TO THE MEMBERS OF FAMILY GROUP 8
Hi, cousins. This is Nancy Kiser, the volunteer administrator of the Phillips DNA Project. Just wanted to let you all know some very interesting news. It seems our Phillips yDNA matches the yDNA of several 3000-year-old skeletons found in a cave in Lower Saxony, which is a state in northwestern Germany. The cave is called Lichtensteiners Cave, so our yDNA is now being called Lichtensteiners yDNA.
Although yDNA is very fragile and usually decomposes rapidly upon death, these skeletons were buried in a fairly inaccessible cave with a relatively low and stable temperature which apparently helped preserve the DNA. Many of the bones were further preserved with gypsum sinter, a type of calcium phosphate from saturated water that dripped into the cave.
Jen Phillips-Smith and I received this information yesterday from a professor named Ken Nordtvedt. Here is some of the info he sent us:
Bones 3000 years old in northwest Germany cave were dug up and the ydna measured. About a dozen of the people were I2b2. So being Lichtensteiners is I2b2's new nickname --- that's the cave's name. And having been in the middle of discovering L38, L39, and L40, I'm confident your haplotype would be positive for them, if not all of them. How do I tell? By noting the unique 10,12 signature of the haplotype at DYS455 and DYS454. That is unique to I2b2 and those are extremely slow mutating markers (meaning the repeat values are stable through tens of thousands of years)
I don't think there is any need to test all those snps; your haplotype's haplogroup identity is rather clear. The "D" comes from the 8 you have at DYS438. That's a mutation down 2 from normal 10, and DYS438 is also a very slow mutating, stable marker. I2b2 has been in central Europe a long time --- longer than most European haplogroups. It really is not that rare. I2b2 is a fairly robust haplogroup centered in Germany. Of course many of the peoples who migrated to the British isles over thousands of years would have come from the Germany region of continental Germany.
Even though Ken says he does not think it is necessary to test for the new SNPs, Jen and I are going to go ahead and have her brother's yDNA tested for these new SNPs just to be certain. We will let you know how it turns out.
Sincerely,
Nancy Kiser
BELOW IS AN ATICLE WITH PICTURES:
News in Science - Human sacrifice was rarer than thought - 22/07/2004
[This is the print version of story http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/2004/1158845.htm]
Human sacrifice was rarer than thought
Anna Salleh in Brisbane
ABC Science Online
Thursday, 22 July 2004
Did this skull from the Lichtenstein cave come from someone who was sacrificed or who died naturally? (Image: Stefan Flindt)
Bronze Age ritual human sacrifice may have been rarer than believed, according to a unique study of ancient DNA from bones in central Europe.
German anthropologist Dr Susanne Hummel from the University of Göttingen presented her team's research at a recent ancient DNA conference in Brisbane, Australia.
Hummel said the research was also the first to use ancient DNA to complete a family tree from human prehistoric remains.
The researchers have been looking at 3000-year old human bones from the remains of about 40 people found in the Lichtenstein cave, in Lower Saxony, north-western Germany.
The cave was discovered in the 1980s and is one of a few sites in central Europe where human Bronze Age bones have been found.
Bronze Age humans were most likely to cremate their dead, which left little in the way of bones.
But Hummel said the presence of bones in this and other caves led archaeologists to conclude that these were sites of ritual human sacrifice.
Cut marks on the skulls and upper and lower limb bones found at the sites supported their conclusion.
"In the beginning it was thought [the Lichtenstein cave] was another site of human sacrifice," Hummel told ABC Science Online. "They thought living people had been led into the cave and killed there somehow."
But Hummel and team analysed the bones and found no signs of violence. She also found the age of death, indicated by the bones, did not fit the expected pattern for human sacrifice.
"Usually just one gender and one age class, let's say all juvenile girls, are sacrificed, because they are the most valuable persons to the society," she said.
"[But] we found that we had all age classes. We had the baby, we had the young people, the young adults, older adults and people who were really old, like 70 years old."
DNA analysis reveals a surprise
To settle the question of whether this site was indeed a burial site rather than a site of ritual sacrifice, the researchers analysed DNA from the leg bones to see if the people they once belonged to were related.
"If they formed a family clan then it is absolutely unlikely this was a sacrificial site," Hummel said.
She and her team extracted DNA and analysed the genetic fingerprints, patterns on the Y-chromosomes and mitochondrial DNA to establish who was related.
To their excitement the researchers found a family tree complete with fathers, mothers, children and grandparents.
"It was fascinating to think that you have just these tiny bone pieces and you can tell who is mum, who's dad and who are the kids, 3000 years ago," said Hummel, adding this was the first prehistoric family tree to have been identified.
Inside the Lichtenstein cave, which has remained undisturbed for thousands of years (Image: Stefan Flindt)
Hummel and team have found four generations so far and expect to find a fifth by the time they complete their analysis.
"This tells us [the cave] is certainly not a place of sacrifice but that it's a burial site," she said.
Hummel added other sites thought to be sites of sacrifice may also be burial sites instead, especially as most of them contain bones without cut marks.
"Up to now, one never thought there was an alternative burial practice. One always thought it was exclusively cremation and everything else was some ritualised sacrificial thing," she said. "This idea might fall down."
If Hummel can reproduce her findings in one or two other caves then she says it would provide good evidence that burying bodies without cremation was simply an alternative, albeit less common, method of disposing of the dead. And that human sacrifice was not as frequent as previously thought in Bronze Age central Europe.
Cave protects the prehistoric remains
Hummel and team's molecular analysis was made possible because the DNA on the bones was so well preserved. One reason for this was the low temperatures inside the cave and the fact that the cave had been undisturbed since the time of the burials, she said.
The cave is 140 metres long but is very narrow with a very low ceiling often requiring people to move around in a crouched position.
"What is for sure is that during the last 3000 years nobody went into the cave," she said.
Hummel said support for this comes from the fact that all the bones and bronze and ceramic artefacts found with them had been covered by a brittle layer of gypsum sinter, a special type of calcium phosphate from saturated water that dripped from the cave.
Any intrusions into the cave would have been recorded in this layer, which appeared to be unbroken.
Hummel said that the analysis of ancient DNA has opened a new window on prehistoric societies, shedding light on everything from hair and skin colour to the cause of death, marriage patterns and related matters of kinship.
"We now have a very strong tool which can tell us how people were related to each other which is the most important thing which characterises a society," she said.
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