Razib Khan explains Genetics, DNA Tests, and Jewish Ancestry

Welcome once again to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host, John Harris. We have a guest on today who has not been on the podcast before, but he has a lot of really interesting things to share.

I'm actually very much looking forward to learning about the science of genetics quite a bit more, because you know what?

I did the DNA test just like so many of you did. I know, I know. They have your DNA, John. You should never have done it while I did it.

So did many of my family members. And the confusing thing is you get this result sheet back that's got all these different regions and ethnicities.

And for me, it actually wasn't really that exciting. It's like, you're basically from England. It's like, okay, yeah,

I knew that. And the thing is, though, the percentages on that will change over time as they update.

And you're like, what happened? Right? Like some people are like, did I lose my German? Did it just all convert to Scotland?

How did this happen? So we're going to talk about that. We're also going to talk about a little bit about Israel and the whole debate there about whether or not modern

Jews are Jews, because that's become such a big thing, even among Christians, to claim that, well, there really aren't any

Jews anymore, or they're Edomites, or they're Khazars, or something like that. So we're going to see where the conversation takes us.

But I have with me, like I said, a special guest. He is the director of operations at a tech company.

He studies genetics history and politics. I've read a number of his articles about genetics.

And frankly, I'm having him on because I get lost in the weeds myself because I'm not a geneticist.

But his name is Razeeb Khan. And I would actually recommend go to his sub stack if you want to know more after this.

It is just Razeeb Khan dot com. Welcome, Razeeb. Thank you for being here. Appreciate it.

So, John, nice to see you. Yeah. Your experience is very common. And, you know, a lot of people have asked me this.

So I guess, you know, we were talking before we started recording the podcast, we were conspiring, so to speak.

So I think one way in a scientific paper that you, you know, it's laid out, usually it's laid out this way. Sometimes you do it the reverse way, but for various reasons.

But there's usually an introduction, which just kind of sets up the background, then the methods, which says what you did, you know, and then there's the results, which are, you know, the output of what you did.

Right. What you're seeing when you do 23andMe, Ancestry, all these things are the results. You you're obviously not seeing the method.

And so I'm going to if it's OK with you and your audience, I'm just going to go really quickly, you know, with how the method works.

And obviously I'm using some shorthand for the geneticists out there. You know, like I've developed these algorithms like, you know, if I'm simplifying,

I'm simplifying so the people out there can understand, you know, not because I don't know this particular little technical detail.

Right. Like I might use words a little differently, whatever. But I'm going to get across, I think, what's going on. So I think most of you, well,

I don't know, most of your audience, a lot of your audience knows. OK, so what is a genome? Genome is basically three billion letters,

A, C, G and T in random orders. You have three billion letters in your genome. You actually have two copies. OK, one copy you get from your dad, one copy you get from your mom.

You know, it's the law of segregation just means that everyone has two copies of their genome and in the process of reproduction, which, you know, both me and you are knowledgeable about this.

We have offspring children and the children get half from the mom, half from the dad. Right. So they get half your genome.

So you have three billion and out of that, you know, you have three billion times two. So six billion total base pairs.

Right. That is the variation that population genesis, which is a very specific type of genetics. So there are types of genesis that look at, say, the molecular mechanisms of DNA replication or recombination or DNA repair.

So that's a biophysical process. You can go on YouTube and you should type DNA replication and you'll see that it's a little, basically a nanomachine.

You know, it's a little biological machine that does this replication. There's a whole field of genetics, you know, by the more biophysical molecular geneticists that study that.

And that's really important when there's problems with that type of mechanism when it comes to disease.

Right. So that's one field of genetics. And obviously, most of you guys probably know, like, oh, OK, you can like look at the pattern of peas, how they're inherited with like curly and straight and all this stuff and different colors and plants.

That's the classical genetics that was pioneered by an Austrian or Moravian, I guess, technically

Moravian monk named Gregor Mendel about 180 years ago. It's a while ago. Around the same time as Charles Darwin.

In any case, what I study, what I did in my career was mostly working on a computer with the total of six billion base pairs.

Right. So that is the information that I focused on. And that information is only available to us really within the last 26 years because of a combination of computation and automation.

So, you know, the sequencing of a genome, which you guys don't need to know how it works. It's basically it's a mechanical process.

It's an industrialized process now. When I was a kid, John, even when you were a kid, you're a little younger than me, but even when you were a kid, we didn't we literally did not have a map of the human genome.

We did not know. Right. So the first human genome, just to give your viewers and listeners a sense, cost about three billion dollars.

Today, you can get a human genome for about 200 dollars. This is over 25 years. OK, so it's gone from like, can we even do this?

Because the Human Genome Project was proposed in the late 1980s and they didn't really know if they could do it because they didn't have the technology. They literally did not have the technology.

Technology was invented in the 1990s. They're like, oh, we'll sequence the whole genome. It's not going to take 100 years, you know.

And so, you know, this is the beauty of science and technology. It's exponential. Sometimes it's improvement. It accelerates.

So all of a sudden you have a whole sequence. With 23andMe, and now I'm going to drill down on 23andMe and Ancestry, these companies, what they do is they're looking at about I think they're looking at 400 ,000 positions in your genome in the analyses.

So that's 400 ,000 A, C's, G's and T's. The patterns of these A, C's, G's and T's is the genetic variation.

It's the raw data that you're using. Now, you might say, well, I mean, there's 3 billion base pairs.

What does 400 ,000 tell you? Well, first of all, they're randomly distributed across the genome. So they're good sampling. OK, they're evenly distributed and they're away from things like,

I don't know, like functional parts of the genome that code for protein that might not be informative of random ancestry.

And what happens is like once you start sampling data, as a lot of your listeners probably know from, you know, science classes and whatnot, is once you get a certain amount of data, you don't need any more.

OK, once you get to about 400 ,000, like you're at the point where you can do all the things you want to do and you don't need all 3 billion.

And in fact, as again, many of you know, most of your genome is actually not variable.

You only have about 5 million positions, four and a half million, actually, for both of us because we're Eurasian. Four and a half million positions in the genome that are variable.

OK, that means they vary between individuals and give you information about your ancestry, why we look different, you know, these sorts of things.

That's within that four and a half million. And so we're getting about 10 percent of these for these ancestry tests.

That's sufficient. Right. And so to give an analogy, think about if you're flipping a coin, if you coin 10 times, you're going to get like tail six times, seven times, maybe three times.

There's a lot of noise because you're flipping it 10 times. Once you flip it a thousand times, it's much, much closer to that 50 -50.

OK, so looking at these 400 ,000 positions in the genome is the raw data is like flipping that coin 400 ,000 times.

OK, you have an enormous amount of data. Now, what do you do with the data? Now, John, like you can actually download the data.

Your listeners and probably about 25 percent have done one of these tests at this point in the United States, can download the data.

And the data comes as just a text file. You just open a text file and you see like, oh, it has a number on the left.

Basically, it has like chromosomes. You have 23 chromosomes, 23 autosomal with the

X chromosome, 22. So you have a number for that. You have a genomic position. So basically, there's a coordinate. OK, so the three billion is not just random.

