The Interestingly Fraudulent Nature of Some Somali Arabian Geneologies

One thing that's been intriguing to me as of late has been following the trail of various Somali genealogies which as I've stated in the past and some of you may know often trace back to Hashemites/ Banu Hashim or Peninsula Arabians or generally non-Horner sources.

-Link-

You can see this, for example, in how that table above made by an unknown Somali displays various clan genealogies which ultimately trace back to some form of an Arabian (often of Hashemite origins). Now, these clans were supposed to have been founded by patriarchs or saints who essentially took native wives (or what are often presumed to be so).

Grave of Dobira resembling other old sites in Haylan nearby to Abdirahman's tomb

One example of these wives would be Dombira / Dobira above who was the wife of Sheikh Darod / Abdirahman ibn Isma'il Al-Jaberti. Now, my interest was vested in finding out whether the genealogies these men were known for having were even legitimate and whether they themselves could actually (at least genealogically) prove to be real Arabians.

It's well-known enough in the field of population genetics that Somalis are not the product of a recent Peninsula Arabian  mixture with East African natives, in fact most Somalis don't at all display any Peninsula Arabian ancestry whatsoever whether in terms of their Haplogroup markers which are centered very comfortably in the Horn of Africa or in terms of their autosomal DNA where they actually seem more genetically isolated than Ḥabeshas since they show no West Asian admixture outside of ancestral components/ clusters like Ethio-Somali which (for the most part anyway) are to be found in South Cushitic admixed peoples like the Maasai and even the Agaw ancestors of Ḥabeshas several thousand years ago.

[5]

So the agenda here was more about placing these founders under scrutiny and not so much their descendants whom I'm sure about at this point. I got the idea when a hobbyist historian interested in the Horn of Africa mentioned to me that the Sheikh Isḥaq (founder of the Isaaq clan) genealogy is actually fake because there's a key figure in the genealogy who simply never existed.

Sheikh Isḥaq's tomb

Sheikh Isaaq/ Isḥaq is an iffy subject and his genealogy is really all over the place, this one which might be known to many Isaaq clan members is his Arabian/ Hashemite genealogy:

Ishaq bin Ahmed bin Muhammed bin Hussein bin Ali bin Mudhar bin Abdalla bin Ayub bin Muhammed bin Qasim bin Ahmed bin Ali bin Issa bin Yahya bin Muhammed al-Taqi bin Ali al-Askari bin Muhammed al-Jawad bin Ali al-Ridha bin Musa al-Kadhim bin Jafar al-Sadiq bin Muhammed al-Baqir bin Ali Zainal al-Abiden bin Imam Al Hussein bin Ali bin Abi Talib 

It was shared on this site for example...

Now, this genealogy is completely impossible and frankly even mixed up because Ali al-Askari, better known as Ali al-Hadi has no grandson named Yahya descended from his son Mohammed. In fact the genealogy often doesn't even make much sense in the epithets it adds to these people. Muhammed "al-Taqi" for example was not the son of Ali "al-Askari" but his father.

Muhammed al-Taqi is an alternate way to refer to Muhammed al-Jawad who was Ali al-Hadi's father. In fact the Ali al-Askari in that genealogy is supposed to be referred to as Ali al-Hadi. "al-Askari" was used to refer to his son Hasan al-Askari who was the father of a boy named Muhammed claimed to be the great "Mahdi", this Muhammed in particular couldn't have been Yahya's ancestor either as he died as a little boy; too young to have fathered any sons.

However Ali al-Hadi did have a son named Muhammed but he too like his nephew Muhammed (the young son of Hasan al-Askari) did die young (as a child) and is also by some sects of Shia Islam thought to be "The Mahdi" / the final and 12th Imam in the place of his nephew/ he died way too young to have any sons let alone one named Yahya whom there is of course no record of anywhere.

This genealogy despite what I'm told about its "popularity" among some Isaaq clan members is a complete mess to be fully frank. All in all it's quite clearly fraudulent...

Sheikh Ishaq's origins as I said can even be a bit complex / iffy. While members of the Isaaq clan will often fervently oppose this view-> the Dir clan often claims that Sheikh Ishaq was essentially a member of the Dir clan and that the Isaaq are more or less an off-shoot of the Dir.

In fact even a source as basic as Wikipedia with a source of its own will say:


"Although the Isaaq clan claims paternal descent from Sheikh Isaaq, group members are often recognized as a sub-clan of the Dir"
[4]

 
At this point I'm led to doubt the idea that this man was an Arabian settler at all but likely just some saintly native who was overly venerated and adopted as a clan founder. I doubt the clan founders of the Somali people are really true blue clan founders as most ethnic Somalis in terms of autosomal DNA and in terms of their uniparental markers are more or less identical / a very homogeneous people.

