Genetic and Cultural Differences between Jews and Greeks

I wasn't aware the there was SSA in Natufians. Weren't they entirely ydna E? I associate ydna E with Ancient North Africans who admixed into Natufians and SSA not vice versa.

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature19310

Ratchet_Fan: Your are correct, based on the evidence we have to date. See paper linked. I think of the 5 Ancient Natufians, 3 were E1b1 and 2 were CT.

Here is a direct quote:

"However, no affinity of Natufians to sub-Saharan Africans is evident in our genome-wide analysis, as present-day sub-Saharan Africans do not share more alleles with Natufians than with other ancient Eurasians (Extended Data Table 1). (We could not test for a link to present-day North Africans, who owe most of their ancestry to back-migration from Eurasia25,26.) "
 
Good paper to read
On autosomal of yemenites
In different yemen provinces
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/749341v1
Modern yemenites have significant african admixture 15-20% except one group there....:unsure:
But 80% of there total genome can still be modeled as lebanese bronze age :cool-v:

There's a big difference between the native Yemenites and the non-native and admixed Yemenites. You can even notice that very noticeably in their looks.
 
I haven't detected ancient SSA admix in Mahri (apparently neither Ygorcs). I used West and East SSAs.

I didn't either, except a minor Ethiopian-like (Pastoral Neolithic East African) admixture in some Yemeni groups...but those may be just some selected samples that had the least African admixture and were thought to represent the pre-admixture indigenous population of the country better.
 
We have some faint idea of how Natufian faces were like because of their interesting practice of making mortuary masks using clay on the face of individuals. Not very realistic, obviously, but much better than the zero material evidence we have for other Mesolithic people:

a5af018edd8da3bb5dd8136e0999c333.jpg
 
One thing that always catches my attention is that the usual genetic ancestry models for West Eurasians that work really well for most populations of that region, yielding results with less than 2-3% genetic distance, always yield only moderately acceptable results that clearly seem to be missing something in two regions: in Northeastern Europe (Baltic countries, Finland, Russia, Belarus), and in the Arabian peninsula. No model with more ancient DNA samples yields results lower than 4-6%. Are we perhaps missing some unsampled population closely related but not nearly identical to the key samples we already know and use, or are Arabians and Northeastern Europeans simply extremely drifted and derived from a very tiny and bottlenecked ancient population that boomed only in the last few millennia?

By the way, in my models and also in some admixture graphs I've seen in studies I don't think there is any particularly high similarity between Yemenites and BA Levantines. They have far less ANF and CHG/Iran_N than almost all BA Levantine samples:

Target
Distance
Dinka
Esan_Nigeria
GEO_CHG
Hadza
IRN_Ganj_Dareh_N
KEN_Pastoral_N
Levant_Natufian
MAR_EN
RUS_Karelia_HG
Simulated_AASI
TUR_Barcin_N
TZA_Pemba_600BP
Yemenite_Mahra:Y311
0.06182714
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
25.6
0.0
67.4
0.0
0.0
0.0
7.0
0.0
Yemenite_Mahra:Y312
0.06017755
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
19.6
0.0
72.8
0.0
0.0
0.0
7.6
0.0
Yemenite_Mahra:Y313
0.04637301
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
26.2
0.0
63.6
0.0
0.0
0.0
10.2
0.0
Yemenite_Mahra:Y325
0.06031077
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
20.6
0.0
69.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
10.4
0.0
Yemenite_Mahra:Y326
0.04599413
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
22.2
0.0
67.8
0.0
0.0
0.0
10.0
0.0
Yemenite_Mahra:Y330
0.06367498
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
20.6
0.0
66.8
0.0
0.0
0.0
12.6
0.0
Yemenite_Mahra:Y341
0.06123139
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
20.2
0.0
71.4
0.0
0.0
0.0
8.4
0.0
Yemenite_Mahra:Y345
0.04496280
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
22.2
0.0
70.6
0.0
0.0
0.0
7.2
0.0
Yemenite_Mahra:Y349
0.04171710
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
26.4
0.0
66.6
0.0
0.0
0.0
7.0
0.0
Levant_Hazor_MLBA:I3832
0.05151368
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
23.2
0.0
34.4
0.0
0.0
0.0
42.4
0.0
Levant_Hazor_MLBA:I3965
0.04135103
0.0
0.0
10.8
0.0
23.2
0.0
29.4
0.0
0.0
0.0
36.6
0.0
Levant_Hazor_MLBA:I3966
0.03789154
0.0
0.0
8.6
0.0
26.4
0.0
29.6
0.0
0.0
0.0
35.4
0.0
Levant_Ashkelon_LBA:ASH29
0.04992355
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
31.2
0.0
30.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
38.8
0.0
Levant_Ashkelon_LBA:ASH33
0.05245753
0.0
0.0
1.8
0.0
32.0
0.0
23.8
0.0
0.0
0.0
42.4
0.0
Levant_Ashkelon_LBA:ASH34
0.03906299
0.0
0.0
7.0
0.0
27.6
0.0
19.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
46.4
0.0
Average
0.05056461
0.0
0.0
1.9
0.0
24.5
0.0
52.1
0.0
0.0
0.0
21.5
0.0
 
