended with
Melungeons. Those enrolled for the project had to be directly
descended from a Cherokee woman strictly through the female line.
To our knowledge, our
studies were the first to qualify participants on the basis of their
family histories. Invariably, these mention Indian ancestry in the
female line, usually Cherokee. Native American chiefs cemented trade
agreements with intermarriage of their daughters and other female
kinswomen. Early explorer John Lawson wrote about this custom in
1709:
The Indian Traders are
those which travel and abide amongst the Indians for a long space of
time; sometimes for a Year, two, or three. These Men have commonly
their Indian Wives, whereby they soon learn the Indian Tongue, keep a
Friendship with the Savages; and, besides the Satisfaction of a
She-Bed-Fellow, they find these Indian Girls very serviceable to
them, on Account of dressing their Victuals, and instructing ‘em in
the Affairs and Customs of the Country. Moreover, such a Man gets a
great Trade with the Savages; for when a Person that lives amongst
them, is reserv’d from the Conversation of their Women, ’tis
impossible for him ever to accomplish his Designs amongst that
People.
My forebear Isaac
Cooper’s grandfather was the pioneer William Cooper. This son of a
plantation owner was born on the James River about 1725 and became
the guide and scout for Daniel Boone when the latter was hired by the
firm of Cohen and Isaacs to survey lands eventually forming Kentucky
and Tennessee. Cooper planted a corn crop in 1775 on the left bank of
Otter Creek above Clover Bottom near Boonsboro. He was then employed
by Richard Henderson to assist Boone in clearing the Wilderness Road.
He died in 1781 in an Indian attack after helping the Cumberland
settlers continue the road to what became Nashville, Tennessee.
Although the Coopers
came from England in the seventeenth century and settled on the James
River, their more distant origins were clearly Portuguese and Jewish.
They were descended from Marannos, who became British citizens in the
period of the Glorious Revolution of William and Mary immediately
following Jews’ re-admittance into Britain. This path to
Americanization is a staple feature of Cherokee genealogies.
Let us now turn to the
female side of the project. Gayl Wilson traces her Wolf Clan line to
Sarah Consene, a daughter of Young Dragging Canoe. She is an enrolled
member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. Her
mitochondrial DNA haplogroup C proves to be one of the leading types
among Cherokees. It is found sparsely in Mongolia and Siberia, and
its frequency in North America is weighted toward the Northeast
rather than Alaska and the Northwest, with a heavy incidence in the
lower Appalachians. Wilson’s particular type of C
matches nine individuals with Hispanic surnames, including Juan B.
Madrid (Two Hearts), a California schoolteacher, and 26 anonymous
samples from Mexico, Peru, Puerto Rico, Spain and the U.S. This would
appear to support the Mexican affinities of the Cherokee.
DNA that ended up
being haplogroup B was contributed by a matrilineal descendant of
Lucretia Parris, halfblood daughter of George Parris and
granddaughter of early Cherokee Indian trader Richard Pearis, who
died in the Bahamas, April 7, 1794. The Pearis or Parris family is
the likely namesake of Parris Island in South Carolina. Their
original name was perhaps Perez/Peres. They intermarried with the
Dougherty and Cooper families.
U.S. federal Indian
agent Benjamin Hawkins describes Cornelius Dougherty’s residence
near the town of Quanasee and calls him “an old Irish trader.” He
is said to have been 120 years old when he died in 1788. His original
trading post was located at Seneca Old Town on the Keowee River,
where William and Joseph Cooper were also situated since 1698.
Cornelius’ father Alexander was a Jacobite who fled to America
after the Glorious Revolution. According to Rogers and Rogers’
Cherokee history, it was Alexander who was probably the first white
man to marry a Cherokee, in 1690. After 1719, Cornelius became a
licensed trader out of Charleston, the British headquarters for the
Indian trade, where brothers William and Joseph Cooper were
commissioners, and married Ah-nee-wa-kee, a daughter of Chief Moytoy
II, thus fulfilling the usual contract. She was of the Wild Potato
Clan. Deerhead Cove beneath the brow of Fox Mountain in Dade County,
Georgia and DeKalb County, Alabama, was named for her. The name of
the mountain towering over Deerhead Cove honors Chief Black Fox,
whose descendants on nearby Sand Mountain are multiply entwined with
Doughertys.
Elvis’ form of B
matches Chickasaws, Choctaws and Creeks. Altogether,
lineage B accounts for one-half or more of Cherokee DNA and roughly a
quarter of all Southeastern Indians. The Maya and Mixté
in Mexico are about one-quarter B and one-half A with smaller degrees
of C, D and other. The Pima are about half B, half C, with a
negligible amount of A. The Boruca in Central America are as high as
three-quarters B.
When first described,
haplogroup B was believed to be part of a second wave of American
Indian colonization from Asia dating to 15,000-12,000 years ago. This
migration supposedly followed an earlier and larger influx of A. The
highest frequencies of B are found along the eastern edge of China in
the islands of Taiwan (34%) and the Philippines (40%). Today,
it is more likely to be seen as the trail of early humans following
the beachcomber route up through Japan and down the American coast.