There really is no genetic basis for the strong and solid substructure these clan systems propose. And even if these clan founders were somehow founders at some point-> the lack of Arabian input in their descendants as well as the fraudulent nature of their genealogies sheds some light on how they were  likely never even Arabians to begin with.

If they were Arabians, one must reconcile these fake genealogies and grasp that they clearly weren't clan founders as Somali paternal markers such as E-V32, T, A-M13 and even J1 are more native to the Horn of Africa / shared with other Horners and do not demonstrate evidence of any recent (within the last ~1400 years) Arabian input within the last 1-2 thousand years, the same goes for Somali autosomal DNA.

Somalis are about ~40% West Asian [1] [2] but this admixture is quite ancient and is old enough to have been mostly shared with South Cushites who departed the Horn long before Somali Islamization and is entirely shared with populations such as Ḥabeshas and Agaws who haven't shared a gene pool with Somalis for at least ~3,000 years-> it clearly was not incurred within the last 700 to 1400 years.


Did you think the fraudulent genealogies stopped at Sheikh Ishaq though? Not at all... The famous Sheikh Darood/ Abdirahman bin Isma'il al-Jabarti (founder of the Darod clan) also has a seemingly fraudulent genealogy that actually holds up somewhat less than Sheikh Ishaq's does if you place it under any kind of scrutiny.

There are two variants of Sheikh Darod's genealogy but both are fundamentally the same in where they fall apart:

The first  was one I always never doubted in terms of validity because it was to be found in a 9th Century history book written by the somewhat famous Al-Masudi, the book being called Aqeeliyoon however it was written roughly 200 years after the genealogy's founding father (Aqeel bin Abi Talib) died:

Abdirahman Bin Isma'il Bin Ibrahim Bin Abdirahman Bin Muhammed Bin Abdi Samad Bin Hanbal Bin Mahdi Bin Ahmed Bin Abdalle Bin Muhammed Bin Aqeel Bin Abi-Talib Bin Abdul-Mutalib Bin Hashim Bin Qusaya

 
The other somewhat distinct genealogy  is a more recent extraction from what I grasp from a work titled Allaa'i Alsuniyah Fi Al-Aqab Al-Aqeeliyah and it goes as follows:

 Da'ud ibn Ismail ibn Ibrahim ibn Abdulsamad ibn Ahmed ibn Abdallah ibn Ahmed Ibn Ismail ibn Ibrahim ibn Abdallah ibn Isma'il ibn Ali ibn Abdallah ibn Muhammad ibn Hamid ibn Abdallah ibn Ibrahim ibn Ali ibn Ahmed ibn Abdallah ibn Muslim ibn Abdallah ibn Muhammad ibn Aqeel ibn Abi-Talib Al-Hashimi Al-Qurashi

 The second genealogy falls flat in more than one way, to be fully honest. It's completely impossible as what is thought to be the Darod clan origin. This genealogy separates Aqeel Ibn Abi Talib (the claimed ultimate Darod clan ancestor) and the Darod clan's founder (in this genealogy dubbed "Da'ud") by about 22 generations.

Sheikh Darod's Tomb

This is the genealogy of a man who lived anywhere along the lines of the 12th to 13th centuries (a generation = 25 years in most cases). It cannot be the founding genealogy followed by the Darod clan or dynasties of theirs such as the Warsangali nor can it be the Aqeeli-Jaberti origin of the Walashma who essentially seem to claim descent from the same lineage as the Darod.

Why? By the 13th century the Warsangali dynasty was supposedly already founded in Northern Somalia and began to rule and conquer small areas of the coast. The Warsangali Sultanate's supposed founder Abdullahi Dhidin's trace back to the Darod clan founder at this juncture was as follows:

 Abdullahi bin Koge bin Warmaeke bin Mahamed bin Mahamud bin Salah bin Hantale bin Amlale bin Abdi bin Mahamad bin Abdirahman

How is he descended from a man who lived around the same time he did by about 9 generations (~225 years)?


 However both the first genealogy and the second one fall flat in one particular way that's even more important than what's outlined above. The ancestor "Muhammad" who is supposed to be a son of Aqeel ibn Abi Talib; doesn't seem to have existed...

