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It was discovered, not so long ago, that the Lusitanians, ancestors of the Portuguese, owned two unique genes that are not found anywhere else in the world, except in Portugal.
• A25-BIS-DR2
• A26-B38-DR13
A26-B38-DR13 is the most ancient gene of mankind and A25-BIS-DR2 is a very rare one also found only in Portugal and its descendants abroad.
This was a discovery which brought a lot of attention in the world of genetics and racial studies. According to it, it was able to prove the Portuguese have the oldest genetic code in the world.
Some time ago, I made a post about the genetical differences between the Portuguese and the Mediterraneans from a similar study. I’ll take the opportunity to again make a reference to the article which talks about it and its conclusions.
In short words, it proves the Portuguese are not of Mediterranean origin:
“A33B14-DR1 is found in Mediterraneans, but not in Basques or Portuguese, reflecting the relative lack of contact with Mediterraneans common to both Basques and Portuguese; these latter groups also share one of the highest frequencies of the Rh phenotype. A25B18-DR15 is only found in Portugal among Europeans; it is also observed in white North Americans and in Brazilians (Imanishi et al. 1992b). It is probably a marker for the ancient Portuguese people in Europe and for people of Portuguese descent in America. A26-B38-DR13 is a specific Portuguese marker not found in any other part of the world, and it probably existed in the first western Iberians. Therefore, Portuguese is a relatively distinct population among Iberians according to our HLA data. They seem not to have had a significant contribution to their genetic pool from paleo-North Africans (A30-B18) and Mediterraneans (A33-B14) on the one hand, and on the other hand they show two specific haplotypes, A25-B18-DR2 and A26-B38DR13. Portuguese people have also maintained a certain degree of cultural and ethnic-specific characteristics since ancient times. Portuguese and Basques do not show the Mediterranean A33-B14-DR1 haplotype, suggesting a lower admixture with Mediterraneans; Spaniards and Algerians do have this haplotype in a relatively high frequency, indicating a more extensive Mediterranean genetic influence. The paleo-North African haplotype A30-B18-DR3 present in Basques, Algerians, and Spaniards is not found in Portuguese either. The Portuguese have a characteristic unique among world populations: a high frequency of HLA-A25-B18-DR15 and A26-B38-DR13, which may reflect a still detectable founder effect coming from ancient Portuguese.”
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