Questions concerning the amount of "WHG" in EEF keep being asked and again. For suggesting that it is a distraction in terms of the discussion of the peopling of Europe, a respected, published author has been attacked on another forum.
I will here speak only for myself. I get the distinct feeling at times that this obsession with quantifying the amount of "WHG" in EEF may, in some people, stem from an attempt to nail down exactly how "European" a group or a person is by taking that figure and adding it to the "regular" WHG in the figures given for modern populations in Lazaridis et al. Apparently, ANE is considered "European" enough not to raise concern, despite its eastern affinities. The short answer is that we are all 100% European, whether we come from France, or Finland, or southern Italy, and whether we can be modeled best with two or three of these ancestral EEF/WHG/ANE populations.
That may well be true but there is also another more fundamental historical reason for getting to the bottom of it imo i.e the two distinct paths East and West Asia took caused imo by the East Asian farmer expansion being more total.
The dominant theory until very recently was European replacement by neolithic farmers and that appears not to be the case probably (again imo) because the process was interrupted by the I-E. So East Asia had an almost complete farmer expansion (apart from a few refuge zones) whereas in Europe it was stalled. I'd say that was possibly quite a big deal in historical terms. For example the earlier spread of civilization in East Asia and southern Europe.
edit:
After reading through the rest of the comments
EEF is defined as 44% plus or minus 10% "Basal Eurasian". (for some reason I keep remembering it as 50 +/- 10)
Combining Basal and WHG this way and then comparing the composite to WHG separately, conceptually fits the neolithic expansion model better but when you separate the two components then it looks more like mesolithic survival so which one it actually is matters. If it's mesolithic survival (not necessarily directly but by cousin) then how come given the extent of the initial farmer expansion? The I-E are the most likely answer to how come but either way if the farmer expansion into Europe was stalled in the north did the slower arrival of farming (crop-centric version as opposed to herding version) to at least northern and central Europe have any significant consequences? I'd say the answer is likelyto be yes.
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"Basal Eurasian peaks among Arabs. Israeli Beduins..."
If it's Bedouin then it's possibly so high because the desert was a refuge so that component could have originally been much more widespread i.e. Basal may have been in some parts of Europe (south and west) before the farmers as well as coming with the farmers.
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"The import of the Lazaridis paper is that there were three migrations into Europe [my notes in brackets]:
1. From the Asian crossroads/Middle East in the Palaeolithic. [mtDNA U and Y-DNA IJ and F]
2. From the Middle Eastern Neolithic heartland in the Neolithic. [mtDNA U3, H, I, J, V etc and Y-DNA G, with a bit of E]
3. From the Asian steppe in the Copper Age. [Y-DNA R]"
(Jean Manco)
The following are just guesses for my own entertainment but personally I think E is likely to be or be connected to Basal, with a widespread coastal distribution including north Africa, southern and western Europe and Arabia and earlier than G - whether before or after IJ I guess time will tell although my gut feel is IJ are both the product of Basal + archaics.
I also think the fertile crescent was likely a big swamp before farmers drained it so the spread of neolithic farming was more likely from the surrounding highlands or possibly the coast.
There was probably a significant geographic / climactic feature that split R1b and R1a.