It's arrayed in a particular structure. It's sequenced. So it'll give you that information and that'll give you whether it's

A, C or G or T. Right. But what are you going to do with that? Like you as a human being can do nothing with that.

And in fact, scientists can really do nothing with that because we cannot look at four hundred thousand positions and compare.

We can compare them on a computer and see where they're different. But what does that tell us? Like we're human beings. What we need to do is we need to summarize it.

Right. And so, for example, statistics, you know, summarize things so you can look at a distribution on a plot.

But unless you're giving an average, it's not giving you all the information. Right. The average is a summary. Now, the average is not something that exists in nature out there.

It's a calculation we make. Right. So there's an average height of Dutch people.

OK. The average height of Dutch people is what you call it. You know, it's an abstraction. Right. It's a calculation. It's something for human beings because we can see that the

Dutch are taller than Italians. We can see that. That's reality. Right. That's the fact.

But. You can't get as much out of that fact unless you measure them and then you calculate their average.

But the average itself is a choice that we have to make. OK. So to bring it back to genetics, how do we take these 400 ,000 positions and give the information back to you guys in a way where you can draw insight and information that corresponds to your past genetic history?

Because we can just say, hey, John, here are these 400 ,000 positions. They're going to be different than the 400 ,000 positions from someone in China.

Just figure it out. That's not going to work. Right. So what we need to do is we take these 400 ,000 positions and we put them.

You can think of it like in a schematic, like in a box. And that box is the model. OK. So we have a model of human history that we're testing.

OK. And that model is a choice that we make. The model is not out there, the raw data.

The raw data is the 400 ,000 positions. And so the models. So this is a real model. OK. So the model will be like, OK, let's assume there are 50 human populations.

OK. There's 50 human populations. And those 50 human populations are in Europe and Asia and Africa and stuff like that.

Right. OK. That's the start of our model. But how do we go from the raw data that you have, your 400 ,000 positions, comparing it to that model and coming out with the percentages?

Because that's what's happening. What we do is we take 100 people from Britain, 100 people from China, 100 people, et cetera, et cetera.

And we take those 100 people, we put them in the boxes in our model. OK. And those people have now genetic variations.

So you have like 400 ,000 times 100. Right. When you have 100 people from any given population, you're seeing the range of their variation.

You're seeing their average. OK. So you have an average for each population. As John Harris or me or your children, as the raw data goes into the model, what the model is doing is like,

OK, what percentages would make sense for this raw data to make sense?

OK. So, for example, well, I mean, I'll give you a concrete example. My children are half

European, half South Asian. OK. So when they go into the model, the different populations are being compared against my offspring.

OK. And the computer is like, oh, well, kind of like Northern European, kind of like South Asian.

Probably they're 50 -50, you know, and so they come out 50 -50. Now, what happens when you update the model?

So, for example, I'm going to give you a concrete example that explains what's going on. So my family is from the northeast part of the

Indian subcontinent, up by, kind of by China, kind of by Burma. So it's in the Far East. Right. And so in the model, there's people from that part of the world.

And so it says, you know, my kids are 50 percent Bengali, 50 percent European, Northern European, you know, specifically

German, Norwegian, blah, blah, whatever. That's what it says, because that's the reality. But I can change the model.

I can remove Bengalis out of that model. The computer is still going to do its calculation. It's going to update now.

It's going to remove that ethnicity. What is it going to do? I know what it's going to do, because I've actually modified the model myself.

Okay. If I remove my ancestral population, it's going to look for the nearest ancestral population.

And then it's going to make the model work again. What's going to happen is my kids are going to all of a sudden come out about like 10 percent

East Asian, 40 percent probably like Bihari, which is an ethnicity nearby, and then the other 50 percent

European. Okay. I didn't change the European part. But if you take my ancestry out of it, the model will update to reweight to the populations it has, because I myself,

I am about 15 percent East Asian, which is pretty atypical for people of Indian subcontinental origin, but that's just specific to my ethnicity.

If my ethnicity is in the model, you don't see that, because it's baked into the cake. Okay. But you remove it, all of a sudden it falls out of the model, because we've changed the parameters.

We've changed the specifications of the model. And so all of a sudden the result is going to change. What usually happens when your ancestry is updated is actually not removal.

What these companies are trying to do is like, we can give you 77 populations. We can give you 88 populations.

And so why are they increasing that? Well, because, well, that's marketing. I mean, I've been in the room.

I've worked at these companies. And sometimes it's like 99 percent of the juice is from 50 of the populations, for example.

But look, if 23andMe has 77 populations or 120 populations, ancestry is going to match them.

And so they keep updating these models. Now, the models, they run on their own.

They have their own logic. The scientists are not controlling the models. They're changing the models, but they're not controlling the models.

And so they're going to cause these weird updates, because we don't know what the calculation is going to be until we run the calculation.

Does that make sense? And so what really is happening with the percentage updates is usually changes in the model because they're updating various things.

And sometimes, you know, sometimes you see things that are peculiar and that don't make sense.

So I'll give you guys a concrete example. There are a lot of models where people from Finland come out as like 2 to 3 percent

Native American, pure Finnish people. OK, that doesn't make any sense.

OK. But that's because the models lack some information about Finns that's very unique to them compared to other

Europeans. They're about 5 percent Siberian. That's why their language is unique. OK. And so when you put a

Siberian population into the model, all of a sudden, they're 5 percent Siberian and the Native American disappears.

That's the closest population that they could find. Native Americans are related to Siberians. They're descended from Siberians. OK.

And so it turns to for the model to work, the model is looking at the Finns and they're like, they're just like Swedish people, but they're kind of different.

OK. They're 2 percent Native American works, you know. But when you put the Siberian population in, they're like, oh,

OK, they're really 5 percent Siberian. That's a much better fit. Now I have the information to go with. Right. And so that's what's happening when they're updating percentages.

And that's why the models are changing. To reiterate, the raw data is really straightforward. The machines are very accurate and precise.

But the raw data is just not intelligible to human beings. We cannot understand that. Right. So we have to translate into these sorts of model frameworks and the models vary by company and they vary over time.

So this is helpful because for some reason, it's Thanksgiving and Christmas when we get out our ancestry profiles and all start comparing.

And I have an uncle who's really into and like genealogy is going back.

My wife has an uncle who's also really into genealogies, like they nerd out on these things.

And my my uncle likes all of that. Like he's mapped stuff out on ancestry because they have all the genealogical data.

But he doesn't trust the DNA results quite a bit because he'll say, well, I know we have this in our family, but it doesn't show up on the model or it doesn't.

He thinks it's more accurate to just go with what we know from collecting information at genealogies. And it's interesting with my

DNA, like it popped. I think it was. Yeah, it was mine where it popped up as like one percent in Ukraine all of a sudden and then it was gone and it popped up one percent

Spanish and then gone. And my uncle would be like, oh, I know what that is. You know, I know

I know where that came from or what. Yeah. And and then they update their model and they give it to someone else.

My wife had a really wild like she they reduced a number of ethnicities.

And one of the weirdest swings to me was like all her German went to Scotland at one time.

