Goldfoot Genealogy

Her granddaughter took the DNA test to find out her mtDNA. It was W1h, called "Wilma".               

My Bubba, Zlata Goldfoot nee Jermulowsky, was of the W1h mtDNA haplogroup.  The oldest branch of W to develop was W1, which emerged about 15,000 years ago, W1h: was found mostly in Baltic and East Slavic countries, but also in Norway, Denmark, Italy, Pakistan, India (Punjab, Gujarat), Saudi Arabia and among Ashkenazi Jews.

This is the sex chromosome that decides the sex of a baby.  Both men and women carry it, but it is passed onto one's children only by a female.  Thus, a direct line develops from mother to daughter and keeps going.  The original mtDNA was from Eve who had 7 daughters.  W was not one of them.  She was found later by the scientists.                                

She was very very short. Beides that, her legs were broken and never mended right in a Pogrom in Lithuania, making her even shorter.   She had to stand on a chair to reach her 6" tall husband, Nathan Abraham Goldfoot to kiss him.  Zlata had black curly hair and brown eyes.

 In an obvious reference to the Flintstones cartoon series, National Geographic have run a story on the reconstruction of a Neandertal woman they call ‘Wilma’. Her face appears partially on their cover, pictured here; you can see the full-facial view on NG’s site.

National Geographic unveils Wilma, the Neandertal lady in 2008.  I have no idea if they know this skeleton's mtDNA, though it is easier to access than the male line of Ydna, or if they just thought of Fred and Wilma of the Flintstone comics.  

Haplogroup W1h is believed to have originated around 23,900 years ago in Western Asia. This clade has been given the name of Wilma.  It is a Jewish branch.   It is descended from the haplogroup N2. N is not one of the original 7, either. The 7 original daughters were Ursula, Xenia, Helena, Velda, Tara, Kathrine and Jasmine.    

FTDNA say that Haplogroup W is derived from the N superhaplogroup, which dates to approximately 65,000 years ago. The origin of haplogroup W dates to approximately 25,000 years ago, and it is mainly found distributed in west Eurasia (or Europe). It is likely that individuals bearing this lineage participated in the expansion into the bulk of Europe following the Last Glacial Maximum. Future work, including obtaining more samples from central Asia, will further refine the historical distribution of this haplogroup and better determine the role it played in the peopling of Europe.  

Neandertals were with us until about 40,000 years ago.  They most likely went extinct due to assimilation into the modern human genome, great climatic change, disease, or a combination of these factors. 

The commoner European haplogroups, H, U, X V, T, K and J, are dubbed by Prof Bryan Sykes as the Seven Daughters of Eve; Helena, Ursula, Xenia, Velda, Tara, Katrine and Jasmin. The W haplogroup is considerably older than any of these and clan W affectionately refer to the common maternal ancestor as Wilma (Flintstone) and the most informative website is Peter Wade's W Haplogroup Home Page.

Peter Wade's research suggests that Wilma's descendants separated from the N1 clan between 49,000 and 26,800 years ago in what is now known as the Punjab region of north west India and northern Pakistan. Some of her descendants moved east towards Asia and others migrated west into Europe.

By the onset of the last ice age around 18,000 years ago the European Wilmas, together with people of haplogroups U7 and R2 were confined to the ice-age refuge in what is now Turkey. When global temperatures rose again around 14,000 years ago, these Wilmas continued to migrate west and haplogroup W is now found in low numbers right across Europe as far west as Ireland.   

So Zlata's W1h clade could have started off from Turkey or even an area in Pakistan and migrated into Poland/Lithuania.                           

Haplogroup N is a human mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) clade. A macrohaplogroup, its descendant lineages are distributed across many continents. Like its sibling macrohaplogroup M, macrohaplogroup N is a descendant of the haplogroup L3.  All mtDNA haplogroups found outside of Africa are descendants of either haplogroup N or its sibling haplogroup M. M and N are the signature maternal haplogroups that define the theory of the recent African origin of modern humans and subsequent early human migrations around the world. The global distribution of haplogroups N and M indicates that there was likely at least one major prehistoric migration of humans out of Africa, with both N and M later evolving outside the continent.

 Haplogroup W is found in Europe, Western Asia, and South Asia. It is widely distributed at low frequencies, with a high concentration in Northern Pakistan. Haplogroup W is also found in the Maghreb among Algerians (1.08%-3.23%) and in Siberia among Yakuts (6/423 = 1.42%).  Additionally, the clade has been observed among ancient Egyptian mummies excavated at the Abusir el-Meleq archaeological site in Middle Egypt, which date from the Ptolemaic Kingdom.

Haplogroup W is particularly common in the eastern half of Europe, in the North Caucasus, in Central Asia, in Iran and in the north-west of the Indian subcontinent. In Europe, the maximum frequencies of W are observed in Finland (9.5%), Hungary (5%), Latvia (4%), Macedonia (4%) and Belarus (3.5%, but over 5% if we exclude the south). Haplogroup W is also well represented among some ethnicities of the North Caucasus, such as the Karachay-Balkars (8%), Avars (8%), Svans (8%) and Adyghe-Kabardin (5%).

In Asia, haplogroup W is most common among the northern Pakistani (8%), Tajiks (6%), northwest Indians (5%) and Iranians (3.5%), but is also found around 1.5% among the Uzbeks, Turkmens and Kazakhs, and at trace frequencies (< 0.5%) among many North Asian ethnic groups (Tuva, Yakuts, Buryats, Mongolians, Koreans, Japanese).

Resource:

https://creation.com/national-geographic-unveils-wilma-the-neandertal-lady

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_W_(mtDNA)

The Seven Daughters of Eve by Bryan Sykes-The Science that reveals our genetic ancestry

http://paternoster.orpheusweb.co.uk/famhistory/sleator/brenda_mdna.htm

Preserving Our Litvak Heritage-a history of 31 Jewish communities in Lithuania, byJosef Rosin