@article {309074,
	title = {A substantial prehistoric European ancestry amongst Ashkenazi maternal lineages.},
	journal = {Nat Commun},
	volume = {4},
	year = {2013},
	note = {http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2013/131008/ncomms3543/full/ncomms3543.html},
	month = {2013},
	pages = {2543},
	abstract = {<p>The origins of Ashkenazi Jews remain highly controversial. Like Judaism, mitochondrial DNA is passed along the maternal line. Its variation in the Ashkenazim is highly distinctive, with four major and numerous minor founders. However, due to their rarity in the general population, these founders have been difficult to trace to a source. Here we show that all four major founders, ~40\% of Ashkenazi mtDNA variation, have ancestry in prehistoric Europe, rather than the Near East or Caucasus. Furthermore, most of the remaining minor founders share a similar deep European ancestry. Thus the great majority of Ashkenazi maternal lineages were not brought from the Levant, as commonly supposed, nor recruited in the Caucasus, as sometimes suggested, but assimilated within Europe. These results point to a significant role for the conversion of women in the formation of Ashkenazi communities, and provide the foundation for a detailed reconstruction of Ashkenazi genealogical history.</p>},
	keywords = {Bayes Theorem, DNA, Mitochondrial, Europe, Female, Founder Effect, Genealogy and Heraldry, Genome, Mitochondrial, Haplotypes, History, 15th Century, History, Ancient, History, Medieval, Humans, Inheritance Patterns, Jews, Male, Phylogeny, Phylogeography},
	issn = {2041-1723},
	doi = {10.1038/ncomms3543},
	url = {http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24104924},
	author = {Costa, Marta D and Pereira, Joana B and Pala, Maria and Fernandes, Ver{\'o}nica and Olivieri, Anna and Achilli, Alessandro and Perego, Ugo A and Rychkov, Sergei and Naumova, Oksana and Hatina, Ji{\v r}i and Woodward, Scott R and Eng, Ken Khong and Macaulay, Vincent and Carr, Martin and Soares, Pedro and Pereira, Lu{\'\i}sa and Richards, Martin B}
}