Aqeel ibn Abi Talib was a well-known figure of his time, cousin to the Prophet of Islam and a brother to the highly venerated Ali ibn Abi Talib whose own line would grow to become nothing short of legendary. He was known to have had at least six sons as even a mere Wikipedia search on him will confirm for you:

Muslim ibn Aqeel, Jaffar ibn Aqeel, Musa ibn Aqeel, Abdul Rahman ibn Aqeel, Abdullah ibn Aqeel, Abi Saeed ibn Aqeel

Notice anything? There's no Muhammad. In fact the only evidence I've found after much digging that a Muhammad Ibn Aqeel even existed is that he is the claimed Darod clan ancestor. The fact that he is listed in the Darod clan genealogy is the main proof that he ever existed... In terms of actual records on Aqeel ibn Abi Talib's offspring, battles and so on of the time-> there is no record of a Muhammad ibn Aqeel ibn Abi Talib. He did not seem to exist.

The Islamic Caliphate under Ali ibn Abi Talib

Hell, look at his Wikipedia page alone where it is claimed that he was killed in the Battle of Karbala (with no source might I add) and this too is false. That battle's notable casualties including those of Aqeeli descent were well documented; a Muhammad ibn Aqeel was simply not among them/ there is no record of him in the battle though it is well-known that his supposed brother Muslim ibn Aqeel participated in the battle. Please do look into this yourself if you find it hard to believe.

This is yet another seemingly fraudulent genealogy.


One more fraudulent genealogy would be the Yusuf bin Ahmad al-Kawneyn genealogy/ the genealogy of Yusuf "Aw Barkhadle" (literally means "Blessed Father") who is a well-known and highly venerated Somali saintly figure. [3]

Shrine of Yusuf bin Ahmad al-Kawneyn

Whilst not being the founder of a clan or subclan of any sort; Yusuf is similar to the clan founders and in some oral accounts is even thought to have encountered and/or known some of them such as Sheikh Ishaq. [3]

He's further similar to Sheikh Ishaq and Sheikh Darood in that he's thought to be a historical proselytizer/ spreader of Islam in Northern Somalia who was highly venerated by the Somali people after his death and eventually given a shrine. And just like the two clan founders he carries a Hashemite genealogy of Abi Talib descent (the uncle of the Prophet). He and Sheikh Ishaq both claim descent from Ali ibn Abi Talib, a huge figure in Islamic history, while Sheikh Darod is claimed to be a descendant of Aqeel ibn Abi Talib, Ali's brother.  


Well, he has one more thing in common with those two clan founders / patriarchs:

Yusuf ibn Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn Abdullahi ibn Isma'il ibn Musa ibn Husayn ibn 'Ali ibn Hamza ibn Qasim ibn Yahya ibn Hussein ibn Ahmad ibn Quwayib ibn Yahya ibn 'Isa ibn  Muhammad ibn Taqi Al-Hadrama ibn 'Abdul ibn Hadib ibn Muhammad ibn 'Ali ibn Musa ibn Ja'far ibn Muhammad ibn 'Ali ibn Hassan ibn Ali ibn Abi Talib

 This genealogy is just another blatantly fraudulent one. In fact, it like the Darod clan one falls apart very early. How? Well, there is no Ali ibn Hassan ibn Ali ibn Abi Talib. Hassan is a very very famous figure within Islam, grandson to the Prophet, son of the Prophet's cousin Ali ibn Abi Talib who himself as I've stated is a sort of mega figure within Islam. Therefore Hasan's comings and goings and the children he had are very well attested in history. Guess what?

He indeed never had a son named Ali. In fact, one oddly suspicious thing about Yusuf bin Ahmad's genealogy is that it practically mixes up the descendants of two separate brothers. It was Hussein not Hassan who had a son named Ali who in turn had a son named Muhammad who in turn had a son name Ja'far who in turn had a son named Musa and so on and so forth. But the Barkhadle/ Yusuf bin Ahmad al-Kawneyn genealogy is fervently claimed by those who carried it on to be a Hassani one and not one descended from Hussein.

The Shrine of Hussein ibn Ali ibn Abi Talib

It actually wouldn't even matter if it was a Hussein based genealogy because even if you followed it as a Hussein descended genealogy; it still fails. "Hadib" whose name is emboldened in the genealogy above never existed.

This is another completely fraudulent genealogy. It's frankly disappointing how easily it fell apart. It's supposed to be a Hassani genealogy but it falls apart the moment you go one son down from Hassan himself.

How these genealogies held water for so long is not too surprising though. It's easy to look at the world as we do now with the internet and so much of our species' accumulated knowledge quite literally at our fingertips and judge the people and historians who've seen these genealogies as valid as foolish people but in truth; the Somalis who kept these genealogies in their heads for generations didn't have records from Arabia of each and every son who was born to so and so Hashemite person to look at.

