Liya Kebede, Credit
There is a new paper, Ethiopian Genetic Diversity Reveals Linguistic Stratification and Complex Influences on the Ethiopian Gene Pool, which is being sensationalized in the media. For example, the BBC headline: ‘DNA clues to Queen of Sheba tale’. I assumed that this was just the media, but to my surprise the authors themselves mention the ‘Sheba tale’ in their discussion for various reasons. This is unfortunate. Though it is true Ethiopians have a legend of descent from the queen of Sheba (and through her relationship to king Solomon the ancient Hebrews), if there is a scholarly consensus about the location of Sheba, it is probably in southwest Arabia (i.e., modern Yemen). But the reality is that it is probably just as likely that the story in the Hebrew Bible is an interleaved synthesis of legend and reality, and that disentangling the nuggets of truth so as to establish the location of the real Sheba is going to be impossible (it is just as likely that the real queen of Sheba, if she existed, was a Levantine notable who was given a more exotic …