Roman genome from West Asia

Well, we got some ancient genomes from Britain but what's of interest to me personally is that one of the Roman Period individuals sampled was seemingly of West Asian (particularly Southern Levantine looking) origins.

You can see him sitting in the "Middle East" cluster above as the yellow Roman sample, he and the other Roman Period samples looked to have been something along the lines of soldiers or gladiators but honestly; David Wesolowski does a better job of going into details than I'm going to bother doing so read his blog post on this matter.

What's of particular interest to me is that we seem to have confirmed via ADMXITURE and analyses like qpAdm that this individual, whilst non-negligibly "African", carries no Yoruba/West-Central African/Niger-Congo-speaker-related ancestry but seems to instead, much like Yemenite Jews below, be showing "East African" related admixture:

You can see what I mean with the below ADMIXTURE results for him (qpAdm doesn't actually tell us that he lacks such admixture from what I can see):

North_Sea: 0.02

Atlantic: 4.06

Baltic: 0

Eastern_Euro: 0

West_Med: 11.24

West_Asian: 10.99

East_Med: 46.16

Red_Sea: 20.98

South_Asian: 0

Southeast_Asian: 0

Siberian: 0

Amerindian: 0

Oceanian: 0

Northeast_African: 6.54

Sub-Saharan: 0.02

Pretty much nothing from the Sub-Saharan/West African/Yoruba peaking cluster but notable amounts from the Northeast African and Red Sea clusters which contain East African-related ancestry from what I can tell.

The samples top matching population in terms of pairwise Identical-by-State (IBS) allele sharing are present-day Saudis

These results are interesting as they confirm something I stated just this month in a prior post... Which is that West-Central/Niger-Congo-speaker-related ancestry in West Asian Arab populations looks to be something more recent in origin (perhaps owed to the Arab Slave Trade) but the East African cluster-related ancestry in the region looks to have a more ancient root.

This is often made obvious by how such admixture is present in the Muslim majorities but, in many cases, not their religious minorities, who may have not been as immersed in such trade and influences, such as Yemenite Jews lacking such input that is present in Yemenite Muslims or Coptic Egyptians (a North African population) seemingly lacking such input unlike Egyptian Muslims.

Despite these religious minorities still carrying non-negligible amounts of "African" ancestry as a whole but more East African/Nilo-Saharan-speaker-esque ancestry instead.

At any rate, I can't say much else that has been said in this Anthrogenica thread or at Eurogenes and will leave it at that...

Reference List:

1. Iron Age and Anglo-Saxon genomes from East England reveal British migration history, Schiffels et al.

2. Ancient human genomes suggest three ancestral populations for present-day Europeans, Lazaridis et al. (where the ADMIXTURE run including Yemenite Jews and co. comes from)