Pitfalls of the Geographic Population Structure (GPS) Approach Applied to Human Genetic History: A Case Study of Ashkenazi Jews

Result code in IS VaVaI

<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F60077344%3A_____%2F16%3A00507438" target="_blank" >RIV/60077344:_____/16:00507438 - isvavai.cz</a>

Alternative codes found

RIV/61988987:17310/16:A1701KVV

Result on the web

<a href="https://academic.oup.com/gbe/article/8/7/2259/2467022" target="_blank" >https://academic.oup.com/gbe/article/8/7/2259/2467022</a>

DOI - Digital Object Identifier

<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/gbe/evw162" target="_blank" >10.1093/gbe/evw162</a>

Result language

angličtina

Original language name

Pitfalls of the Geographic Population Structure (GPS) Approach Applied to Human Genetic History: A Case Study of Ashkenazi Jews

Original language description

In a recent interdisciplinary study, Das et al. have attempted to trace the homeland of Ashkenazi Jews and of their historical language, Yiddish (Das et al. 2016. Localizing Ashkenazic Jews to Primeval Villages in the Ancient Iranian Lands of Ashkenaz. Genome Biol Evol. 8: 1132-1149). Das et al. applied the geographic population structure (GPS) method to autosomal genotyping data and inferred geographic coordinates of populations supposedly ancestral to Ashkenazi Jews, placing them in Eastern Turkey. They argued that this unexpected genetic result goes against the widely accepted notion of Ashkenazi origin in the Levant, and speculated that Yiddish was originally a Slavic language strongly influenced by Iranian and Turkic languages, and later remodeled completely under Germanic influence. In our view, there are major conceptual problems with both the genetic and linguistic parts of the work. We argue that GPS is a provenancing tool suited to inferring the geographic region where a modern and recently unadmixed genome is most likely to arise, but is hardly suitable for admixed populations and for tracing ancestry up to 1,000 years before present, as its authors have previously claimed. Moreover, all methods of historical linguistics concur that Yiddish is a Germanic language, with no reliable evidence for Slavic, Iranian, or Turkic substrata.

Czech name

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Czech description

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Type

J_imp - Article in a specialist periodical, which is included in the Web of Science database

CEP classification

—

OECD FORD branch

10603 - Genetics and heredity (medical genetics to be 3)

Project

—

Continuities

I - Institucionalni podpora na dlouhodoby koncepcni rozvoj vyzkumne organizace

Publication year

2016

Confidentiality

S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů

Name of the periodical

Genome Biology and Evolution

ISSN

1759-6653

e-ISSN

—

Volume of the periodical

8

Issue of the periodical within the volume

7

Country of publishing house

GB - UNITED KINGDOM

Number of pages

7

Pages from-to

2259-2265

UT code for WoS article

000381502000015

EID of the result in the Scopus database

2-s2.0-85018364558