She had all this German and all of a sudden it was gone and it was Scottish. And we were like, so that makes sense then.

They're just they're making more options, I guess. And then that's one of the that's one of the drivers.

I will. I will. I want to end specifically with Europeans. There's there's there's some issues here.

And that that has, again, to do with capitalism and marketing. OK, 80 percent of the customers.

Last I checked, I think, well, let's let's talk about 23andMe because it's mostly American. MyHeritage has a lot of customers in Europe and Middle East, actually, but let's talk about 23andMe just to make it easy.

23andMe and Ancestry because they're overwhelmingly American. 80 percent of their customers are of European heritage. That's 80 percent of their customers.

About like 13 percent of the people in the world have European heritage. So what's going so when you look at the number of clusters that they're providing?

They're providing a lot of European clusters, getting hyper specific. Yeah. And like that's driven by the that's driven by consumer demand.

That's not driven by the science. So when you if you just looked at the science and you told so you can tell the model, like,

OK, I'm going to give you like a thousand human beings randomly sampled from the world, divide them into the number of populations you want to divide them into.

OK, you would have like many more divisions within Africa. And then like many more fewer outside of Africa, because everyone outside of Africa and I know there's going to be some disagreements with some of your your viewers, but I'm going to like just pretend like right about 60 ,000 years ago, humans left

Africa, about a thousand of us and everybody outside of Africa is descended from those one thousand.

And so everybody outside of Africa looks quite similar compared to people inside of Africa and compared to people comparing within Africans to Africans.

Right. So if you just did it purely by the science, like said, OK, break apart human populations into a tree or into clusters based on what their genetic variation is, you would not divide

Europe up into this way. The reason you divide Europe so much is because that's what the customers want. And the reason that it's extremely difficult to divide northern

Europeans is they're all actually very similar. That's one thing. They're very similar genetically. So even with the four hundred thousand, there's only so much you can do.

OK, now they've gotten much better and they can do a lot. But there is a fundamental problem you're never going to get around when you're talking about Germans.

What is a German? Is a German someone from Prussia? Is a German someone from Rhineland? Is a

German someone from Bavaria? What is an English person? Is an English person someone from East Anglia or is an English person someone from Devon?

And so these constructs that we have, they obviously have variation. Not all English people look the same or even ancestrally totally the same, although broadly not that far apart.

But there's variation. So I've worked on this, so I know that this is what happens. Germans, there are actually like three broad clusters within Germany.

You look at their geographic distribution and you look at their variations. There's people in the southwest, kind of like Rhineland, Bavaria, Baden -Württemberg.

There's a lot of people that live there, a lot of Germans that live there. Those Germans, they're not quite like the

French, but they look a lot like northern French people, which makes sense. Like it's Franconia. Franconia, that's part of Germany.

It's where the Franks are from. Then you also have Germans in the east towards Poland and what is today

Prussia. I think part of it's like Dresden, that area towards Berlin. Those Germans are a lot more like Polish people.

They're a lot more like Slavic people. In fact, a lot of them used to be Slavic speakers. It's just known. There's a fair number of Germans in eastern

Germany where they have weird surnames and they're clearly Germanized Slavic surnames. And then you have the

Germans in the north around Bremen, Hamburg, towards Jutland, where the

Jutes used to come from, like Anglo -Saxons, that area, the old school Anglo -Saxons. Those Germans are more like Scandinavians.

When you're saying Germans, what kind of German are you? That's the question you have to ask.

And so these sorts of really subtle selection pressures within the scientific team in terms of like, okay, what do we select for Germans?

What is the German German? The algorithms are smart enough to figure out that there's three types of Germans, but still it is going to get confused because there are certain types of Germans that are much more like French people, right?

And so if you increase your algorithm with more of those types, the model with more of those types of Germans, all of a sudden some

French people are going to turn out to be German because they are like Germans. In fact, some of them might be descended from Franks, right?

That's just a fact. So with the English, you guys know, I think most of the listeners will know, England is a population that's like a mix of Anglo -Saxons and native

Britons. The Celtic speaking people, the Welsh are like relatively pure descendants, you could say.

People in East Anglia, by what's called the old Saxon shore, have the most of the Dutch. It's mostly really like Dutch, Dutch type ancestry, whereas people in Wales have the least of that, right?

But people in other parts of England have a variable amount. So people in Yorkshire in the north, Yorkshire in the north area, for example, has more

Scandinavian ancestry. That's where, you know, the kingdom of York, the Scandinavian kingdom of York was there for a long time. And there was a lot of Scandinavian settlers, you know, that was like the heart of the

Danelaw, you know, whereas in the southwest towards Devon, Devon used to be the old Celtic kingdom of Dubnania.

And a lot of people don't know this, but the oldest names in Alfred the Great's lineage, who was, you know, like the king who united Britain, okay,

Anglo -Saxon, they're Celtic. It looks like Alfred's lineage himself, they were Germanized Celts.

They were probably British warlords that switched sides and switched language and culture.

They probably were even Christian, and then they became pagan. And then they changed it. The earliest names are like Welsh names in the lineage.

They didn't get, they didn't, I mean, they're not like modern propagandists. They're just like, oh, we're not gonna even lie. We're just gonna switch names, and we're gonna keep them in the genealogy, and like everyone's gonna know, but we don't care, right?

So there were a lot of British people that switched and became German, because Germanic speaking, Anglo -Saxon. And so you have these mixes all across England, okay?

And so that's why you have some English people that are like, why does it say I'm 5 % Dutch?

Like, I have no Dutch ancestry. I should be able to know that. Well, you know, it's not because you're 5 % Dutch. It's because you're where the

Anglo -Saxon, you really, your family's literally where the Anglo -Saxon settled first. So obviously you have most of that ancestry. Again, it's not like the scientists at these companies don't know this.

They try to figure out ways where the model can intelligently, and I'm telling you verbally what's going on, because I'm a human being, and I have the ability to like know, oh, well, you know, your uncle says the genealogy says this.

Well, it's because, this is why the genealogy, genealogy and the ancestry test is like causing this distortion. So the ancestry test is not smart enough yet to know that there's this type of variation within England, and this type of variation within Germany and Ukraine, and it's trying to make the model work for your data, okay, and come out with the right result, quote, unquote, right result, a result that makes sense in line with your genealogy.

One last thing I'm going to say, and you can ask questions or whatever, but like one of the last thing I'm going to say, once you get about eight generations back, there is a 50 % chance that you inherit no genes from that given ancestor.

And that's because when you're dividing, you, there's no, so I'll give you a concrete example. You know,

I know someone who is, so you can like sequence the four grandparents and look at the person.

I know someone that's 30%, one grandparent, 20%, another, 27%, another, and then like 33 % the other, right?

And it's because there's noise when it comes to recombination and transmitting your genetics from your grandparents.

So for example, like, you know, I know someone who's 18%, one great grandparent, okay, and that should be 12 .5%.

That means there's more of some people in your genes than other people. But when you're, when you're doing a genealogical tree, you don't know, and you don't do that, right?

When you go back into the genealogy, everyone is your ancestor. But when you look at the genetics, that's actually not true. And that's like noisy.