Hell, one could argue historians who studied these genealogies briefly like Enrico Cerulli and I.M Lewis didn't really have all the knowledge they needed at their fingertips. But we of the 21st Century today do have access to such a wealth of information, and this is now seriously something a ten year old could confirm for themselves and I urge you to do your own research; these genealogies are quite fake. Ali ibn Hasan, Muhammad ibn Aqeel and Yahya ibn Muhammad al-Taqi did not exist.

There is no credible record of any of them. Only Muhammad ibn Aqeel shows up in an old record  and that's in a book (Aqeeliyoon) from roughly 200 years or so after his supposed father's death, written by a fellow really just recounting the Darod clan's claimed genealogy as far as I can tell. Actual records from the time of his supposed life don't mention him having existed at any point. He is however the one person out of the three with the best chance of having been real; the other two are hopeless.

I once thought that whilst being genetically invalid; these particular Arabian genealogies might have at least been historically solid but now it seems as though they are historically invalid as well.
 

Reference List:

1. Ancient west Eurasian ancestry in southern and eastern Africa, Pickrell et al.

2. The African Genome Variation Project shapes medical genetics in Africa, Gurdasani et al.

3. Saints and Somalis: Popular Islam in a Clan-based Society, by I. M. Lewis

4.  A Modern History of the Somali, by I.M Lewis

5.  Early Back-to-Africa Migration into the Horn of Africa, Hodgson et al.


Notes:

1. Yusuf bin Ahmad is sometimes considered the ancestor of the Walashma/ Wilinwili dynasty but this is however considered more of a fabled origin. There's more on that here: [-] 

2.  Apologies for not being able to find a sample of the "A Modern History of the Somali" via google but that information on the Isaaq being claimed by the Dir is somewhat common knowledge. Even I in an ethnic Somali household that did not like to talk about clans was aware of this supposed connection a few years ago via conversations with talkative relatives. 

3. The Ethio-Helix blog post I linked you to at some point is pretty reliable and the author pretty much cites a plethora of peer-reviewed papers for the Haplogroup information he shares (you're welcome to look them up via his page), so no worries there. It's no rinky-dink random blog.  

The First Ancient Genomic Data from Anatolia and its impact on European Neolithics is on its way

Eurogenes' author just shared some interesting links to the abstracts of upcoming peer-reviewed papers on population genetics. One seems to finally touch upon getting us a glimpse at the ancient Near East.

Turkey / Anatolia

As the abstract says:

"The most important process in the prehistory of our species is arguably the Neolithization. In the course of 10000 years, it took us from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to the society we live in today. For Eurasia, Anatolia and the Near East played a key role in this process. It has already been shown that the neolithic expansion from this area and westwards was driven by migration. But we know little about the actual establishing of neolithic societies in Anatolia, and on what kind of population dynamics effected their gene pool. And we also know little more about the Neolithic gene flow from Anatolia than that it had occurred. For the first time we present genomic results from an ancient Anatolian farmer, from Troy's proto-settlement Kumtepe, and it anchors the European neolithic genepool to Anatolia. Further, the late-neolithic individual from Kumtepe does not only contain the genetic element that is frequent in early European farmers, but also a component found mainly in modern populations from the Near and Middle East and Northern Africa, and to a much smaller degree, in some Neolithic European farmers. The scene presented by Kumtepe is compatible with geneflow into Europe from or through the neolithic core area in Anatolia. And it is likely that this occurred early, perhaps just after the neolithic core area had been established in southeastern Anatolia."

 - the sample is from Turkey/Anatolia and clearly seems to from what they're saying; anchor the European Neolithic to West Asia/ the Near East and more so to Anatolia itself. I honestly cannot say much since this is just an abstract but I'll be sure to touch upon this paper's data once it's made fully available and for now all I can say is that this is very very exciting stuff as its the first genomic data we'll have from pre-historic to ancient West Asia; regardless of its seemingly small sample size (one farmer).

Reference List:

1. The First Genomic Data from Anatolia and its impact on European Neolithics, Günther T et al. abstract , an image of the page in case it somehow goes down.

Recommended read:

ISABS 2015 Abstracts, Eurogenes

New Paper on Ashkenazi Jews: We should wait for ancient samples from the Levant

Seems as though we're in for a new paper on the ancestry of Ashkenazi Jews which seems to posit that they do indeed have European admixture but mostly of Southern European/ Italic origins.

