Genetic genealogy and the origins of Islam
The standard narrative that you read in the history books, as passed down through Islamic tradition and historiography, is that in the first decades of the 7th-century the religion of Islam was promulgated by Muhammad and his followers from the cities of Medina and Mecca. Muhammad brought the tribes and peoples of the Arabian peninsula […]
Icelanders descended from Native Americans?
That is the question, and tentatively answered in the affirmative according to a new paper in The American Journal of Physical Anthropology. A new subclade of mtDNA haplogroup C1 found in icelanders: Evidence of pre-columbian contact?:
Although most mtDNA lineages observed in contemporary Icelanders can be traced to neighboring populations in the British Isles and Scandinavia, […]