And that's why some people within families get quite different results because they get ancestry from different people. That makes sense.

When I first did ancestry, one of the immediate results was they said he's from Mississippi.

And I was like, I have one grandfather from Mississippi. I have so so that's three that aren't.

And then one of my grandparents has, I would say, close,

I suppose, like Tennessee, Kentucky genetics, but it's, I was like, that's very strange.

But I it's also the grandfather that my family says I look like I was, I think it's part of the reason

I was close to him. And that would make sense of that. So yeah, now

I know. So another thing to really, I know that people like talking about their ancestry and stuff.

Another thing my uncle found was going back where we're descended from William the Conqueror, just like half of England, you know, yeah, really that special.

But if you go back far enough, he's gone into, like the 1200.

Actually, I think it's more like the eight, eight hundreds. There, there's all these Viking names in our ancestry.

And he's actually found these. And it must be Royal Line stuff, because if you get if you keep going, I mean, people weren't keeping records unless they were,

I would assume, unless they were part of the Royal Line. Yeah, a lot of it. It depends.

So church records can be pretty good. And during the Protestant Reformation, some parts like like all of a sudden,

Scandinavia decided like they're going to get really good records, like right during the Reformation. And then some parts of France keep pretty good records.

I can trace my kids maternal line to Switzerland to like 1320.

That's and that that goes to like those are Catholic Church records. That's the exception. But yeah, there are the reality is there were records somewhere.

But like, are they preserved? Was the church burned down in World War Two? Like there's all sorts of issues like that, too. I just don't think

Vikings from the seven and eight Vikings were pretty much pretty much illiterate, like, you know, ruins were not that great.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think so. Anyway, England in England, it starts with the Normans that there's a lot of good records.

The Normans started to be really good. So I want to switch gears a little bit, if that's OK, talk about Israel and Jewish ancestry, because there's been all these this focus and these tests on wanting to figure out whether these various Jewish groups are truly related to people who lived in the

Levant from 3000 to 4000 years ago. First question I have, and this is an honest question

I'm genuinely confused about. I'm not a geneticist. How do we have DNA from three to 4000 years ago by which to compare modern groups?

Yeah, that's amazing, right? And this is a new thing. So there's a whole field called paleogenetics. Pioneers by the name of Swantek Pabo.

He's a Swedish guy. Well, Finnish, Swedish guy. And he got the Nobel Prize a couple of years for it. So basically, DNA is actually a pretty robust macromolecule.

So it's obviously a molecule like you've seen the schematic and what it looks like. It's microscopic, but, you know, from our scale, but really, it's actually pretty big and well structured.

Now, the thing is, is DNA is the code for why you look the way you do and why your body, it's code, it's information, right?

So it has to be, first of all, like, it has to be pretty robust, right? If it was not a robust molecule, you would be messed up.

You would have like two heads and stuff. You would not be alive. And so of all the micro macromolecules in your body, the

DNA is one of those that you would actually expect to preserve its information because that's its whole role.

Its whole job is to transmit information to parent to child, parent to child with high fidelity, right? So it is kind of like, well, you're young enough to know, or you're old enough to know,

I guess, the diskettes in computers, you know, it's like, it's like that, like it has to be robust enough to transmit the information, right?

It can't be delicate. So that's one explanation. Another explanation is there are parts of the body, like there's a bone in your inner ear, your pinky, there's other regions that are like almost enclosed off and they can preserve that DNA for a long time.

The oldest, I think right now is like, I think it was in the Arctic. There is DNA that they got more than a million years old.

I think in Greenland or Siberia, one of the two. So if it's cold, if it's dry, if it's stable temperature, the

DNA will maintain a lot of its structure, okay? The oldest, I think like big animal is like a horse 900 ,000 years ago from the

Tamir Peninsula, which is Northern Siberia. Okay, so that's one thing. The other thing is scientists like now have done a lot of this and they've gotten really good at figuring out how the

DNA breaks down and degrades. And with computers, you can pull out the information, use the same type of sequencing information.

Well, just minor note for your listener. One thing that scientists have been doing the last 30 years to really help is something called polymerase chain reaction.

And basically all that means is you take a strand of DNA and you can put a chemical around it and that chemical duplicates the

DNA. It duplicates the DNA just because DNA is supposed to be easy to duplicate. Well, it duplicates the DNA. And so you can take a little bit of DNA and that blows it up.

Now, if the DNA is low quality, it'll blow up low quality DNA. And that's hard to use, but we have computers now that can figure out the patterns of how

DNA degrades. And you can basically do a thing where you take the data and you can pull out all of the bad degraded

DNA patterns. And out of that, you get the good stuff, right? So I guess the two major things that I would say is one, it's actually a very, very robust macromolecule because it's supposed to be how information is transmitted from the generations, but also across your lifetime.

There's DNA repair mechanisms, all the cells in your body, except for red blood cells have DNA, stuff like that, right?

So that's one thing. And the second thing is now we have computers that allow us to look at even degraded DNA and get information out of that.

And it's used for two things. It's used for the historical stuff, but it's also used for forensics. So I have a friend, it's a company called

Arthur, my friend, David Middleman, and they do forensic genomics and they're solving a lot of old cold cases because they can now use these methods to get information out of DNA that they previously, 30 years ago, couldn't get information out of.

Wow. Don't ever commit a crime. There's a lot of people, serial killers are basically, it's almost impossible for you to be a serial killer now.

Yeah. Because if you're killing multiple people, you're going to leave your DNA. Right. Right.

I mean, you watch those shows, it's like they find a strand of hair or something, you touch the wall here and you're done.

I don't know if they're doing it at any, I think they're still doing it. But, you know, a presidential candidate like Hillary Clinton, she was being followed by her security detail.

They were taking all her garbage, like the waste bins at her events because they were worried that someone was going to go in and get the coffee cup or something and get

DNA off it. Really? Yeah. So it's a national security issue. It's a national security issue.

Like we're really worried about people getting DNA from, from like, you know, major political figures.

So there's reasons for that. Fascinating. OK, so there's back to how do we know three, two or three thousand years ago?

Yeah. So so there's two things. First of all, we have to know, it seems like to me that whatever sample that you're getting.

So I don't know. You said fingernails or something like that. There's also one of the things that a pinky, the pinky bone, they got

DNA. They've gotten DNA out of the inside of the bones. Right. Usually like pinky bone or something like that. There's certain types, there's certain

I don't know. Look, I'm not like that type of biologist, but there's certain parts of your body that are really, really rich in DNA and that are enclosed in a lot of bone.

OK, and that's the ideal. So there's one in your ear, inner ear bone. That one apparently is like very, very rich in DNA.

And it's also enclosed by really compact, like protective cover of bone. Right.

OK, so we find someone's ear in the. Yeah. And then we got to figure out, well, how do we know how old that body is?

And I'm assuming this is like a radiocarbon thing. Yeah. So we have we have we have sometimes radiocarbon or, you know, you kind of look if someone is dressed like a

Anglo -Saxon. You kind of know that they got to be like fifth or sixth century, first of all.

