@Angela
I thought I knew my history pretty well, but your taking this to a whole new level. Im going to have to do weeks of research in order to respond to this haha.
When I say "MENA", I am taking not about Neolithic Stuttgart. But, more along the lines of the East Med, West Asian, South West Asian, and South Asian components that are found in Italy, Greece, and Jewish populations at a significant level.
CHG is found all over Europe, as well as the ENF components, these are not what Im talking about, as these are the Bronze age Indo-Europeans I think?.
Then I really don't know what you mean. There's almost nothing left. The "West Asian" cluster was tracking CHG in the calculators before the Kotias and Satsurblia samples were discovered. My point was that some came with the Indo-Europeans, and some may have come separately to southern Europe in the Copper or Bronze Age or even later. Maybe that's how Otzi got some. We won't know until we get ancient genomes. Even when we do, you're going to say the same genetic component isn't MENA if it came in with Indo-Europeans in the third millenium BC through central Europe but it
is MENA if it came 500 or a thousand years later through the southeast?
Southwest Asian was tracking Natufian, some of which was already in Otzi in the Copper Age, although some may have, once again, come later. So what percentage is MENA? Said another way, is all the southwest Asian a later arrival or did some come with Cardial, and shows up in some Neolithic populations but not others? There's no appreciable South Asian in Italy.
You've already said that you don't include EN, as in Barcin, LBK etc. as MENA. So, what's left....Mozabite? Yet, some was present in the Neolithic. Was it all wiped out to be all re-introduced later? How do we know without the appropriate genomes from southeast Europe? Maybe some of the Iranian Neolithic, of which there's not very much anywhere? Was it MENA when it was in the Bell Beaker samples? Maybe a portion of Southwest Asian? The same applies to it as to "Mozabite". East Med is precisely Barcin, Natufian (some of which is incorporated into the Anatolian Neolithic) etc. None of the academic papers talk about it. It's an anthrofora term. ALL "Med" on the calculators comes originally from the eastern Med. The Sardinian samples from the isolated interior were and usually still are the modal for "Mediterranean" in the calculators, and they plot very near the EN farmers who came from...wait for it...the Eastern Mediterranean, i.e. the Levant and Anatolia. They just have some additional WHG.
This is not just me saying some of this...From the creator of the spreadsheet:
"
- It's nice how the old "West Asian/Caucasus" component in Admixture runs based solely on modern populations predicted the CHG population. CHG peaks at some 62-63% in Georgians and Abkhasians, just like "West Asian" did in some of those calculators.
- Also the "Gedrosia" component of those runs predicted nicely the Iran_Neolithic population, both peaking in Brahui.
- Same goes for the "South West Asian" component predicting the Natufian population, both very BedouinB-like.
- Not such a good job with WHG and EHG, where Admixture could never really show what we see with ancient DNA. I don't remember any West Eurasian component peaking around the Urals (it seems that EHG peaks in Udmurts among modern populations). It was broadly a North European/Baltic component that contained both WHG and EHG."
Go back and look at the percentages from the spread sheet.
I'm not, I should add, saying this analysis is the be all and end all or that one should take these percentages as gospel. I'm just trying to show the complexities and how you have to use more than Admixture runs to figure this all out. Most important, we need ancient dna.
As to Jewish ethnogenesis, if I had the answer and could prove it, I'd publish a paper on it. I hate to sound like a broken record, but until we get a first century AD "Jewish" genome from Israel we're really in the dark. As I said above, the Italian populations which have been compared to the Ashkenazim show no IBD sharing. Maybe tomorrow some population that has been overlooked will show it, or a new way to look at IBD will emerge, but for now, despite all the theories that it's Roman conversions in the Classical Era or a group of Italian women from around Tuscany or just north who were absorbed before the Jews went to the Rhineland, it doesn't appear. There's one other remote possibility, I suppose. Perhaps the Philistines were Sardinians or Aegean peoples and they changed the "Jewish" genome of Israel. I don't know. That's totally unsupported speculation that I've seen floating around.
