The genetic evidence for this sort of thing often seems to go against the conventional wisdom (which is fun I think). There's a brilliant book by Tudor Parfitt (I forget the name of the book) in which he investigates the story of a southern African tribe called the Lemba who despite appearing to all intents and purposes to be just like any other black southern African tribe, reckon they are Jewish. He traces their story and tries to work out where they might have come from (they were supposedly the architects of Great Zimbabwe for example). For the most part it's fun but sounds like the sort of work that people like Graham Hancock put together (they even had the Ark of the Covenant at one time allegedly) by multiplying together a succession of 80% probable events to get an extremely improbable end result.
Then right at the end, he gets the DNA results back from the genetics lab. Turns out that those Lemba descended from their hereditary priest caste have the same genetic markers as Jews descended from the Jewish hereditary priest caste, and that yes, in all probability, the Lemba were descended from Jews.
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Date: 2010-08-27 12:10 pm (UTC)Then right at the end, he gets the DNA results back from the genetics lab. Turns out that those Lemba descended from their hereditary priest caste have the same genetic markers as Jews descended from the Jewish hereditary priest caste, and that yes, in all probability, the Lemba were descended from Jews.