Right. But you can't carbon date it to double check it. You know, so that's one. OK. Yeah. So and I know this would be probably a disagreement.

I'm not well versed in the genetics and the science of it, obviously. But my understanding from more the the creationist,

I don't know what you want to call it, the young or whatever, is that the radiocarbon dating is only accurate up to a certain point.

And then people who believe in a pre -flood world that had different levels of carbon, it would it would mess that all up.

But yeah, the scales that we're talking about, that's that's not relevant. Right. Right. So I'm just saying for the for my so they understand what's going on here.

If you assume, though, a consistent level of carbon leaking or whatever, then you could theoretically go back much farther, assuming that there are different conditions.

So I don't want to get people to stumble on that. That is how the scientists talk and you're accurately representing it. So they find these bones and they do radiocarbon dating.

They find other, I don't know, a sign on the gravestone that says the year or whatever it is.

Well, I mean, ancient people in particular, you know, before like before, like, you know,

Christianity, Islam, a lot of the ancient cultures, pre -modern cultures, they buried people with grave goods.

So it's very identifying. Right. OK. So it was like, OK, we know this person's Phoenician. Like, look, you know.

OK, so so they went to the Levant. They went to this this broad area where there were Canaanites, Edomites and all sorts of other sites that the

Israel was supposed to wipe out and didn't. And then there's there's Israel and the 12 tribes and all these people live there and they start taking samples.

The thing that I was wondering is like, OK, so how many samples do they actually have? And who are these people?

Because there are all kinds of people who live there. I don't know if you know the answer to that. But yeah, I mean, in terms of samples,

I mean, now we have for ancient DNA, we have tens of thousands, lots. Some areas have a lot.

Some areas have very few northern areas and colder areas have more colder, drier, have more. Also, some countries have just invested a lot in this and other countries have not.

So that's some of some of the variation is just due to climate. Some of the variation is due to things like did the did the people cremate?

And so in ancient Greece, for example, we have a fair number of samples from before 1000

B .C. when they were burying and then between after 1000 B .C. and up to about, you know, 300, 400

A .D., you don't have that many because they're cremating. You still can get DNA out of cremated bodies, but it's like, wow, because because again, like the bone is enclosed and the

DNA is inside the bone. So the bone outside will get charred and it might not get fully, fully burned inside.

OK, so going to the Levant area, then we have the area we have.

I mean, I think we have we have dozens, dozens to hundreds, you know, but yeah, from what

I remember, I mean, I think actually some of it's like unanalyzed. There's more data than there are people to analyze it. We really have hundreds.

I think dozens have been analyzed, but I'll give you guys a concrete example. There are samples from, I think, Sidon in what was later called

Phoenicia, like on the Levant and some samples from 1800 B .C. OK, so that is, you know, whatever, 3 ,800 years ago.

This is like approximately, you know, if you use traditional biblical chronology, it's around Abraham's time, right? These two people,

I think there's two samples. OK, I have to make it clear here because people get confused. I said earlier, well, we have 400 ,000 base pairs and all this stuff.

When you look at a person's genome, when you have that, when you have like hundreds of thousands of base pairs, it's not just that person's genome, it's their whole genealogy you're sampling.

So we have one person. If the populations are well mixed, you're actually getting information about the whole population's history.

And so a lot of times people are like, well, you have one sample. How can you draw conclusions from that? That's not an N of one. OK, that's an

N of like hundreds of thousands. It just happens to be in one person. OK, that's one thing to know.

Now, if you have like like let's say that like someone in the far future gets a sample from the United States and it's a black person.

Obviously, that's not informing me or you. But if it's a

European person, it's informing most of the population. So it depends on like how much population variation there is within the population and representative, blah, blah, blah.

But usually what happens so far, what we've seen is you get one or two people, you get most of the information from that and later you get follow ups.

And that like adds a little extra certainty because, OK, those people were representative. So you have these two individuals initially in 2017,

I think 2017, 2018. Yes, it's 2017 that the paper came out that I'm thinking about. There's been follow ups that confirm it.

But two individuals. What I say, like rule of thumb is like if you go to modern day Lebanon, about 80 percent of their ancestry is from the same population as this population 3 ,800 years ago.

OK, so these are the kind of like conclusions you can draw. Right. You just like compare these ancient people and how similar are they to the modern people in Britain, for example.

It depends on where you are, but let's say like the Midlands. I'm going to say like 30 to 40 percent continuity to to 1800

B .C. OK. And like the migrations where there seems to be a migration of Celts around 1000

B .C. that arrived into into southern and central Britain. And then later there was the

Anglo -Saxons mostly. Those are the two ways that that's the remaining like 60 to 70 percent. Right. So in the ancient

Near East, most of the changes actually happened like for 1800 B .C. There was stuff.

We don't need to get into that. That's not relevant. Going back to the Jews. OK, so the Hebrew language is a

West Semitic language, right? It is related to the languages of the Canaanites. In fact, I don't want to get into like arguments about this because like this like freaks people out.

But a lot of people just call it a Canaanite language because it's so close to the other the languages of the

Phoenicians. Right. Like they're clearly, extremely closely related peoples. They're not like alien peoples at all, which kind of makes sense.

Like you if you read the Bible and you see the genealogy, you know, Abraham and Lot. Right. They're coming out of like the same people.

They're actually I'm going to just say they're basically the same people, but different cultures.

The cultures change, but genetically they're all related to each other. And in fact, obviously.

So Isaac sent Jacob away to, you know, you know, obviously to find his relatives with his relatives.

But like what that's telling you is a lot of of people of the

Israelite what became the Israelite people group because Jacob is Israel himself. But what became that people group, what became that ethnicity were intermarried with all the other ethnicities.

OK, and they weren't necessarily happy with that. But it happens. You know, you know, the people at Shechem wanted to have like, you know, wanted to exchange daughters with the with the

Hebrews. So this is happening all the time. Obviously, you have Ruth, you know, who is ancestor of David and ultimately, you know, in the lineage of Jesus.

Ruth is not originally a Hebrew. Right. She's not an Israelite. You know, you have Bathsheba.

There's a lot. There's a lot. There's a lot. There's no the Edomite, the Hittite. You just open the

Old Testament and you're just like, OK, these people are related to each other. Yeah. OK. Egyptian blood from the. Yes, exactly.

Joseph, Joseph Ephraim and Manasseh's mother, Ephraim and Manasseh's mother. Right. So you have all of this stuff going on.

And so when you say like the genetics of the ancient Hebrews, look, unless we have like a tomb that we can identify culturally and like that, that is doable, you know, like, so, for example, the the

German king, the medieval German King Otto, there was a there was a there was a tomb and people like, oh, this is this is this is

Otto. And his I think his father was Otto as well. But in any case, like this is his tomb. They didn't know. They recently just DNA tested it and they compared it to the other

Otto. And that's his son. OK, that's what happens. You know, like it's like we can do things like that.

We can do things like that. Right. But with the ancient Israelites, archaeology is not quite there yet in terms of identification.

But there's plenty of people in that zone that have been genotyped, that have been sequenced, that have been analyzed in that time period.

