Where did the European people come from?

In chapters 10 and 11 in the book The Seven Daughters of Eve, the author Bryan Sykes makes a very interesting conclusion in his research about where the European people came from. He states that in a large degree, the fields of genetics, archaeology and linguistics all believed that the mesolithic hunter-gatherers of Europe had been overwhelmed by the neolithic farmers that came to the area from the Near East. Thus making most Europeans descendants of the early farmers and not from the much older generations of hunter-gatherers. However, during his research of mitochondrial DNA in the populations of Europe, he found 7 distinct clusters of the DNA that was apparent in Europe, and 6 of those 7 were much older than he had anticipated. He estimated that those 6 clusters of mitochondrial DNA were older than the 10,000 years he had expected. Only one cluster was 10,000 years or younger.

To check his research he compared his findings to a people who call themselves the Basques. "The Basques have long been considered the last survivors of the original hunter-gatherer population of Europe," he says. So, the Basques should have a much different mitochondrial DNA sequence, right? Well, his findings stated otherwise: "They were just like all the other Europeans - with one noticeable exception: while they had representatives of all six of the old clusters, they had none at all of the seventh cluster with the much younger date." They were very much like most of the rest of Europe, with the one exception. So, when the immigrants that carried the 7th cluster of DNA came to the region, the Basques did not integrate with them.

How did the Basques avoid the influence of this 7th cluster of people? We may never truly know the answer, but Sykes looks into his research and finds that the majority of the 7th cluster has a very distinctive distribution. "It split into two branches, each with a slightly different set of mutations. One branch headed up from the Balkans across the Hungarian plain and along the river valleys of central Europe to the Baltic Sea. The other was confined to the Mediterranean coast as far as Spain, then could be traced around the coast of Portugal and up the Atlantic coast to western Britain. These two genetic routes were exactly the same as had been followed by the very first farmers, according to the archaeology."


Where did this 7th cluster come from? The last clue he used to define where these people were from was to compare the 7th cluster to people living in the Near East. "At the time, the only sequences we had available from this region were from the Bedouin of Saudi Arabia. While only about 15-20 per cent of Europeans belonged to the young cluster - depending on which population was being studied - fully half of the Bedouin were in it." At this point, he concluded that the majority of Europeans traced their ancestry back to the hunter-gatherers of the Palaeolithic, and not the farmers of the Neolithic.

But, what of this 7th cluster of Farmers who seemed to have such an profound effect on the culture and language of Europe? Who exactly were they? Could they have been part of a fulfillment of prophecy as spoken of in the Bible regarding the scattering of the house of Israel? Is it a stretch to say that they could possibly be one of the tribes of Israel? They may not have contributed a massive amount of their mitochondrial DNA, but their influence changed the way that Europe progressed.