The Samaritans part 1
The Samaritans belong to an ethnoreligious group that worships the Abrahamic deity situated today in mostly the West Bank and Israel. They originate in Samaria (featured in the book of Hosea of the Old Testament) in the Kingdom of Israel, and the Kingdom of Judah to the south. Samaritans as a people claim descent from the Israeli tribes, specifically the tibes of: Ephraim, Manasseh, and the priestly tribe of Levi. The earliest inscriptions of this group self-identifying themselves as Samaritans dates back to around 150BCE to 50BCE and the inscriptions show them referring to themselves as: Bene Israel or translated: Children of Israel. In Samaritan hebrew, they call themselves B'nai Israel or Shamerim which means "guardians" or "watchers" in a loose translation. In Arabic they are known as al-Sāmiriyyūn. What's interesting about Shamerim and al-Sāmiriyyūn are both cognates to Šomerim which in biblical hebrew, means "to guard".
The origins of the Samaritans dates back to as early as the 6th century BCE, and as late as the 3rd century BCE. Samaritans claim that their schism and eventual split from the southern israeli tribes to be around the time of Eli, who they felt to be a false prophet.
Orthodox Jewish Tradition claims a different story and base their claims on the Talmud, Josephus's writings, the Hebrew bible, and other contemptorary writers of the time. In their tradition, Samaritans as a people and religious group began around the time of the Babylonian captivity, and were called Cuthites after the city of Kutha, in what is modern day Iraq, and that they came from Kutha.
In any case, the rabbis who lived and wrote the Mishnah found it nearly impossible to draw a distinction between the two groups. Attempts around that time to date the schism vary greatly from 70BCE to 130BCE. It is now generally accepted by modern Rabbis and Jews that the schism took place some time in the Hasmonean period (Second Temple era).
Contemporary scholars are mostly in agreement that deportations and exiles took place in the region before AND after the Assyrian conquest of the ancient Israeli kingdoms in the 700'sBCE. Archaeological evidence from these areas show that mass depopulation took place (numerous sites are abandoned or destroyed, or feature a long gap in occupancy.) in the 8th century BCE. The tribes: Reuben, Gad, Dan, and Naphtali disappear fully and are never mentioned again. However, some scholars point to the region of Samaria where there is more of a mixed bag. Some sites are destroyed or abandoned, but cities like Megiddo and Samaria remain largely intact, with other sites showing a continuity of occupancy. The Assyrians texts claim that they exiled upwards of 30,000 people in all, which still leaves many ancient israeli's in the area still. It is now estimated that only around 10% of the population of Samaria were actually deported. This means that the local population was simply diminished, but not replaced.
Biblical evidence also points toward a simple diminished population, with the Book of Chronicles saying that King Hezekiah of Judah invited five tribes to celebrate Passover in Jerusalem to celebrate Passover AFTER the "destruction" of the kingdom of Israel. Furthermore, the Jewish scholar Shemaryahu Talmon supported the Samaritans stance, citing 2 Kings 17:24 was meant to ostracize the Samaritans from the Israelites who returned from their Babylonian exile. Furthermore, he also suggested that 2 Chronicles 30:1 could be interpreted to: the tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh remaining in Israel after the banishment. There are other scholars who support this.
Genetic studies done throughout the 1900s up to today show some interesting things. Demographic studies were taken in the 1960s that showed the majority of Samaritans dating back up to 13 generations showed four main lineages. 1.The priestly Cohen lineage from the tribe of Levi. 2.The Tsedakah/Sadaqa lineage, claiming descent from the tribe of Manasseh, 3.The Joshua-Marhiv lineage, claiming descent from the tribe of Ephraim, 4.The Danafi lineage, claiming descent from the tribe of Ephraim. Even more recent genetic studies show that three of the four lineages have haplogroup J, and the priestly cohen lineage has the haplogroup E. a 2004 study compared genetic testing of the Samaritans to modern Israeli populations and concluded that there was enough component material to suggest and affirm a common ancestry. It was also concluded that the Y chromosome of the modern Jewish population and the Samaritan population had more of an affinity to each other than their geographical neighbors the Palestinians. Autosomal DNA also shows us that the Samaritans cluster well with other Levantine populations and resemble that of levantine groups in terms of admixture. However, Samaritans do not have much of the sub-saharan dna found in their Arabian neighbors.