OK. And when you read the Bible, it's quite clear that except for and like this is a whole separate issue and I don't want

I don't think you want to get into this because it's interesting, but I don't think it's like the topic of the Philistines. Everything about the

Philistines, we pretty much know they were people from, you know, what would be modern day

Greece, Greece and Crete. There's there's hints in the Bible that they were, you know, peoples.

Yeah. There's hints of the Bible that they were. But there have been like Philistine burials that they've gotten culturally.

They're culturally Philistine. Those people do have Greek ancestry. OK. So that's been confirmed. OK. So that's like one group that's quite distinct because they came from over the sea.

All the other groups, though, like the Phoenicians, the Edomites, you know, these like, you know, desert pastoralists, the

Midianites and the Sinai, they're all genetically adjacent and very, very close to the ancient

Hebrews. Right. And so they're all like useful proxies. The question that you're asking and the question that's asked on the

Internet today today is like, OK, like you see an Ashkenazi Jew, you say blonde Ashkenazi Jew. Do they have any connection to the people in the ancient

Levant? You know, and I can say with a high degree of certainty and I can't say 100 percent because I'm not God. Right. But I can say with a high degree of certainty they almost certainly do.

And we know that because we've looked at the genetics of Ashkenazi Jews and it turns out Ashkenazi Jews are genetically very distinctive.

OK. And how are they distinctive? They look to be a mix of Middle Eastern and European populations.

OK. And a little bit of East Asian, actually, which is super weird. And I don't want to get into that. But, yeah, well,

I mean, look, they've been around all around the world. OK. You know, so it's not surprising. But go to New York and you see you see the marriage patterns.

Right. But anyway, so Ashkenazi Jews, we know their genetics really well. They're one of the most well -studied population, actually, because they have a lot of genetic diseases due to various historical things.

Right. So they've been studied by geneticists even before genomics. And now with genomics, they're extremely studied. And so I can say, yeah,

I mean, it depends on the model. And this is why it was useful for me to talk about that. It depends on the model. But their ancestry is like anywhere from like 20 to like 50 percent

Levantine, which probably means like who would have left the Levant a couple of thousand years ago and had descendants who were

Jews? Would they be Edomites? Probably not. Right. Can I be 100 percent sure that they're not actually descended from Edomites?

No, I can't, because the Edomites are genetically very similar to the Israelites. Like they're intermarrying. They have the same genealogy.

Eventually, you could do it. Eventually, if we found if we found, say, like the Kingdom of Judah, which is when the

Judeans had a very distinct ancestry. If we found burials from Kingdom of Judah, there are some that are being sequenced right now.

They haven't been published. And then like we get really good data. You could potentially do such a fine grained analysis that you see that there are segments of this person's ancestry that are found in modern people.

OK, that would be fascinating. That would be. But I will say this. I will say this. You're going to find them in a lot of local

Muslims, actually, because their ancestors were Christian. And before that, they were Jewish. So that's the that's the other thing.

I want to tell them that. Right. Yeah. Well, I mean, Muslims are like weird. You know, Abu Mazen, like the West Bank.

I mean, I think I mentioned this one. Yes, you did. Yes. He's descended from like a guy who was forcibly converted like 150 years ago.

So he's ethnically Jewish. Right. And what is paternal lineage? So like Yasser Arafat used to call him the Jew, you know.

So there's a lot of people like that in the Near East. Like there's a there's a lot more Jewish ancestry actually from that period in the world than there probably are

Jews, to be honest. So I think where this probably gets confusing is when you overlay the theological layer and say, well, whether are these people descendant of Isaac, because if they're descendant of Isaac, then they're they're distinct and they're the people that are being referred to in the

Bible, because I guess the evidence would be in addition to genetics, they've had their traditions that they've kept and including religious traditions, distinct culture and that kind of thing.

That's always been the evidence. I don't think anyone's ever questioned who the Jews are because they passed down so aggressively.

Probably not the best word, but the cultural continuity has a high degree of fidelity. Right. They very much passed down from one generation to another, the markers of that culture.

So it was always reasonable, I think, for people to believe that, OK, this is the same group. But now it's challenged, essentially.

I think that's the new development. Perhaps it's challenged on the basis of DNA alone.

And then obviously there's slop science that gets put into this that like, how do we even know, like you said, the Edomites were, how do we know they're

Edomites? You're just throwing that out there. You have no evidence to back any of that up with. But but that seems to be the issue.

So you're saying, though, and I think this is helpful, that even though these samples from three to four thousand years ago, they're not telling you exactly what lines and so forth, but they're telling you the regional

DNA, which is similar, that the people who claim to be Jews now and Ashkenazis being the most distant, perhaps because they went to Europe, they do have connections to the

Levant. What about Sephardics? Yeah, yeah, yeah. There were people there who remained in the land, right?

They didn't. Those are not Sephardis. Those are Mizrahi, actually. They're called Mizrahi. Yeah. And so one thing that I don't like,

I haven't like 100 percent confirmed this, but I've been told this. I have some friends who are of this background. OK, I have a friend who is a fourth

Iraqi Jew, three fourths Ashkenazi Israeli, Israeli -American, three fourths.

So this is like not an uncommon combination in Israel. So he's one fourth Iraqi Jewish and three fourths Ashkenazi. And so his grandmother tested before she passed away and she came back 25 percent

Ashkenazi. She came back like 75 percent, like Middle Eastern type stuff. And then it says 25 percent Ashkenazi. Why does it say 25 percent

Ashkenazi? Well, the reason is the model. There's a lot of Ashkenazi customers.

And so you have to make sure that you identify Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry. But I just told you they're a mix of Middle Eastern and European. But that's not what they get.

It says they're 99 percent Ashkenazi. OK. And so what the model is doing is when it finds

Mizrahi Jews, it's like which populations can explain this variation? Well, it turns out part of Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry is connected to Mizrahi Jewish ancestry.

That, to me, is an extremely strong tell that they share common ancestry to the ancient Jews. Now, did they mix with other people?

Yes. Iraqi Jews probably did mix with local populations who are East Syriac speaking at the time.

So it's a related language, probably not as close as Canaanite or whatever to Hebrew.

Actually, I know it's not because it would be Assyrian, Akkadian. But anyway. But, you know, it's a Semitic language and.

It's a little more distant than Arabic, actually, but in any case, sorry, I'm just like thinking, but I'm not. Huh? So Mizrahi Jews.

A new word. Yeah. Which is for me, it is. Yeah. So it's a new word in general. OK. Yeah. Well, because like they just call themselves

Jews in Iraq. They call themselves like, you know, Jews and Persians or Persian Jews. You know, they obviously go back to Cyrus, you know.

Right. Well, that'd be the first captivity. Yeah. So, OK. So let's just like get into like, you know, Jewish taxonomy real quick because it's confusing.

Ashkenazi Jews, they're called Ashkenazi because they're European Jews and they come out of particular liturgical tradition. Like so in there, you know, in the synagogue, there's a particular liturgy.

It's called Ashkenazi liturgy. I think it goes back to Rashi in the Rhineland, 1000 AD. OK. So this is a very distinct culture.

