X2c1
Aliens, Mormons, the Remnants of Atlantis… and Me
Byline: Elisabeth de Kleer
Of the various things I learned about myself from personal genetics testing, my mitochondrial haplogroup (X2c1) initially seemed to be the least useful… or interesting. Unlike genomic DNA, mtDNA does not appear to be a good predictor of health or traits. What’s more, the information about haplogroup ‘X’ on 23andme was so general that, at least initially, it didn’t seem to have any bearing on my genealogy project. However, I was intrigued by the idea that we can use mtDNA to trace patterns of population movement. So driven more by curiosity than anything else, I decided to embark on a journey — a journey that would lead me down a colorful conspiracy-rich rabbit hole complete with aliens, Mormons, the remnants of Atlantis, and ultimately circle back to my own family tree.
mtDNA and Ancestry
My first task was to educate myself about mtDNA and how it can be used to trace human migratory patterns. There are quite a few online articles on the subject, but the best resource by far was Bryan Syke’s book “The Seven Daughters of Eve,” which I downloaded on my kindle. I learned that mtDNA is non-Mendelian, which means it comes from one parent and one parent only — the mother — without recombination. So my mitochondrial DNA is the same as my mother’s, which is the same as her mother’s, and onward down the line in a linear fashion. Second, mtDNA mutates at a rate that is faster and more predictable than genomic DNA, making patterns easier to identify and track. Using these plotting techniques, scientists have identified seven main haplogroups — significant branching off points that represent shifts in our ancestors’ migratory patterns… moments in history when one population became geographically isolated and genetically distinct from their predecessors. The seven haplogroups have been assigned letters U, H, V, T, K, J, and of course, X.
Define ‘X’
According to Sykes and other sources, little is known about ‘X’ — the broadest and most sparsely distributed of the seven haplogroups. We know it’s found across the globe, particularly in Northern Europe and North America (1), and that there are a few population isolates with high concentrations of X: the country of Georgia (8%), the Orkney Island in Scotland (7%) and the Israeli Druze community (27%). Recent studies of Danish Viking skeletons also suggest ‘X’ have been prevalent in that community, but with only 10 skeletons studied, the data set is too small to say anything conclusively (2). However, what I found interesting about ‘X’ was not what was known… but what was UNKNOWN. The distribution patterns of ‘X’ are unusual and difficult to explain, making it the most mysterious and contentious of the seven haplogroups.
Exotic ‘X’
What is particularly puzzling about X is its prevalence in Western Europe and the North America… but nowhere (at least not in any significant numbers) in Asia. There are several other haplogroups present in both Europeans and Native American populations, but they also feature heavily in East Asian populations, popping up along path our ancient ancestors took as they migrated into the America via through the Bering Strait. What’s unusual about X is that it has the exact opposite distribution pattern that we’d expect for an eastern migration to North America; instead of getting denser as we go east, it gets sparser, with the densest pockets being in Europe and the Northeast United States. This has led some scientists to theorize that there may have been a separate western migration to North America during the Ice Age. It has also led other “scientists” to postulate competing theories — that X people are the remnants of Atlantis, that we’re living proof of Mormonism, and, best of all, aliens! (3)
As tempting as it was to leave it at “aliens,” what I really wanted to know was not where X came from in the first place… but how it was passed along to me. And for that, I had to look much closer to home.
My ‘X’
Since mtDNA is passed from a mother to her children, I decided to do some investigating into my maternal grandmother’s line — who her mother was, and her mother’s mother, etc. I knew that my grandmother was one of sixteen children born in a Mennonite colony in the Canadian prairies, so I started by acquiring Mennonite historical documents: ship records, colony censuses, church records. Luckily, the Mennonites, like the Amish, are religious about upholding tradition and documenting family heritage, so there was a lot of material to work with.
Using these records, I was able to trace my maternal line from Canada to a Mennonite colony called Chortitza in South Russia in the mid 19th-century, then to another colony called Wischenka (also in Russia) during Napoleonic times. From there, I dug a few more generations down to a woman named Judith Wollman, born in 1776 in a colony in Hungary, and finally to her mother — a woman named after the Biblical Joseph’s Egyptian wife, Asanath. Asanath was a member of the Hutterites — a radical Anabaptist sect even more austere than the Mennonites. Hutterites eschew violence and private property, preferring instead to hold all goods communally and to raise children as a collective. According to the Hutterite’s website: “All members of the colony are provided for equally and no assets are to be kept for personal gain. Hutterites do not have personal bank accounts; rather all earnings are held communally and funding and necessities are distributed according to one’s needs. Hutterites believe that all their work is to benefit the community and is a form of service to God.” (5)
The record entry on Asanath is frustratingly vague. There’s no maiden name, no information about her parents, and nothing about her ethnicity — which leaves me to wonder whether she was descended from one of the original Swiss Hutterites that fled to Hungary to escape Counter Reformation persecution, or whether she was a local convert. This is where the story stops… almost.
‘X’ is for Hutterite
After discovering Asanath, I wanted to find out if anyone had sampled mtDNA from Hutterite and Mennonite communities, and whether X2c1 ever came up in the studies. In fact, someone had. In 2010. The following is an excerpt from the European Journal of Human Genetics.
“Pichler and her team further discovered that the haplogroups among the Hutterites are vastly different from those found among central Europeans. For example, 30 percent of Hutterites belonged to a single haplogroup called X2c1 —which is virtually absent in Europe. This shows that even while the Hutterites lived in Europe, their genetics were vastly different from their non-Hutterite neighbors” (6).
The authors go on to speculate that sometime in the mid 18th century, precisely around the time Asanath was born, the Hutterite population bottlenecked, probably due to political persecution in Hungary. Indeed, my records reflect that in 1755 only 67 Hutterites lived on the colony… compared to 1,200 a century later. Could Asanath be the missing piece of the puzzle — the X2c1 that accounts for the prevalence of this haplogroup in the Hutterite and Mennonite populations today? It’s possible. She had six children, and each of them had at least six of their own. I may be, in fact, descended from the Eve of the Hutterite community.
Solving the puzzle of how my ‘X’ was passed down to me was exciting. But what’s even more exciting is knowing that we have tools available to answer these sorts of genetic questions (who am I? where did I come from?) and that this may be just the beginning. My written record may stop at the Asanath, but the genetic record may not. While I may never know their names, I hope that as we make strides in genetic research, I’ll be able to know more about where she same from… and where her mother came from… and on, and on, and on.
(1) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1180497/
(2) http://www.plosone.org/article/fetchArticle.action?articleURI=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0002214
(3) “Some of the people that fled the sinking continent went west and settled and became the Iroquois. Others went east to the Iberian Peninsula and the Pyrenees (Basques), and the West Coast of North Africa then the Atlas Mountains (Berbers). Turning to the Berbers we find yet another group that contains the highest frequency of haplogroup X in the world. Is it a coincidence that these disparate people share a very rare mtDNA lineage?” http://www.redicecreations.com/specialreports/2006/05may/atlantisDNA.html
(4) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_X_(mtDNA)