It seems to be a rather valiant effort, mind you and even finds some Eastern European ancestry in Ashkenazi Jews but I must agree with David Wesolowski over at Eurogenes (the blog's author); this paper looks to be on to something but there's one key flaw; it's using modern populations and not ancient samples to make its inferences. This is relevant because if we're learning one thing through the constant sampling of ancient remains across Europe is that "Modern Populations ≠ Ancient Populations". 

This principal seems to even ring true for some ancient populations that existed as early as ~2,500 years ago. They've sampled three ancient Etruscans from about ~2,500 years in the past and surprisingly enough; they do not seem to be well-represented by modern day Tuscans in Italy despite modern Tuscany and surrounding parts of the Italian peninsula corresponding well with where the Etruscans once were. [1]

Modern populations in my humble opinion are simply not a viable proxy for the peoples who lived where they now toil away a few or several thousand years ago. They're surely descended from those people to some great extent but clearly not a frozen image of said ancient group's genome. 

And herein lies the problem; we lack ancient genomes from the Levant. And therefore we honestly lack a true proxy for what could be an ancient Levantine. David voices this concern on his blog; posting that he believes the ancient Near East wasn't genetically what it is now. And he's probably right. We can't be sure exactly how Southern European Ashkenazi Jews are because we lack an example of what a "pure" pre-Western Jew exodus and even pre-Arabization/ Arabian conquest Levantine looked like so we lack something concrete to compare them to and see just how much they've shifted away from what Yahudim were like before their exodus.

Modern Arabs in the Levant are mostly the Arabized descendants of former Aramaic speakers who do seem to clearly have some Peninsula Arabian genetic input as can be surmised from their

Haplogroups as you can see for example through the J1 Project. This effect seems to be greater for example in Muslim Levantines who prove somewhat distinct from their Christian neighbors though not at all by any note worthy amount. [2]

Cypriots may prove a good example of the ancient Levant perhaps because they're an island population given that Sardinians; a fellow island population come out to be a genetic isolate in Europe [3] [4], predominantly descended from Early European Farmers with very little Steppe derived ancestry. Islanders can at times prove a preservation of what close by mainland populations used to be like as they could have avoided whatever land expansion affected their mainland kin. 

However Cypriots who speak Greek for example could very well have Southern European admixture due to becoming Hellenized and shifting to Greek linguistically. Though any reader reading this must forgive me as I'm not too knowledgeable about Cypriot genetics other than that Cypriots seem to look like a Levantine population (similar to Western Jews and Arab Levantines more than anything else) especially in terms of their fundamental ancestral components and the proportions they have them at (Eurogenes K=8).

Other groups like Samaritans may prove to be reliable genetic isolates of the Levant but still; we're learning via Europe time and time again that assuming modern populations are a perfect example of their ancient predecessors is a slippery way of seeing things. 

Suppose Levantines from ~2,000 years ago or from right before the ancestors of Ashkenazi Jews departed prove to actually carry a notable amount of Western European Hunter-Gatherer and Early European Farmer-esque ancestry. Wouldn't that prove the results of this paper (the exact proportions of Italic-esque ancestry in Ashkenazis) to be incorrect? And Ashkenazim would suddenly look a lot more Near Eastern.

I'm doing a lot of blabbering here to say something quite simple in truth. We lack ancient samples from the Levant and neither Western Jews nor Arab Levantines are to be taken as a trustworthy example of the ancient Levant as both groups have seemingly experienced non-Levantine gene flow, one from Europe (mostly from Southern Europe) and the other from the Arabian Peninsula. Until we have ancient individuals from the Levant to compare these populations to; we should remain cautious about trusting how non-Levantine either group is.

However I do not at all doubt the core of what this paper will be preaching (I did once though...) which is that Ashkenazim do seemingly have some substantial non-Levantine admixture mostly of a Mediterranean European nature and also a much much smaller amount of Eastern European admixture.

Reference List

 1. Assessment of Whole-Genome capture methodologies on single- and double-stranded ancient DNA libraries from Caribbean and European archaeological human remains, Ávila-Arcos et al.

2. Genome-Wide Diversity in the Levant Reveals Recent Structuring by Culture, Haber et al.

3. Ancient human genomes suggest three ancestral populations for present-day Europeans, Lazaridis et al.

4. Genome flux and stasis in a five millennium transect of European prehistory, Gamba et al. 

 

I'd like to clear up some inaccuracies

In my very first blog post where I attacked the concept of racialism I made some statements about population genetics and well... I've learned more as I hope many who read this blog and the papers I cite have since. In this post I'd like to correct some inaccuracies in some of things I posted practically 6 months ago (it's surreal that it's been that long).

I've actually corrected these inaccuracies with my blog posts over the last several months (my second ever post in fact did make a point of adding new information to what I'd posted in my first one about Early European Farmers) but I'd like to touch upon them again but this time on their own rather quickly in this blog post.

