The late emergence of Semitic Ethiopia
Some of you have asked me about a new paper on East Africa, Ancient DNA reveals a multistep spread of the first herders into sub-Saharan Africa.The reality is some of you know this topic better than I, so I don’t have much original to add. But, I was curious today when a preprint dropped, West […]
TreeMix: Who were the West Eurasian ancestors of Ethiopians?
One of the primary concerns/questions I had about Luca Pagani’s paper on the genetic origin of Ethiopians is that he found that their West Eurasian ancestor was closer to Levantine than Arabian. I was confused by this because on model-based clustering (e.g., Admixture) when you push down to a fine level of granularity you always […]
Not out of Sheba
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 …
Flavors of Afro-Asiatic
In the post yesterday I reported what was generally known about the Horn of Africa, that its populations seem to lie between those of Sub-Saharan African and Eurasia genetically. This is totally reasonable as a function of geography, but there are also…
Man at Bab el-Mandeb
In light of my last post I had to take note when Dienekes today pointed to this new paper in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Population history of the Red Sea—genetic exchanges between the Arabian Peninsula and East Africa signaled i…
The genetic affinities of Ethiopians
In the open thread someone asked: “Any recent stuff on the genetics of Ethiopians.” That prompted me to look around, because I’m curious too. Poking around Wikipedia I couldn’t find anything recent. A lot of the studies are older uniparental lineage based works (NRY and mtDNA). Ethiopia is interesting because unlike almost all other Sub-Saharan […]