There's a big difference between the native Yemenites and the non-native and admixed Yemenites. You can even notice that very noticeably in their looks.
Yeah, the paper kingjohn posted confirms the Mahra would have no SSA.

As for your modeling, I guess I got slightly different results because I used Anatolian Epipaleo rather than Barcin Neo, and also Iran Meso (Hotu) rather than Iran Neo. My goal was isolating Natufian the maximum as possible, and both Barcin N and Iran N may score some Natufian. Especially the former. Doing so (using AHG and Iran Meso), the Natufian-like contribution for Mahra gets higher.
 
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One thing that always catches my attention is that the usual genetic ancestry models for West Eurasians that work really well for most populations of that region, yielding results with less than 2-3% genetic distance, always yield only moderately acceptable results that clearly seem to be missing something in two regions: in Northeastern Europe (Baltic countries, Finland, Russia, Belarus), and in the Arabian peninsula. No model with more ancient DNA samples yields results lower than 4-6%. Are we perhaps missing some unsampled population closely related but not nearly identical to the key samples we already know and use, or are Arabians and Northeastern Europeans simply extremely drifted and derived from a very tiny and bottlenecked ancient population that boomed only in the last few millennia?

By the way, in my models and also in some admixture graphs I've seen in studies I don't think there is any particularly high similarity between Yemenites and BA Levantines. They have far less ANF and CHG/Iran_N than almost all BA Levantine samples:

TargetDistanceDinkaEsan_NigeriaGEO_CHGHadzaIRN_Ganj_Dareh_NKEN_Pastoral_NLevant_NatufianMAR_ENRUS_Karelia_HGSimulated_AASITUR_Barcin_NTZA_Pemba_600BP
Yemenite_Mahra:Y3110.061827140.00.00.00.025.60.067.40.00.00.07.00.0
Yemenite_Mahra:Y3120.060177550.00.00.00.019.60.072.80.00.00.07.60.0
Yemenite_Mahra:Y3130.046373010.00.00.00.026.20.063.60.00.00.010.20.0
Yemenite_Mahra:Y3250.060310770.00.00.00.020.60.069.00.00.00.010.40.0
Yemenite_Mahra:Y3260.045994130.00.00.00.022.20.067.80.00.00.010.00.0
Yemenite_Mahra:Y3300.063674980.00.00.00.020.60.066.80.00.00.012.60.0
Yemenite_Mahra:Y3410.061231390.00.00.00.020.20.071.40.00.00.08.40.0
Yemenite_Mahra:Y3450.044962800.00.00.00.022.20.070.60.00.00.07.20.0
Yemenite_Mahra:Y3490.041717100.00.00.00.026.40.066.60.00.00.07.00.0
Levant_Hazor_MLBA:I38320.051513680.00.00.00.023.20.034.40.00.00.042.40.0
Levant_Hazor_MLBA:I39650.041351030.00.010.80.023.20.029.40.00.00.036.60.0
Levant_Hazor_MLBA:I39660.037891540.00.08.60.026.40.029.60.00.00.035.40.0
Levant_Ashkelon_LBA:ASH290.049923550.00.00.00.031.20.030.00.00.00.038.80.0
Levant_Ashkelon_LBA:ASH330.052457530.00.01.80.032.00.023.80.00.00.042.40.0
Levant_Ashkelon_LBA:ASH340.039062990.00.07.00.027.60.019.00.00.00.046.40.0
Average0.050564610.00.01.90.024.50.052.10.00.00.021.50.0

YGORCS: There was a paper looking at ancient ancient SSA DNA that was published earlier this year and it notes that there are 3,500 Ancient West Eurasian samples vs. only 85 Ancient SSA samples, although as DNA technology gets better, they appear recently to be getting more and more ancient DNA samples from parts of the world where DNA in the past has been hard to sequence.