Elvis Presley was born
and grew up in Tupelo, on the edge of Chickasaw country. But his
maternal ancestor Nancy Burdine came from Kentucky in Cherokee
territory. His remote female ancestor could have been either
Chickasaw or Cherokee. The Chickasaw and Cherokee had a common border
just west of the site of Nashville along the Natchez Trace. They
often exchanged female marriage partners in peace treaties and
intertribal relations.
Two Cherokee female
lines show a connection with the white man who founded the Eastern
Band of Cherokee Indians. Col. William Holland Thomas (1805-1893)
occupies a special place in the history of the Eastern Band of
Cherokee. He went to work at the age of twelve at the Walker trading
post on Soco Creek and learned the Cherokee language as he bargained
with the natives for ginseng and furs. Drowning Bear, chief of
Quallatown, took a keen interest in him. When Drowning Bear learned
that the boy had no father or brothers and sisters, he adopted him as
a son. Will’s best friend was a Cherokee boy who taught him the
ancient customs, lore and religious rites.
In 1867 Thomas’
health failed. The Civil War had ruined him. He eventually went into
an insane asylum, where he died May 10, 1893. Without him, however,
there would be no Eastern Band of the Cherokee Nation. Col. Will
Thomas was the only white chief of an Indian tribe.
While he was an
apprentice for the Walkers, young Will fell in love with Catherine
Hyde, a descendant of Betsy Walker, a Cherokee woman from Soco
(One-Town). A direct maternal line descendant of Betsy Walker,
Kimberly Hill, provided a sample of her mitochondrial DNA. It proved
to be a specific type within haplogroup J. The same haplotype came to
light in fellow project participant Sharon Bedzyk, a descendant of
Ann Hyde, Catherine’s sister. A related haplotype was identified in
a late-joining participant with ancestry traced to Myra Jarvis, a
Melungeon woman born 1815 in Georgia.
Although Col. Will
officially married Sarah Jane Burney Love late in life in 1857, he
had several paramours. In addition to Catherine Hyde, one of them was
the Polly after whom the Qualla Reservation was named. She
bore him Demarius Angeline in 1827. Note that Demarius is a favorite
name of Crypto-Jews. It is derived from Tamar, Hebrew for “date
palm.” Here again our project was fortunate. Thanks to the Indian
grapevine, a direct female-line descendant of Demarius Angeline
Sherrill, nee Thomas, responded to the call. “We were most
surprised to learn our Angeline came from the X lineage,”
said James Riddle. He is literally the last of the line. Since he is
male, Angeline’s lineage would die out with him. It is an apt
illustration of the fragility of haplogroups.
Haplogroup X was first
detected in North America over a decade ago. It was added to Native
American lineages A, B, C and D only reluctantly. Its discovery
opened the door for more minor founding mothers at the same time that
it created a strong incentive among die-hard believers in existing
dogma to prove it was Siberian. What is different about
haplogroup X is the suspicion it might be an ancient link between
Europe and North America. Some view it as a founding lineage that
directly crossed the Atlantic Ocean, perhaps with the elusive Red
Paint Culture. The detection of X in our study represents
the first report of it among the Cherokee. Previously, it was
identified only in certain northern tribes.
We have seven
instances of haplogroup X. In the case of Annie L. Garrett, born 1846
in Mississippi, descendant Betty Sue Satterfield vouches for their
being a tradition in the family she was Cherokee.
Michelle Baugh of
Hazel Green, Alabama, traces her Cherokee female line to Agnes Weldy,
born about 1707. Descendants include enrolled members of the Eastern
Band of Cherokee Indians.
Seyinus, a Cherokee
woman born on or near the Qualla Boundary in North Carolina in 1862,
is the source of a similar X lineage.
Another is the sample
taken from Billy Sinor, the son of Gladys Lulu Sutton, born in Indian
Territory in 1906. His mother’s birth certificate lists her as
“Cherokee Indian.“
My own maternal line
goes back to a Cherokee woman in northern Georgia or North Carolina
who had children by a trader named Jordan. He can be identified as
Enoch Jordan. Trader Jordan was born about 1768 in Scotland of
ancestry from Russia or the Ukraine. His Cherokee wife, my 5th
great-grandmother, proves to be haplogroup U2, but a form of it with
no exact matches in any databases. Given origins in Russia or the
Ukraine, and an intervening generation in Scotland, Trader Jordan
himself was almost certainly Jewish. The Y chromosome type of his
descendants belongs to male haplogroup J, a paternal lineage that
contains the genetic signature of Old Testament priests. Here is
evidently another case of a Jewish trader marrying a Cherokee woman.
But how to explain the Cherokee wife’s Old World
haplogroup of U?
Haplogroup U is
associated with Berbers and Egyptians as well as other early
Mediterranean peoples. Professor Brian Sykes in The
Seven Daughters of Eve places the Ur-mother Ursula he
created for his bestseller in prehistoric Greece. The
resemblance of members of my mother Bessie Cooper Yates’ family,
who claimed to be Cherokee through the female line, to a modern-day
Cyrenaic woman in the Alinari photo archives seems striking and
undeniable.
