Doug Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> You mean this?
>
Quote:
> When the same museum had the Searching for Ancient
> Egypt exhibit in 1999-2000, I prepared a statement
> for the Museum to give to the press in case they
> had a similar incident. It was factual, backed up
> with actual biological and DNA studies about
> ancient Egyptians, and filled with citations. As I
> recall, they only had one complaint and once the
> press release was given, not a word more was
> heard.
>
> That is not a genetic study.
>
> The genetic markers most prevalent in Egypt are
> the African marker E3, E3b, J and F.


The Arredi paper your cite does not support the contentions you make.

For example figure 3 the genetic distance between N-Egypt,S-Egypt to the Near East is much less than the genetic distance between egypt and sub-Saharan Africa. and the conclusion presents a different picture with the population coming from the Near East:

"Early Neolithic sites are documented in the eastern part of North Africa and later ones in the west, which would be compatible with an east-to-west movement at this time, and this is also the case for the Arab expansion. Historical records of the Arab conquest, however, suggest that its demographic impact must have been limited (McEvedy 1980). In addition, genetic evidence shows that E3b2 is rare in the Middle East (Semino et al. 2004), making the Arabs an unlikely source for this frequent North African lineage. Parallel analyses between North Africa and Southern Europe have revealed strikingly similar patterns of Y chromosome variation which would support a scenario in which the Neolithic expansion, originating in the Middle East branched into two flows separated by the geographical barrier of the Mediterranean Sea. Indeed, as in North Africa, Y-chromosome variability in Southern Europe is clinal, gene diversity decreases from east to west, and genetic distances between North Africa and Southern Europe increase in a regular fashion from the Middle East toward the west (results not shown). Under the hypothesis of a Neolithic demic expansion from the Middle East, the likely origin of E3b in East Africa could indicate either a local contribution to the North African Neolithic transition (Barker 2003) or an earlier migration into the Fertile Crescent, preceding the expansion back into Africa.



In conclusion, we propose that the Y-chromosomal genetic structure observed in North Africa is mainly the result of an expansion of early food-producing societies. Moreover, following Arioti and Oxby (1997), we speculate that the economy of those societies relied initially more on herding than on agriculture, because pastoral economies probably supported lower numbers of individuals, thus favoring genetic drift, and showed more mobility than agriculturalists, thus allowing gene flow. Some authors believe that languages families are unlikely to be >10 KY old and that their diffusion was associated with the diffusion of agriculture (Diamond and Bellwood 2003). Since most of the languages spoken in North Africa and in nearby parts of Asia belong to the Afro-Asiatic family (Ruhlen 1991), this expansion could have involved people speaking a proto–Afro-Asiatic language. These people could have carried, among others, the E3b and J lineages, after which the M81 mutation arose within North Africa and expanded along with the Neolithic population into an environment containing few humans."

Acknowledgments

Bernard