These findings, reported in Wednesday's edition of the journal Nature, support biblical accounts that date the priesthood to times before the Jewish people were dispersed from their homeland about 2,500 years ago. Karl Skorecki and his colleagues at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa were able to trace the lineage because the Jewish priesthood passes only from fathers to sons. Most of the Y chromosome, the so-called male chromosome, is also passed only from fathers to sons. The researchers analyzed the Y chromosome of 120 lay Jews and 68 Cohanim, or men descended from the Israelite high priests.
All subjects currently live in Israel, North America or Britain.
But whatever their nationality, for example, only 1.5 percent of Cohanim carried a particular genetic marker. In contrast, 18.4 percent of lay Jews carried the same marker. Other researchers in the study came from the University of Toronto, University College London, and the University of Arizona in Tucson.