There's a separate liturgy called the Sephardic liturgy, which goes back to medieval Spain, obviously, and Spain Sephard. That's the

Hebrew for Spain or like whatever language they were using. I think actually Aramaic. But in any case, so they're called

Sephardic. What happened is the Sephardic liturgy has spread across much of the Jewish world. The Iraqi Jews used to have their own liturgy in the 18th century, but all the rabbis died during,

I think it was smallpox. And so they replaced them with Sephardic rabbis from Aleppo. And so what happened after the expulsion of 1492 is a lot of the

Sephardic Jews, they went, there's two streams. One went to northern Europe to Netherlands primarily. Another went, another stream went to, well, some of them just lied and said that they were

Catholic. OK. But the ones that migrated went to Anatolia, Syria, Egypt, et cetera,

Morocco. In Morocco, there were native Moroccan Jews that they mixed with, but their culture was very prestigious and they were very well -off group.

And so they ended up culturally assimilating a lot of the other groups with a few exceptions. In Greece, there were two types of Jews before World War II, and there still are, but they're mostly in Israel now.

Romaniot Jews, they're called Roman Jews, they're Greek -speaking Jews. And they go back to, like, if you go to the New Testament, Timothy, right?

They're descended from those Greek Jews. OK. And there are Sephardic Jews that came during the

Ottoman period and they speak Ladino, which is actually Judeo -Spanish. OK. And so these Sephardic Jews are culturally very dominant, and their liturgy is the liturgy that most non -Ashkenazi

Jews use. There's some exceptions, the Yemenites have their own traditions, but all of these groups are actually, like, not very culturally cohesive, even though you call them

Sephardic. Sometimes Mizrahi, which means, like, Eastern Jews, so the Jews from Bukhara, that's Uzbekistan, are distinct from Persian Jews, are distinct from Iraqi Jews, are distinct from Kurdish mountain

Jews, are distinct from Georgian Jews. So there's all these, like, little Jewish populations that speak all these languages originally before they came to Israel.

And they got lumped in by the Ashkenazi ruling elite of Israel. It's like, OK, they're all Sephardic Jews, even though the

Iraqi Jews are very different than Moroccan Jews. I mean, look, you know, so genetically, going back to the genetics, Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry, the

Southern ancestry, like, you know, whatever, like, a lot of it is actually shared with Sephardic Jews from Spain originally.

The Spanish Jews themselves got some Morishad mixture later that changed them. But if you go back a thousand years ago,

Sephardic, you know, the proto -Sephardic and proto -Ashkenazi were very similar. It's only in the last thousand years that the

Ashkenazi in Poland and Eastern Europe mixed with some other people that made them distinct. And then the Sephardic Jews themselves in Spain started intermarrying with the indigenous

Jews of North Africa that had been there since the Roman Empire. And so they both changed. And then when the Sephardic Jews moved into Eastern Mediterranean after the expulsion, they started mixing with the local

Jews. So you have all these genetic mixes. Now, going back to what you're concerned about and what we were talking about, what you off to Sephardic Jews in 23andMe last

I checked, and they might have updated the model. So I have a friend, David Shore, he's a political pundit. He is

Moroccan Jew on both sides, you know, grew up in Miami, and his results were coming back 50 % Ashkenazi.

So obviously, Sephardic Jews are connected to Ashkenazi Jews. There were no Sephardic Jews in their model.

So they're looking for the closest population. The other 50 % was mostly Iberian. And I've looked at David's DNA, there's a little bit of like Moroccan, there's like a 10 %

Moroccan in there, like indigenous, interesting, like local Moroccan. And so all of these

Jewish populations have their own nuances. But there are connections. And the last thing I want to say, you know, I want to put this out there before we drop off.

There's something called the Cohen modal haplotype, which is like the maternal lineage. So since the time of the Roman Empire, Jews have done maternal lineage.

And that's the Roman practice. Okay. But if you look older in the Bible, like Ephraim and Manasseh's mother, she's

Egyptian. Now, the rabbis in the Talmud say, well, actually, she was Jewish, and she was adopted by an Egyptian.

Okay, I don't believe that. They have to say that later. Okay, I'm gonna be honest. But Jews went with paternal ancestry for the

Roman period, right? So the lineage of David, you know, going back all the way to Abraham, you know.

So what you see is the Cohens maintain that. So these are the descendants of Aaron, you know, the priesthoods of Aaron, right?

And so when the temple is back, they're going to do the rituals, right? And Cohens cannot go to funerals. There's like other things, right?

So Cohens are paternally descendant. And it looks like the majority of Cohens in the world, or about half, have the same

Y chromosome. So they have the same paternal lineage. So the paternal lineage has been maintained for over 2000 years, closer to 3000 years, you know.

Yeah, so it's called modal haplotype. Now, there's some Jewish groups. A lot of the Jewish groups in the world actually have this.

Okay. So the Indian Jews, 70 % of the men have the Cohen modal haplotype.

So it's like they were like Cohens that went to India and intermarried. So they look kind of Indian. They kind of look like me, although they look a little

Jewish too, in a way. But anyway, when you look at their Y chromosome, 70 % of them are descended from the

Cohen modal haplotype, which I think is the same for like 30 % of Ashkenazi, whatever. It's different by the different groups. It's way more represented in the

Cohens. It's also found in a lot of Middle Eastern people, which indicates perhaps that they were like descended from converted

Jews. And I believe actually the lineage of Muhammad is the sibling to the Cohen modal haplotype.

So that's a whole different thing. So some of the Christians who live in modern

Israel will say that they've been there since they never left after 70 AD.

They're essentially Jewish in their ethnicity, but they converted to Christianity and they're just still there. What can you tell me?

Can you tell me anything about that? Because I am fascinated by the idea that there were those who did not go into the scatter diaspora.

And I mean, are they still around? It seems plausible to me.

I mean, I think that's true. I mean, I think some people have asked me like, you know, which modern population do you think is going to end up to be genetically the closest to the ancient

Israelites? And I think probably the Christians that live in places like Nazareth and Bethlehem. They probably have the longest

There's arguments like, you know, and like, this is like, this is in politics. And this is like rooted in politics, but like, oh, well, how many people were resettled?

Because, you know, you read the Bible, but also history is how many people resettled into Judea and Samaria and stuff like that, where they come from and all these issues.

But I think like we will probably if I had to put my money on it, the ancient Israelites are genetically closest to Levantine Christians, particularly the

Christians of the Southern Levant, right? Which, okay, that's what you would expect. Now, the Samaritans, they've been there forever.

And the Samaritans are descended from people that are maternally, we're not Israel, we're not Hebrews, but we're paternally

Hebrews. And they are also like, you know, the issue with the Samaritans is they have such a small population until recently that they start to genetic drift, they're starting to look a little weird, no offense.

That's why they're intermarrying with other groups, because their genetic diseases are so bad. But Samaritans are also obviously, they're paternally,

I mean, it's like, that's their tradition, you know, Samaritans are still there. And so they are also related to the ancient

Israelites, because they're descended from the people that didn't leave during the exile. Other people are descended from people that came back.