Of those 3,500 ancient DNA samples, how many are from what different source populations? Is there any breakdown on say how many ancient Anatolian Neolithic samples vs. how many WHG vs. EHG or how many ancient Iberian samples vs. How many ancient Scandanavian samples, etc?
 
We have some faint idea of how Natufian faces were like because of their interesting practice of making mortuary masks using clay on the face of individuals. Not very realistic, obviously, but much better than the zero material evidence we have for other Mesolithic people:

a5af018edd8da3bb5dd8136e0999c333.jpg

Doesn't look "robust" like, as in how the Mesolithic people of Europe looked. On the other hand the climates were completely different, so different selection processes were at work. They also had been sedentary and eating a lot of grain for thousands of years already.

Looks like long, narrow nose, relatively small mouth, no protruding eye brow ridges, perhaps high cheekbones, wide face with a strong jaw, and oval eyes.

I think they must have been lovely.

Wait a minute. Something just occurred to me. Perhaps approximating this face if it were idealized? Egyptians had a lot of Natufian.

c5be6e2c1b1038a2a9371cbffb26c5cc.jpg


Caveat is this information comes from the internet, but this child is labeled a Maara.

2edmavt.jpg
 
Doesn't look "robust" like, as in how the Mesolithic people of Europe looked. On the other hand the climates were completely different, so different selection processes were at work. They also had been sedentary and eating a lot of grain for thousands of years already.

Looks like long, narrow nose, relatively small mouth, no protruding eye brow ridges, perhaps high cheekbones, wide face with a strong jaw, and oval eyes.

I think they must have been lovely.

Wait a minute. Something just occurred to me. Perhaps approximating this face if it were idealized? Egyptians had a lot of Natufian.

c5be6e2c1b1038a2a9371cbffb26c5cc.jpg


Caveat is this information comes from the internet, but this child is labeled a Maara.

2edmavt.jpg


i am sorry to destroy the party angela
but this is not natuffian practice it is later in time
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastered_human_skulls

in PPNB

https://blog.britishmuseum.org/facing-the-past-the-jericho-skull/



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastered_human_skulls#/media/File:Human_skull_from_Beisamoun.JPG
 
Thanks for this correction, @kingjohn, though I still think that's the closest we might get to the Natufian look, since PPNB was still about 50-60% Natufian, and those features also look reasonably similar to what we see in Egyptian artworks (a very Natufian-rich people) and some modern Yemeni (though they usually have more "crooked" nose, perhaps a sign of the significant ~20-25% CHG/Iran_N?).

Angela's interesting observation that Nefertiti's bust has some similarities with that plastered mortuary mask from the PPNB Levant seems really apt for me, because if you apply a slightly higher (0.25x) genetic distance in a G25 model, a move that tends to concentrate more ancestry in the few most proximate sources, ancient Egyptians appear very much Levant_PPNB with significant extra Natufian + Barcin_N added, which is anyway the same main mixture of Levant_PPNB:

Target
Distance | ADC: 0.25x
GEO_CHG
IRN_Ganj_Dareh_N
KEN_Early_Pastoral_N
KEN_IA_Deloraine
Levant_Natufian
Levant_PPNB
TUR_Barcin_N
Levant_Beirut_IAIII_Egyptian:SFI-43
0.02983590
9.6
8.0
5.4
0.0
10.0
67.0
0.0
Levant_Beirut_IAIII_Egyptian:SFI-44
0.03260384
11.0
10.0
5.8
0.0
0.0
59.8
13.4
EGY_Hellenistic:JK2888
0.04759368
2.8
12.2
4.4
0.0
4.4
68.4
7.8
EGY_Late_Period:JK2134
0.03785227
11.2
2.4
5.0
0.0
0.0
78.0
3.4
EGY_Late_Period:JK2911
0.02807013
8.2
10.6
0.0
0.2
8.8
72.2
0.0
Average
0.03519116
8.6
8.6
4.1
0.0
4.6
69.1
4.9
 
I'm glad this thread has been put into the spotlight, to help repudiate the sophistry being posted on Anthrogenica.