East Eurasians

I originally made the statement that Eastern Non-Africans/ East Eurasians like the Andamanese man to the right and his child were (alongside Australian Aborigines and Pacific Islanders) more distant from Africans like Niger-Congo speaking Africans and non-West Eurasian admixed East Africans than Europeans and West Asians were.

Well, some indeed are; at least in the case of Australian Aborigines and Papuans who have notable levels of Denisovan admixture which is presumed to be the cause for why they're more distinct from African populations like the ones I mentioned than populations like Europeans are. [1]

And I indeed was on the mark when I said that the man to the right and his son are full-blown Eurasians (of an 'Out of Africa' population) and don't have any post-Out of Africa African ancestry while many West Eurasians and North Africans such as Arab Levantines, Peninsula Arabians, Egyptians, Moroccans and so on do indeed have actual post Out of Africa African admixture so in this case; many West Asians and North Africans are closer to Africans than Eastern Non-Africans are. [2] [3] [4] However the claims I made that West Eurasians (Europeans + West Asians) as a whole thanks to Basal Eurasian are closer to Africans than Eastern Non-Africans are was not entirely correct as I was depending on Fst values to make these assumptions and I'll get into that more with the Basal Eurasian section below.

As that table above demonstrates; Papuans are more distinct/ varied from Yorubans than Frenchman and Han Chinese are, that is indeed true. [1] However as I mentioned in my East Eurasians focused post in the past; this is likely mostly due to them having their levels of Denisovan admixture. Not all non-East Asian East Eurasians (those who may lack the higher levels of Denisovan admixture found in Australian Aborigines and Papuans) are as distant as Papuans are from Niger-Congo speaking Africans, instead, I wager their variance from Yorubans would be comparable to what you see for the Frenchman and the Han above.

Basal Eurasian

My actual post on this component since I made my very first blog post was more or less spot on with

no real inaccuracies that swayed away from the peer-reviewed data I was depending on from what I recall. However in my first blog post I made the claim that Europeans for example for having Basal Eurasian admixture were closer to East Africans (those of a non-Eurasian admixed variety) and Niger-Congo speaking Africans than East Eurasians/ Eastern Non-Africans are. 

First off, Basal Eurasian isn't exactly what I said it was in my very first post but is what I said it was in my actual long post dedicated to it though even in my first post I mentioned fervently what  those in the field of academia more or less made of it for now (Out of Africa isolate). It's not a component (for the time being) with a real African affinity as I said with my first post but instead as I said in its own post; at best a Quasi-African component. It is closer to the East African origin point ("Non-African" in the diagram and sometimes dubbed "Proto-Eurasian") of all Out-of-Africa (OoA) populations (Eurasians, Pacific Islanders, Native Americans etc.) than other Eurasian/ OoA components are; it's highly divergent from all other Eurasian components and is seemingly more Basal to them than Ust-Ishim which Haak et al. finds to be basal to all so far discovered Eurasian ancestral components except for Basal Eurasian. [5] 

However it ultimately lacks any confirmed African affinity. It is clearly somehow still grounded in its Eurasian-ness, as it's clearly still a Eurasian component but again (as my post on it says); it's a statistical concept for now and we don't really have full knowledge of what it is. We may hopefully grasp it completely once we have ancient genomes from West Asia but for now; the academia are cautiously and understandably sticking to what their current data seems to be saying; that it's an Out-of-Africa isolate the way I explained it in my first post. [6] [7]

 Also; as I explained in my actual post about Basal Eurasian; Fst values aren't to be taken too seriously as a real measure of "genetic distance" / variance at least in some cases. And Fst values were what I was mainly depending on for my assumption that Europeans for example were closer to African populations than East Eurasians (Han, Papuans etc.) were.

Fst values like the ones represented in the diagram to the left of this text [8]; can be influenced by a whole foray of variables not truly indicative of a population's real variation level from another population. For example it can be skewed by a heightened level of genetic drift  and some such. And as an old friend put it:

"Fst looks at the variation between entire groups, which is why more isolated East Asians will have an increased distance to others, like e.g. Africans. This effect is the most pronounced in Native Americans, who tend to be the most divergent from Africans with respect to Fst distance."

A real measure of the variance between groups would be better and that is represented in the table I shared earlier showing you Papuans, Neanderthals, Han and the like... In that case Europeans don't truly show an African pull of sorts and Basal Eurasian's Out-of-Africa-ness seems rather solid for now. Though as I stated in the East African cluster's blog post; groups with ancient East African ancestry in Africa like Niger-Congo speakers (as per their mtDNA markers for example) do demonstrate a greater pull/ similarity toward Eurasians than groups that would mostly lack such ancestry like non-Bantu and East African admixed San. 