And then if you read, you know, Nehemiah, if you read those books, you know, they put their

Gentile wives away and all that stuff, right? So there's complicated details there. But I think

Middle Eastern Christians, minorities, like those groups, probably are the closest that we have to the descendants of the ancient

Judeans. Because Judeans, you know, obviously, the 10 northern tribes are gone, you know, so but the

Judeans what you're talking about, there were a lot of them, you know, they're fruitful. Also, there were like, you know, there were a lot of conversions, to be honest, though.

I mean, so this is like complicated, like, you know, like Herod the Great, you know, was from a forcibly converted family during the

Maccabean period. So, you know, in the ancient world, before Christianity, before Christianity became the eventually, basically the only listed public religion, a lot of people went in and out of Jewish identity.

And so there's, there is that ambiguity, where especially the Eastern Mediterranean, and some of the arguments online are like, well, they could be

Anatolian Jews, like Paul, he's from Tarsus, like, what's his genetics? I mean, we don't know, we don't have, you know, his

DNA. It could be that they're like local Anatolian people that intermarried with Jews or became Jewish and vice versa.

That sort of complication is real. But going back to what I'm saying, with the Iraqi Jews, when you look at the genetics, there are, there are connections between most of these very distinct

Jewish populations. What is the, what is the simplest explanation for that? They go back genealogically to people that were

Jewish during the time of the Roman Empire. And who are they descended from? Are they magically descended from a totally different group than the

Israelites of Judea? I mean, come on, like, you gotta be trying hard to like, break that connection.

You have such a bias if you're, yeah. I'm thinking of Peter in Acts when he gets up, I think it's in Acts 3, and he says, men of Israel, right?

I mean, that's what he, he's identifying the group, but at the time he's saying this, the groups in front of him are

Jews from all over from the previous diaspora. They're speaking different dialects.

That's the whole point of the tongues sign and all of this. So they actually probably have mixture in them already.

And he's saying men of Israel to them. So I, I, I don't get hung up on this stuff, but I know there are guys online who get very hung up on it because they want to prove a point, which is that they're basically in the theological perspective that, that God's done with these people, that these people don't have any claims, especially to the land.

That's the political end of it. And I think for the Muslims, especially, it's that, you know, this is basically our land and your invaders who are coming in your colonists.

And maybe this does make a difference, like whether it's a homecoming or whether it's, you know, we're here to colonize a land that we've never been to or something.

Um, we don't ask this question about the United States or Australia or South Africa. Uh, the, the, we maybe, maybe you do.

I don't know. I don't really ask this question. I'm like, well, you, you came to these regions. They were generally, they weren't very populated.

You populated them. History happens. Here we are. Um, but obviously there's

Marxists and so forth today who want to say like, that was all a colonial, uh, stealing process.

We're on a land that we shouldn't have. And you know, it, it, it's sort of the same dynamic

I feel like with this. It's like the same exact thing. It's like, we're saying, let's do a land claim or something. Uh, yeah.

I mean, I will tell you, like, I get involved in like, look, I don't really care about that sort of stuff. Cause it's like, look, Israel is a fair company.

You know what I'm trying to say? I'm not religious. So for me, it's not theological. It's like, it's a nation that's there. What are you going to do about it? This is how it is.

And people are like, well, they're only 10 % Middle Eastern according to this model. But I'm just like, you don't really care.

Like, let's, let's keep it real. You don't really care what the models say. Like you have a political axe to grind.

For me, it's just like, whatever. It's like, ultimately it doesn't, does it really, really matter?

I mean, they're there. What are you going to do about them? Are you going to push them into the sea? Like, you know, based on a genetic test?

No. Genetic test is just like a talking point you're using. That's my opinion. Most of these people don't really care. Um, when

I talk, sometimes I can see their eyes glazing over it. They don't care. I care, but I don't care because it's a political thing.

I care just because like, I'm a geneticist and you're very interested. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think it's been fascinating.

We've actually been now going for about an hour. Um, receive, I, I really appreciate, uh, your kindness and giving us your time and your knowledge on this issue.

And if people want to find out more about your studies in this, they go to receive con .com.

That's your sub stack and they can subscribe there. Yeah. Also I have a, I have a website where I linked to everything like my

Twitter and social media and everything like that. How did you get received? It must've been really early. Well, I've been writing on the internet since 2002.

Wow. Yeah. Let's see. Receive .com. Am I spelling it right? Let's see. Yeah, it did come up.

Wow. Okay. So everything's there. So I just like, I just point to everything there. And if you like, cause I'm on social media and stuff like that, people email me, there's an email there that you could probably find.

And, um, you know, like I'm open to asking questions, obviously. Like, I, you know, I love genetics. I'm like super interested in it.

And, you know, I mean, it's been become relevant like over holidays, obviously. And now with the geopolitical stuff, um, you know, it's obviously only like one dimension, one angle.

I will say that, you know, all this evidence of like, Oh, Jews mixing with other people, people have asked me like, Oh, like how did you react? And they're like, ah, you know, look, we follow the law.

We're Jews. That's really how Jews react. They don't really care. I mean, honestly, like religious Jews don't care.

I mean, do you think that they don't know that don't some, like blonde Hasidic Jew doesn't know that maybe he's not 100 % descended from the people of Israel when he like looks at himself in the mirror.

I mean, they know, you know, I had this friend received growing up, a really good friend of mine. And he, he had red, like the most red hair you've ever seen.

Like it looked like it was colored red. And yeah, he grew a beard when he was getting into his teen years, but his family's

Puerto Rican. So they always claimed a hundred percent. We're Taino. I am a Taino.

And I'm like, dude, yeah, you're not, you are. There's something else going on in there.

Yeah. Like you may have some Taino, but yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Finally, he got into his twenties and finally he sort of is like, you know, you're right.

I wasn't, but that was like such a source of pride. It was difficult, but I was like, dude, red hair. I'm pretty sure

I haven't seen any red hair when he, when he, when he met the Indians of the new world.

Yeah. No, yeah. No one failed. They failed to, to write that down. Although there is a population. And was it the

Southwest of giants with red hair? Supposedly. Yeah. There's all sorts of weird, I mean, this is like off the top of their, you know, the past is actually more interesting and weirder than scientists have thought it would be partly because, you know, science is about like, you know, just keep it boring and simple, you know?

And then it just like turns out weird things and weird populations that were replaced. And I mean, that's a whole different thing with native

Americans. You know, they do not want to talk about their replacements, but they did a lot of replacing actually.

Yeah. Yeah. Lots of wars. So anyway, well received, this has been helpful. I know you're not a

Christian, which of course I want to convert you, but you know, it's up to one. It's up to one person.

That's it. I was about to say, I can't do that. It's gotta be Christ that does that. But this has been very helpful to Christians primarily, which is my audience.

For sure. For sure. For sure. Thanks for explaining that. So yeah. If you guys have follow -up questions and like that, just like at me at Twitter, you know,

I'll try to, I'll try to answer, you know, I mean, I, I look, I love talking about genetics. I love explaining this stuff, obviously.

So it's not like, you know, any, you know, skin off my back. Like I just get to talk about what I really like talking about. Yep. All right.