6B54Hsw.jpg


Yemenite Jews look a lot like Ancient Egyptians, in terms of admixture rate, as do some Saudis.

I think it is interesting that Western Jews are probably closer to the admixture of Greek-like Sea Peoples invaders, and Bronze Age Canaanites, that would become of the Philistines after the conquest of the Levant. However, without the 15%-25% Slavic ancestry that is in Ashkenazim.
 
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Can you help me understand this right? I have also been following the more than Afro-centric threads involving this topic on Anthrogenica, and there are a few things I was wondering if you could help me understand right. So as far as the Ancient Egyptian samples go, some Anthrogenica users posted genetiker admixture graphs showing minor SSA admixture, while the graphs displayed above, show no such admixture. Also shouldn’t the Yoruba have some sort of Natufian-related admixture? Or were they not as effected by the Mesolithic-Neolithic Eurasian back migrations as other SSA populations were? I thought Yoruba possessed either Basal Eurasian-like or Para-Eurasian/ANA/Iberomaurusian-like admixture? Wouldn’t those components then show up in the admixture graph you have linked? Thanks again for starting this thread.
 
Can you help me understand this right? I have also been following the more than Afro-centric threads involving this topic on Anthrogenica, and there are a few things I was wondering if you could help me understand right. So as far as the Ancient Egyptian samples go, some Anthrogenica users posted genetiker admixture graphs showing minor SSA admixture, while the graphs displayed above, show no such admixture. Also shouldn’t the Yoruba have some sort of Natufian-related admixture? Or were they not as effected by the Mesolithic-Neolithic Eurasian back migrations as other SSA populations were? I thought Yoruba possessed either Basal Eurasian-like or Para-Eurasian/ANA/Iberomaurusian-like admixture? Wouldn’t those components then show up in the admixture graph you have linked? Thanks again for starting this thread.
I believe it pretty much depends on the reference chosen for Yoruba in that study, and apparently it's modern.
 
Do know what reference it would have been? I am surprised Yoruba wouldn’t have some kind of Eurasian or Para-Eurasian/ANA component in the admixture graph
 
Do know what reference it would have been? I am surprised Yoruba wouldn’t have some kind of Eurasian or Para-Eurasian/ANA component in the admixture graph
Well, I don't know the study, but if this Yoruba is modern, as I think it is, then it could be a mere case of redundancy, in which modern Yoruba would logically prefer modern Yoruba over other pops, since they're the reference for themselves. :)
That said, Yoruba does have some Eurasian ancestry, as evidenced by Lazaridis et al. It would be something around 5% of WHG-related ancestry, via Dzudzuana, in turn via ~13% of Taforalt-related ancestry. This finding is reinforced by the fact Yoruba also has a bit of Neandertal ancestry.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/suppl/2018/09/20/423079.DC1/423079-1.pdf

Lazaridis et al. also used modern Yoruba (bold always mine):
"We sought to determine the direction of admixture without a priori assumptions by forming the following set, which includes All plus a ~2,000BP hunter-gatherer from South Africa20, a ~4,500 year old sample from East Africa (Mota), Yoruba (from present-day West Africa where no ancient genomic data is available), Taforalt and Natufians:"

But they would have worked data differently, and they corrected a previous finding of SSA supposedly contributing to Taforalt:
"The study of the Ibero-Maurusian remains from Taforalt was initially interpreted as suggesting that this population was formed by admixture between Natufians and a Sub-Saharan population15. However, the admixture graph model suggests the opposite scenario: that Natufians were formed by admixture from a Taforalt-related population and a Dzudzuana-related one."