To be honest; I've encountered a lot of people who've been fooled by Fst values/ "Fst distance"; using as a real measure of the distance between populations; they're in truth not to be too relied upon for that though they can be quite useful in some cases. 

In essence; the only real mistake I'm trying to correct here is one that surfaced through me making too much of Fst distances and not seeing more reliable measures of the variance between populations and that lead me to make the still true statement that for example Papuans are more distant from Yorubans than Norwegians are but it's not because of Basal Eurasian being in Norwegians but most likely because Papuans are last I checked about ~5% Denisovan while Norwegians aren't (but not all East Eurasians are more distant from Africans than Europeans are. F.e. the Han's variation from them is comparable to that of a European population like the French) Basal Eurasian is a highly divergent ancestral component that we don't know everything about just yet but it doesn't make West Eurasians any closer to Africans than Eastern Non-Africans (East Eurasians) are and it's at best Quasi-African at least for its close-ness to the very base of Eurasians which is ultimately very ancient East African in origin as per the Haplogroup evidence (Y-DNA an mtDNA) and the very real affinity the East African component has for Eurasians.

Beyond that; I can't think of anything else that truly needs correcting especially if you've been keeping up with my other blog posts since that very first one. So... Take care and I hope you enjoy this blog.


Reference List:

1. Genetic history of an archaic hominin group from Denisova Cave in Siberia, Reich et al.

2.  Genomic Ancestry of North Africans Supports Back-to-Africa Migration, Henn et al. 

3. Early Back-to-Africa Migration into the Horn of Africa, Hodgson et al. 

4. The History of African Gene Flow into Southern Europeans, Levantines, and Jews, Moorjani et al.

5. Massive migration from the steppe is a source for Indo-European languages in Europe, Haak et al. 2015

6.  Ancient human genomes suggest three ancestral populations for present-day Europeans, Lazaridis et al.

7. Genome Sequence of 45,000-year-old modern human from western Siberia, Fu et al.

8. The Genetic Structure of Pacific Islanders, Friedlaender et al. 


Notes:

1.  I made this post mostly because I noticed that my very first blog post gets a good amount of my traffic and well... It's much more important that you all actually read the other posts where I actually share information on various populations and so on rather than sifting through that old post where I was making a political statement more than anything (not really my forte at any rate) and well; I always advise you to consult the papers I link you to. 

You're not supposed to take my word for anything. My blog posts just like any book, Wikipedia article or even paper are not reliable on their own. Instead I advise you to always read the sources I or other sources share and the data we share as well and add that on top what we're saying to make your final judgments. Always think for yourself... 

But I assure you; as the making of this post demonstrates-> I take great pains to make sure I share the most objective and accurate information I possibly can on the subjects I touch upon and try to make sure you yourself are informed through your own research by sharing my various credible sources.

2. The Hodgson et al. paper I shared has flaws as I've touched upon in the past but it shows you how Egyptians and Arabians have African admixture so that was the point in sharing it as a source.

The Khazar Theory: Give it a Rest

This theory comes up quite often, as a matter of fact; it did just recently at a forum I frequent where a chap was essentially spewing the usual "Western Jews are not 'Middle Eastern'/ 'West Asian' " rhetoric and in his case; he evoked the whole frankly retarded "Theory of the Khazars".

Cyprus is often counted as part of the region as well

To get what the Khazar idea is out of the way: it's predicated on the notion that for example Ashkenazim derive a large portion of their ancestry from the region ruled over by the Khazar Empire/ Khaganate, basically claiming that they're not really native Levantines but substantially Caucasian, the Khazars themselves being a semi-nomadic Turkic speaking people who experienced a Jewish presence within their realm. One Dr. Eran Elhaik wrote a paper basically supporting this. [1]

Khazar Khaganate

He got the following reply from over 20 geneticists:

