In addition to the local ancestry from Epipaleolithic/Neolithic people, we found an ancestry related to ancient Iranians that is ubiquitous today in all Middle Easterners (orange component in Figure 1B; Table 1).
Previous studies showed that this ancestry was not present in the Levant during the Neolithic period but appeared in the Bronze Age where ∼50% of the local ancestry was replaced by a population carrying ancient Iran-related ancestry (Lazaridis et al., 2016). We explored whether this ancestry penetrated both the Levant and Arabia at the same time and found that admixture dates mostly followed a North to South cline, with the oldest admixture occurring in the Levant region between 3,300 and 5,900 ya (Table S2), followed by admixture in Arabia (2,000–3,500 ya) and East Africa (2,100–3,300 ya).
These times overlap with the dates for the Bronze Age origin and spread of Semitic languages in the Middle East and East Africa estimated from lexical data (Kitchen et al., 2009; Figure 2). This population potentially introduced the Y chromosome haplogroup J1 into the region (Chiaroni et al., 2010; Lazaridis et al., 2016). The majority of the J1 haplogroup chromosomes in our dataset coalesce around ∼5.6 (95% CI, 4.8–6.5) kya, agreeing with a potential Bronze Age expansion; however, we did find rarer earlier diverged lineages coalescing ∼17 kya (Figure S2). The haplogroup common in Natufians, E1b1b, is also frequent in our dataset, with most lineages coalescing ∼8.3 (7–9.7) kya, though we also found a rare deeply divergent Y chromosome, which coalesces 39 kya (Figure S2).
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