I don't understand this "Near East" aversion, honestly. The Near East and Europe are
very different in terms of culture and civilization, but there is a huge overlap in terms of genes.
This is a chart from Haak et al 2015:
All Europeans except those from far eastern Europe and the Baltic areas are over 50% EN. That's EN not EEF.
The English have 63.8% of it, the Czechs 62.2%, the Norwegians 63.8% (the Germans probably somewhere around there but maybe higher in the south), the French 75.9%. The northern strip of Spain has 80.6%. The rest of Spain has 73.3% but then they needed 12.7% Bedouin to get a good fit, and, as that was used as a proxy for the early farmers in Lazardis et al, is mostly EN too, just with some small trace SSA. I don't know where the NA alleles go, but probably some goes into WHG, some into EN, or maybe the rest of it goes into Bedouin. The northern Italians look like the northern Spanish more or less, the Sicilians like most of the Spaniards but with some more Bedouin, and the Tuscans are in between. The difference between northern Europe and southern Europe in terms of EN seems to be that northern Europe has about 63% and southern Europe has around 80% or more. The Europe that created the Roman and Greek civilizations, the Renaissance, both the Italian one and the northern one, the later Agricultural Revolution, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and on and on, was a Europe composed of people who were at least 60% EN (and some 80%) in terms of genetics.
So do some Europeans truly despise over half of their ancestry? Really? So there's going to be some sort of competition, and whoever has less of it is somehow better? Better in what way? Certainly not in terms of accomplishments or contributions to European Civilization. At least for young American hobbyists, don't they mandate a year long course in Western Civilization anymore?
Or is the issue when it came? Some of it came from the early EEF farmers, some of it came with Yamnaya migrations, some of it came perhaps in other Bronze Age migrations, or, God forbid, in the Iron Age. I don't know what makes a source with the Phoenicians so objectionable when it's the same alleles that came with Bronze Age migrations from the steppe, just not mixed with EHG. Is it just the association of the Phoencians with Semitic languages? Of course, it's probably the trace SSA that is left from the Moorish invasions that makes that invasion so unthinkable.
Honestly, if people can't handle what the genetic data shows and incorporate it into their world view and sense of identity then maybe they just shouldn't bother to be involved at all. It's the same thing I tell anyone who gets their own genome tested. If you don't think you could handle certain results, don't test.