In our study, U covers
13 cases or 25% of the total, second in frequency only to haplogroup
T. Who are these Mediterranean descendants among the
Cherokee?
One is Mary M.
Garrabrant-Brower. Her great-grandmother was Clarissa Green of the
Cherokee Wolf Clan, born 1846. This Wolf Clan woman’s grandfather
was remembered as a Cherokee chief, as is consistent with the
traditional nature of the Wolf Clan. Mary’s mother Mary M.
Lounsbury maintained the Cherokee language and rituals, even though
the family relocated to the Northeast.
A Scottsdale, Arizona
doctor in our study, another U, matches only one other person in the
world, Marie Eastman, born 1901 in Indian Territory. His own descent
is documented from Jane Rose, a member of the Eastern Cherokee Band.
Her family is listed on the Baker Rolls, the final arbiter of
enrollment established by the U.S. Government.
My wife, Teresa
Panther-Yates, proves to have mtDNA that can also be designated U,
the most common “European” subgroup according to genetics
journals. It has no exact matches anywhere; it is unique in the
world. Teresa traces her maternal line back to Hancock County,
Georgia. Her female ancestor died about 1838, at the time of the
Trail of Tears. There is a tradition in her family that this line was
Cherokee.
One participant who
learned of her U lineage in the study says that her line goes back to
Ann Dreaweah, a Cherokee woman married to a half blood Cherokee man.
Another instance of U
has no close matches at all but appears to have a Cherokee form of
it. He was adopted in Oklahoma and knows nothing of his mother’s
ancestry.
Gerald Potterf,
another U, traces his mother’s line to Lillie C. Wilson-Field, born
in 1857, Catawba County, North Carolina. He believes she was probably
Cherokee.
In all instances of U
where there are Melungeon, Cherokee and Jewish connections in the
genealogy, the most frequent clan mentioned is Paint Clan.
It was the T’s,
however, that blew the lid off Cherokee DNA studies. Haplogroup T
emerges as the largest lineage, followed by U, X, J and H. Similar
proportions of these haplogroups are noted in the populations of
Egypt, Israel and other parts of the East Mediterranean.
Maternal lineage T
arose in Mesopotamia approximately 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. It
spread northward through the Caucasus and west from Anatolia into
Europe. It shares a common source with haplogroup J in the parent
haplogroup JT. Ancient people bearing haplogroup T and J
are viewed by geneticists as some of the first farmers,
introducing agriculture to Europe with the Neolithic Revolution.
Europe’s previous genetic substrate emphasized older
haplogroups U and N. The T lineage includes about ten percent of
modern Europeans. The closer one goes to its origin in the Fertile
Crescent the more prevalent it is.
All T’s in the
Cherokee project are unmatched in Old World populations. They
do, however, in some cases, match each other. Such kinship indicates
we are looking at members of the same definite group, with the same
set of clan mothers as their ancestors.
One T in the study
fully matched four other people in the Mitosearch database, all born
in the United States. One of these listed their ancestor as being
Birdie Burns, born 1889 in Arkansas, the daughter of Alice Cook, a
Cherokee.
Gail Lynn Dean is the
wife of another participant. Both she and her husband claim Cherokee
ancestries.
Linda Burckhalter is
the great-great-granddaughter of Sully Firebush, the daughter of a
Cherokee chief. Sully married Solomon Sutton, stowaway son of a
London merchant, in what would seem to be a variation of “Jewish
trader marries chief’s daughter.”
At twenty-seven
percent, T types make up the leading anomalous haplogroup not
corresponding to the types A, B, C, or D. Several of them
evidently stem from the same Cherokee family or clan, although they
have been scattered from their original home by historical
circumstances. Such consistency in the findings reinforces the
conclusion that this is an accurate cross-section of a population,
not a random collection of DNA test subjects. No such mix
could result from post-1492 European gene flow into the Cherokee
Nation. To dismiss the evidence as admixture would entail
assuming that there was a large influx of Middle Eastern-born women
selectively marrying Cherokee men in historical times, something not
even faintly suggested by the facts. Mitochondrial DNA can only come
from mothers; it cannot be brought into the country by men.
If not from Siberia,
Mongolia or Asia, where do our anomalous, non-Amerindian-appearing
lineages come from? The comparative incidence of haplogroup T in the
Cherokee mirrors the percentage for Egypt, one of the only countries
where T attains a major showing among the other types. In Egypt, T is
three times the frequency it is in Europe. Haplogroup U in our sample
is about the same as the Middle East in general. Its frequency is
similar to that of Turkey and Greece.
Far and away, however,
the most explosive evidence revolves around haplogroup X, the third
largest haplogroup. The only other place on earth where X
is found at such a prodigious frequency is in the Druze, a people who
have dwelt for thousands of years in the Hills of Galilee in northern
Israel and Lebanon. The work of Liran I. Shlush in 2009
proves that the Druze, because of the high concentration as well as
diversity of haplotypes, is the worldwide source and center of
diffusion for X.
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