"The origin and history of the Ashkenazi Jewish population have long been of great interest, and advances in high-throughput genetic analysis have recently provided a new approach for investigating these topics. We and others have argued on the basis of genome-wide data that the Ashkenazi Jewish population derives its ancestry from a combination of sources tracing to both Europe and the Middle East. It has been claimed, however, through a reanalysis of some of our data, that a large part of the ancestry of the Ashkenazi population originates with the Khazars, a Turkic-speaking group that lived to the north of the Caucasus region ~1,000 years ago. Because the Khazar population has left no obvious modern descendants that could enable a clear test for a contribution to Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry, the Khazar hypothesis has been difficult to examine using genetics. Furthermore, because only limited genetic data have been available from the Caucasus region, and because these data have been concentrated in populations that are genetically close to populations from the Middle East, the attribution of any signal of Ashkenazi-Caucasus genetic similarity to Khazar ancestry rather than shared ancestral Middle Eastern ancestry has been problematic. Here, through integration of genotypes on newly collected samples with data from several of our past studies, we have assembled the largest data set available to date for assessment of Ashkenazi Jewish genetic origins. This data set contains genome-wide single-nucleotide polymorphisms in 1,774 samples from 106 Jewish and non- Jewish populations that span the possible regions of potential Ashkenazi ancestry: Europe, the Middle East, and the region historically associated with the Khazar Khaganate. The data set includes 261 samples from 15 populations from the Caucasus region and the region directly to its north, samples that have not previously been included alongside Ashkenazi Jewish samples in genomic studies. Employing a variety of standard techniques for the analysis of populationgenetic structure, we find that Ashkenazi Jews share the greatest genetic ancestry with other Jewish populations, and among non-Jewish populations, with groups from Europe and the Middle East. No particular similarity of Ashkenazi Jews with populations from the Caucasus is evident, particularly with the populations that most closely represent the Khazar region. Thus, analysis of Ashkenazi Jews together with a large sample from the region of the Khazar Khaganate corroborates the earlier results that Ashkenazi Jews derive their ancestry primarily from populations of the Middle East and Europe, that they possess considerable shared ancestry with other Jewish populations, and that there is no indication of a significant genetic contribution either from within or from north of the Caucasus region." [2]

I reckon no further delving into how fallacious the notion that Ashkenazim are basically a Caucasian population is needed but in case you need simple examples of how fallacious the notion always was-> here's an example of the fundamental pre-historic ancestral components in Caucasian, Turkish, Iranian & Levantine populations from the work of a genome blogger I often cite here (Eurogenes/ David Wesolowski):

 

EE = East Eurasian


.

 WHG = Western European Hunter-Gatherer



As you can see, Ashkenazim & Sephardim (both "The Jews of Germany" & "The Jews of Spain" as their names mean respectively) are more or less identical while clearly not fitting amongst Caucasians, Turks/ Anatolians & West Asian Iranian speakers like Kurds. Lacking the heightened Ancient North Eurasian input found in these populations that I noted a while back. Instead they fit much more decently amongst "Arab" Levantines like Syrians & the Lebanese whether Christian or Muslim.


Simply put; the Khazar theory is nonsensical. Genetically speaking, Jews like Ashkenazim and Sephardim are more or less a Mediterranean population more genetically similar on a fundamental level to populations like Sicilians, Lebanese, Tuscans, Syrians, Cypriots and so on than anything else.


Pan West Eurasia PCA (Principal Component Analysis) / Cluster


I repeat (with the backing of virtually every respectable geneticist out there familiar with West Asian and Jewish population genetics); the Khazar theory is bullshit... We live in an age where wild speculation about Human or population origins based on hearsay, myths and "cranio-metric data" is obsolete. Mostly thanks to population genetics. And the genetic data of Ashkenazi Jews for example is pretty clear; not Khazars (not even from the Caucasus).

Reference List:

1. Israeli Researcher Challenges Jewish DNA links to Israel, Calls Those Who Disagree 'Nazi Sympathizers', Forbes

2. No Evidence from Genome-wide Data of a Khazar origin for Ashkenazi Jews, Behar et al.


 Notes:

1. Despite their linguistic standing; Greek Cypriots are genetically a Levantine population-> more similar to the populations of the Levant than anything else as you can see from that ADMIXTURE analysis showing you the ancient ancestral components that make those populations up. Though Greeks as a Mediterranean population like them, especially one of a more easterly geographic position, are quite similar to them anyway (on a fundamental level).

2. "Early Neolithic Farmer" is essentially what you get when you remove/ account for the Western European Hunter-Gatherer (native European component) admixture in an Early European Farmer (EEF) or EEF-like component. It's what carries Basal Eurasian and seems to be the main native West Asian component; it for now peaks in Peninsula Arabians and can be found to be the dominant ancestral component across West Asia and most of the Mediterranean.

3. Cranio-metric data can have its uses and there are somewhat respectable peer-reviewed papers on the subject (I can't seem to find one right now but I'll update this post with a link when I do) but ultimately; the conclusive evidence lies in sampling a population's genome. Cranio-metric/ facial data can be quite misleading (as with the obsolete painting of the old "Caucasian Race").