Denisovan mtDNA

Now that I’ve cleaned up the dataset, I’m plainly adding new genomes, and I’ve just analyzed a Denisovan genome from the NIH. Amazingly, yet again, many modern humans have a lot in common with an archaic human, though the match is not as strong as it is with Heidelbergensis. Specifically, some Finns (5 out of 20) and many Ashkenazi Jews (8 out of 18) have about 70% of their mtDNA in common with the Denisovan genome. This is just amazing, and I’ve never heard anyone point this out before, but you can’t argue with it, it’s simply counting matching bases, so there it is. Because Denisovans are believed to be significantly older than homo sapiens, I think it’s fair to conclude that some Finns and many Ashkenazi Jews descend from Denisovans, which does not seem to be the case for the rest of Europe, though this dataset is limited to 29 global ethnicities. If true, this means they’re both really ancient people.

The Finns are unusual in Scandinavia, because they speak an Uralic language, that is closer to Hungarian than the other Germanic Scandinavian languages (e.g., Norwegian). This is at least consistent with the idea that the Finns have an origin independent from the rest of Scandinavia, which this work shows is not limited to their language, and is instead genetic. Hebrew is, as far as I know, not mysterious in terms of its origins, and is a Semitic language connected to Phoenician, and ultimately derived from Ancient Egyptian. However, I did find a number of Maritime Archaic genomes that were connected to Ashkenazi Jewish genomes, and they were completely insular, in that if a genome was connected to the Ashkenazis, all of the genomes connected to that genome, were ultimately connected only to each other, and the Ashkenazis. This is of course consistent with the generally insular marriages among Jewish people. This suggests again the possibility that Jews are also truly ancient as a genetic group, predating the advent of Hebrew, and possibly the advent of Judaism itself. In some sense this has to be true, since all people are far older than any known history connected to any religion, though it does suggest the possibility of group behavior among people that would eventually become Jews. All that said, the bottom line is, the Finns and the Ashkenazis are unique in their strong connection to the Denisovan genome, despite not having anything otherwise notable in common. That is, both the Finns and the Ashkenazis have basically the same ethnic profile that is typical of all European people (see below).

The graph below on the left shows the maximum non-empty match percentage, which leaves exactly one Finnish genome, with 73% of bases in common with the Denisovan genome. The graph on the right shows the number of matches by ethnicity at a minimum 70% of bases in common. As always, there are no material changes to alignment, and no gaps at all, so this is impossible to argue with, and the bottom line is some Finns, and many Ashkenazi Jews, are closely related to Denisovans on the maternal line, and it’s just not true of the rest of the world, though as you can see, there are some matches in many ethnicities.

The graphs below show the distribution of matching genomes by ethnicity for the Finns and Ashkenazis, and the Mexicans and Japanese for context. Each is generated by setting the minimum percentage of matching bases at 99%. As you can see, there’s basically no difference in overall structure, suggesting a common mix of maternal heritages among the four groups. This is true of many people with historical connections to Europeans, and even some Asian populations that don’t, most notably Japan, which to my knowledge, never suffered from any material Western colonial rule or conquest. As a consequence, we cannot explain this away using imperialism alone, and I think instead, yet again, the world was very global, a long time ago, probably simply due to sailing and trade. One notable distinction between the Finns and the rest, they contain some matches to the Roma, which is not very common in European countries. Note that this means some people that identify as Finns are a 99% match to Roma people, as opposed to known Roma living in Finland.