DISCUSSION
Working on authentic Marie-Madeleine’s hairs, we have found a bulb for the 10th hair studied. Using the amelogenin test, we found that the DNA extracted from this bulb corresponds to that of a woman. Among the panel of the nine mutations we found in the mtDNA HVR1 sequence, the 16224C and 16311T mutations (the basal node) determinate that this woman belongs to the K mtDNA haplogroup.
Overall, mtDNA haplogroup K is found in about 6% of the current populations of Europe and the Near East(http://www.oxfordancestors.com/content/view/35/55). But this percentage attains approximately 16% of the Druzes of Syria, and is elevated in Lebanon, Israel and Jordany ; in Palestinian Arabs, there is also a significantly elevated proportion (8%) of haplogroup K, that reaches at the level of 17% in Kurdistan (4).
Approximately 32-37% of people with Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry are of haplogroup K. This high percentage points to a genetic bottleneck occurring some 100 generations ago 5,6,7 . Behar et al. 8 report early finding of a significantly higher frequency of haplogroup K among Sephardic Levites (23%) and Sephardic Israelites (13%), probably the highest frequency of K found among any (European) population. This may indicate that some of Ashkenazi haplogroup K is , in fact, of Israelite origin.
One of the greatest interest of the Behar et al. 2006 paper 5 on the maternal ancestry of Ashkenazi Jewry is that they traced back Israelite ancestry to only four women, carrying distinct mtDNA groups that are virtually sub-clade of the N haplogroup and three sub-clades of the K haplogroup : K1ab1a, K1a9 and K2a2a.
K1ab1a sub-clade is marked by two – coding transitions (at the 10978 and 12954 sites) of the mtDNA , and includes fourteen of the 121 (=11.6%, the major K sub-clade found) of the 121 complete mtDNA sequences described. Seven of these were reported in 5 for the first time, and are from Ashkenazi subjects, whereas the other seven were reported elsewhere 9 as forming a specific cluster named “K1a”. The ethnicities or religious affiliations of these last seven subjects are not available , but they were all collected in United States and shared the mtDNA control-region mutations with the Ashkenazi samples.
Newer researches have further updated the phylogenetic tree of haplogroup K sub-clades 10 . The K1a1b1a1 sub-clade has yet to be approved and does not appear in the Build 17 Phylotree of February 18th, 2016 ; but it is well admitted that the characteristic mutations of the K1a1b1a1 sub-clade are : 10978G, 12954C and (in HVR1) 16234T. As this last mutation is present (see table 2) in the HVR1 mtDNA sequence of the women of the K haplogroup whose genomic DNA were extracted from her 10th- studied hair capillary bulb, we conclude that she is of the K1a1b1a1 sub-clade. The current version 3 of van Oven’s phylotree (http://www.phylotree.org) defines K1a1b1a1 by the highly polymorphic 114 site in HVR2, sites 10978 and 12954 in the coding region, and the 16234 site in HVR1. This is supported by a growing number of Genebank (index.php?S=Genebank&item_type=topic) samples. However, the 12954 site is not needed to define K1a1b1a as of 2013 and, mentioned above 10 , is used now to define K1a1b1a1.
According to Jacques de Voragine 11, in his famous Middle-Ages story (but based on previous oldest traditions), Marie-Madeleine was of double royal lineages : her father was named Syrus and her mother Eucharie (or Euchérie) ; etymologically “Syrus” designates probably the Syrian people, and “Euchérie” (latinisation of the greek term Eucharie)means graceful.
Syrus was previously a Syrian Prince (or King). Other sources indicate that he was converted to Judaism (under the name of “Syrus the Yaïrite”) and that he was the archipriest that officiated in the Capharnaüm synagogue. Marie-Madeleine’s mother Eucharie descended from a rich Pharisian family, possibly of the Davidic lineage.
Estimates of the age of the K1a1b1a sub-clade vary, depending on the mutation rates adopted in the calculations and on historical population sizes. The age of K1a1b1a has been estimated at 4,8003,600 years ago, according to the Genographic Project(index.php?s=Genographic%20%Project&item_type=topic). The K1a1b1a sub-clade is under the U’K haplogroup and descends from K1a1b1, which is thought to be an 11, 500-year-old European sub-clade of mostly non-Jewish origin.
A difficulty estimating Ashkenazim lineages is that they have undergone severe founder effects during their history 12, drastically altering the frequencies of genetic markers and distorting the relationship with their ancestral populations. There were Diaspora communities throughout Mediterranean Europe and Near-East for several centuries prior to the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 70, and some scholars 13 suggest that their scale implies proselytism and wide-scale conversion
There are two important questions with respect to the geographic origin of the Ashkenazi founding lineages 5 : i. Were these lineages a part of the mtDNA pool of a population ancestral to ashkenazi Jews in the Near-East, or were they established within the Ashkenazi Jews later in Europe as a result of introgression from European groups? ii. Were did the lineages expand? The observed global pattern of distribution renders very unlikely the possibility that the K1ab1a lineage (and the three aforementioned founder lineages) entered to the Ashkenazi mtDNA pool via gene flow from a European host population : in databases of HVS1 sequences of British, German, French and Italian subjects, this Ashkenazi sample lineage sequence was not observed 14, 15, 16 . Furthermore, the non-Ashkenazi Jewish populations (Iberian Sephardims) sharing the Ashkenazi mtDNA haplogroup-lineages K turn out to be from Jewish communities that trace their origins to the expulsion from Spain in 1492 ; either a shared ancestral origin of the two groups may explain the sharing of these maternal lineages 5 , albeit at low frequencies, in North African and Near Eastern Jews supports a common Levantine ancestry. Moreover, the K1a1b1a –sister lineages (K1a9 and K2a2a) which share with it a common ancestry at the internal nodal level of sub-clade K1a1b1 , is found in Portugal, Italy, France, Morocco and Tunisia. All that reveals that this particular limb of the haplogroup K phylogenetic tree is of a wider Mediterranean presence and origin 5.