Also:
"The results of our analysis using the All set, as well as the results of the analysis of ref.15 do suggest that Taforalt can be modeled as a mixture of a West Eurasian related population (represented by Dzudzuana in our case) and a Sub-Saharan African lineage. However, when one uses only a single African population as a source without using others as outgroups, this mixture can only be interpreted as evidence of ancestry from a lineage basal to members of the All set, rather than as evidence of ancestry specifically related to the chosen African population. No Sub-Saharan African populations appear to be good sources for the ancestry of Taforalt as described previously. The admixture graph model suggests an alternative possibility: that it is West African populations like the Yoruba that may have ancestry from a North African Taforalt-like population. Under such a scenario, North Africa and the Levant were occupied by populations that experienced gene flow from each other, with more ancestry from a Basal lineage in North Africa, and more ancestry from a West Eurasian-specific lineage (represented by Dzudzuana) in the Levant, thus explaining the presence of Dzudzuana-related admixture in Taforalt and of Taforalt-related admixture in the Levant. Under this scenario, a North African-related population may have contributed some ancestry to Sub-Saharan populations to its south, perhaps during the Holocene Green Sahara period (~11-6kya)22 that postdates the sampled Taforalt individual which may have facilitated north→south gene flow across the Sahara."

Fortunately, we already have now two 8k years old samples from Cameroon.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-1929-1
I don't know when this flow South of Taforalt-related ancestry started, but modern Yoruba do score some Taforalt in G25, in a model using as sources these two ancient SSA and also Taforalt.
 
Well, I don't know the study, but if this Yoruba is modern, as I think it is, then it could be a mere case of redundancy, in which modern Yoruba would logically prefer modern Yoruba over other pops, since they're the reference for themselves. :)
That said, Yoruba does have some Eurasian ancestry, as evidenced by Lazaridis et al. It would be something around 5% of WHG-related ancestry, via Dzudzuana, in turn via ~13% of Taforalt-related ancestry. This finding is reinforced by the fact Yoruba also has a bit of Neandertal ancestry.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/suppl/2018/09/20/423079.DC1/423079-1.pdf

Lazaridis et al. also used modern Yoruba (bold always mine):
"We sought to determine the direction of admixture without a priori assumptions by forming the following set, which includes All plus a ~2,000BP hunter-gatherer from South Africa20, a ~4,500 year old sample from East Africa (Mota), Yoruba (from present-day West Africa where no ancient genomic data is available), Taforalt and Natufians:"

But they would have worked data differently, and they corrected a previous finding of SSA supposedly contributing to Taforalt:
"The study of the Ibero-Maurusian remains from Taforalt was initially interpreted as suggesting that this population was formed by admixture between Natufians and a Sub-Saharan population15. However, the admixture graph model suggests the opposite scenario: that Natufians were formed by admixture from a Taforalt-related population and a Dzudzuana-related one."

Also:
"The results of our analysis using the All set, as well as the results of the analysis of ref.15 do suggest that Taforalt can be modeled as a mixture of a West Eurasian related population (represented by Dzudzuana in our case) and a Sub-Saharan African lineage. However, when one uses only a single African population as a source without using others as outgroups, this mixture can only be interpreted as evidence of ancestry from a lineage basal to members of the All set, rather than as evidence of ancestry specifically related to the chosen African population. No Sub-Saharan African populations appear to be good sources for the ancestry of Taforalt as described previously. The admixture graph model suggests an alternative possibility: that it is West African populations like the Yoruba that may have ancestry from a North African Taforalt-like population. Under such a scenario, North Africa and the Levant were occupied by populations that experienced gene flow from each other, with more ancestry from a Basal lineage in North Africa, and more ancestry from a West Eurasian-specific lineage (represented by Dzudzuana) in the Levant, thus explaining the presence of Dzudzuana-related admixture in Taforalt and of Taforalt-related admixture in the Levant. Under this scenario, a North African-related population may have contributed some ancestry to Sub-Saharan populations to its south, perhaps during the Holocene Green Sahara period (~11-6kya)22 that postdates the sampled Taforalt individual which may have facilitated north→south gene flow across the Sahara."

Fortunately, we already have now two 8k years old samples from Cameroon.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-1929-1
I don't know when this flow South of Taforalt-related ancestry started, but modern Yoruba do score some Taforalt in G25, in a model using as sources these two ancient SSA and also Taforalt.

Excellent post Regio, thanks.
 

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