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I am an ethnoreligious Maronite Catholic from the Syrian Coast, with mtDNA haplogroup H4a. My father is being tested for his Y-haplogroup right now, but it is not back yet, so I have nothing to go on besides what I know about my family history and what I have read. Excluding a single cousin who I share a maternal line with, the only matches I have with H4a[...etc...] mtDNA are all of European descent on their mother's side, i.e. mixed. The only thing I know about any family outside of Syria is that a few hundred years ago, a Maronite man from Cyprus came back and married one of my great-great-etc-etc grandmothers, but again, that does not explain it.
On my 23andMe test I show up as "100% Levantine," so any descent in the last ~8 generations is for the most part ruled out. On modelling methods like G25 I have a very weird fit on everything, but after inspecting that for a bit I think it would have nothing to do with this and instead is just me being more Anatolian-shifted than a Lebanese Maronite; indeed, I graph somewhere between modern Lebanese Christians and some ancient Anatolian populations.
As for the mtDNA haplogroup, I will be honest- I have tried looking into as many options as I can to find a reasonable explanation for this, but I am always led back to this haha. I am mostly posting this because I am not that experienced in haplogroups et cetera, I am more so interested in actual genotypes, so if you know more about this than I do and see anything, please tell me about it, I would love to know. I figured posting this on a forum with a higher European history interested population would be helpful regardless for this European-dominated haplogroup.
I think it is pretty obvious that many of the commonly thrown-about arguments like "descent from enslaved European women" would be very odd to make in this case. I know that there is a recorded occurance of H4a1 in 7th century BC Egypt, but I do not seem to fit into that either even as I tried to look a little more into the sequence I have myself.
Thus... this kind of crackpot theory that my family likes to claim. I have made this map aligning what I know about my family history with crusader sites in the region. Sorry for how it looks, I was mostly making it for myself but I ended up wanting to share. Here are the translations for the captions:
1. Magenta - Historical Crusader Site
2. Arrow pointing up --> Antioch, Maronite 'homeland'
3. Arrow pointing down --> Mount Lebanon
4. To big purple circle --> "In the circle since maybe 1000"
5. To smaller blue circles --> "In the blue circles - records of my family in these regions, the oldest one confirmed maybe 1500 (for both areas)"
6. To the orange blob --> "Maybe ancestors, not confirmed"
I do of course acknowledge there are other possibilities, about a trillion of them really, yet so many people suggest this I'm starting to subconsciously believe it I guess. Honestly, it seems like a stretch even to me, but...there were some women who came during the Crusades, and it's not unreasonable I think to assume that at least some assimilated into the local Maronite Catholic population over time, even if they don't have a real trace on the autosomal results of the region.
Obviously there is no way to know for sure, but I may as well sharpen my Occam's razor while I am here. Thank you very much my friends and I would like to hear if you have any ideas about this, even if it is just laughing because I may have boxed myself into a corner and am missing something much more clear.
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