Ancient DNA Finally Reveals Where Ashkenazi Jews Really Came From Bandi [NnEWrTfR477]

Beneath a parking lot in Erfurt, Germany, construction workers disturbed a medieval Jewish cemetery and cronaca scientists recovered something extraordinary: a genetic snapshot of a Jewish community suzuki frozen in time for 700 years.

In 2022, a landmark study led by geneticists Shai Carmi and David Reich published genome-wide data from 33 medieval Ashkenazi Jews recovered from that cemetery. For the first time, we could josh hokit hold a medieval Jewish population up against the modern one and ask: where do Ashkenazi Jews actually come from and what changed?

In this episode, Professor Julian Ng walks through what the ancient DNA genuinely shows. The broad answer is both clear and remarkable: Ashkenazi Jews carry ancestry from two deep sources roughly half from the ancient Levant and the Near East, and roughly half from Southern Europe, likely absorbed during the Roman-era Mediterranean world. Independent lines of evidence, from Y-chromosome lineages to shared ancestry with geographically isolated Jewish communities in Iran, Iraq, and Yemen, all point back to the same ancient homeland.

But the Erfurt data added a genuine surprise: the medieval community was more genetically diverse than modern Ashkenazi Jews are, suggesting the population had not yet fully consolidated. We also examine the 'Khazar hypothesis' a political myth the genomic record quietly demolishes and explain why Ashkenazi Jews resemble Southern Italians without that being evidence against Middle Eastern roots.

No politics. No agenda. Just what the genome actually says.