DNA Proxy Wars, Palestine Front

Steve Sailer has a—to me—fascinating post today regarding DNA studies intended to sort out what modern demographics in the modern Levant—roughly, the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea—are most closely related to the Bronze Age population of the area.

Satellite view of the Levant including Cyprus, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Jordan and the Northern Sinai

Sailer—Who Is Genetically Closer to Ancient Canaanites? Jews or Palestinians?—relies on the work of a geneticist, who himself relies on the work of an interdisciplinary group of geneticists, historians, anthropologists, and archeologists, many of whom are drawn from Israeli universities and institutes. I can’t pretend to any deep knowledge of genetics, but I have—over the years—paid some attention to the claims of Jews to a privileged genetic connection to the Land of Israel and are therefore entitled to kill, expel, and otherwise dispossess Arab “squatters”. An associated claim is that there is no such demographic that can plausibly lay claim to the title “Palestinian.” Anyone interested in my own views need only dig back into the archives pre 2018 for numerous extended posts on related topics. My view is that of those researchers who maintain that the ancient Israelites are simply a branch of the native Canaanite population of the area. The ancient Israelites did, in fact, construct a distinct cultural identity in the rough area of present day Palestine (the southern Levant)—closely related to but distinct from the Phoenician (Lebanese) culture of the northern Levant.

Anyway.

The substack on which Sailer relies is for paid subscribers, so I’ll be piggybacking on Sailer to quote from the relevant substack. Razib Khan, the author of that substack and a geneticist, sets out to answer a carefully delimited group of questions—three, in fact:

More than kin, less than kind: Jews and Palestinians as Canaanite cousins
The cold facts recorded in Jewish and Palestinian genetics today and historically

RAZIB KHAN
DEC 28, 2023

… So, here is my attempt to cover the late 2023 state of understanding of Jewish and Palestinian genetics without sophistry or motivated reasoning, to simply revisit what science has and has not found thus far. …

1. Are Palestinians descended from invading Arabs (circa 650 AD), native pre-Islamic peoples of the region (or a mix)?

2. Are Jewish Israelis today native to the Middle East (specifically Judea), Europe, elsewhere, or a mix?

3. Who is genetically closest today to the inhabitants of Judea circa 2,500 years ago?

What Khan does, drawing on earlier studies, is quite intelligent. He identifies four Bronze Age proxy DNA groups and graphs their presence in modern populations. These are are averages, of course, but the method is statistically sensible. Here are the four groups, all representing Bronze Age populations.

• Megiddo (Armageddon): This group represents the Bronze Age Canaanite population of ancient Palestine. The Israelites of the period represent Canaanites who withdrew from coastal regions to the hill country of what became later Judea, Samaria, and Galilee. The purpose for including this group is to address the question of whether modern Palestinians are actually descendants of Arab invaders or are descended from the ancient Canaanite population—which included Israelites as a cultural subgroup.

• Iran: The purpose for including this group is that researchers believe that the pastoral lifestyle arose in western Iran in the Zagros mountains and then spread elsewhere—including to the Middle East. One might plausibly assume that Iranian sourced DNA would appear in Palestine.

• Somali: This group is included for the simple reason that “African” DNA is known to have reached the region, but no more specific origin can be identified so far. It’s a plausible guess, based on geography, that Bronze Age Somali DNA is a reasonable proxy for the African component.

• European: I’ll repeat—this DNA dates from the Bronze Age. It’s well known that there was considerable contact between the Levant and Mediterranean Europe as far back as the Bronze Age. It is also now well established that the Ashkenazi Jewish population is largely based on Middle Eastern males but European women—likely of Italian origin.

This is my summary, for our purposes here, of a portion from behind the paywall of Khan’s substack. Sailer quotes this portion, which I’ll reproduce, which contains additional remarks but also includes the graph that puts the results together:

The bar chart below is from a 2020 paper, The Genomic History of the Bronze Age Southern Levant. Each bar represents the averages for a population. As the title implies, it draws from a large data set of ancient samples dating back to the Bronze Age, 5,000 years ago, and even earlier. The southern Levant would be today’s Israel and Palestine, so odds are high that some of the results might be inflammatory to some faction’s political ideology or social agenda. …

… Megiddo_MBLA is a proxy for the Biblical Canaanites, the dominant ethnicity described in the Bible when the Hebrews conquered the land of Israel. Here, I want to observe that the modern consensus is that Hebrews themselves were a branch of the Canaanites who developed a unique religion and cultural system that came to be dominant over their co-ethnics …

The other ancient sample in the results above, Iran_CHL, dates to about 4000 BC, and is from western Iran’s Zagros mountains. … the latest work in ancient DNA shows that agriculture and pastoralism were independently adopted by several groups of culturally and genetically distinct Middle Easterner foragers 10,000-12,000 years ago. Agriculture began in the Levant, and then arose in central Anatolia, while pastoralism emerged separately in western Iran in the Zagros mountains. …

The two other populations composing the source ancestry pools in the bar chart are Bronze-Age Europeans, a combination of Pontic steppe and Neolithic farmer ancestry, and Somalis, a present-day Eastern African source population, drafted in the absence of genetic data on ancient populations from that region

The above paper shows that Palestinians have more of the Megiddo_MBLA ancestry than Ashkenazi Jews, Moroccan (Sephardic) Jews or Iranian Jews do.

The chart is the bottom line. However, Khan adds value by digging down into the data. Thus:

Running this method on the Middle Eastern and Jewish populations in my data exposes patterns that will not surprise those familiar with the most recent population genetic work on these populations. Sephardim (those Jews with origins in Spain), Moroccan Jews (whose ancestry is again mostly Sephardic), Italian Jews and Ashkenazi Jews are all on the same branch as the two non-Jewish Italian populations, indicating low genetic distances and high relatedness. This is expected; the best current models imply that European Jews, Sephardim (originally from Spain) and Ashkenazim, have a lot of ancestry from an ancient Italian population. As my friend Taylor Capito likes to say, Italians don’t look like Jews, Jews look like Italians. Also, unsurprisingly, some regional Jewish groups are very genetically similar to their nearby non-Jewish neighbors. The Syrian Jewish samples resemble many Middle Eastern groups. The Jews of Kurdistan look very similar to Iranians. The Jews from Yemen, in southern Arabia, are on a branch with Saudis.

There are also notable patterns for non-Jews. Iraqis, Syrians, Jordanians and Lebanese Muslims share a branch, set apart from Lebanese Christians, Lebanese Druze and Palestinians. The Druze are a sect with origins in Islam but they have been endogamous since the 12th century AD. Palestinians land closer to Egyptians than to the Lebanese groups, supporting the common conjecture that many Palestinians (like the late Yasser Arafat) have recent Egyptian ancestry.

But it gets even more interesting—for people like me, anyway—and the reference to the Druze and the practice of endogamy is a hint. The Arab invasion of the 7th century led to assimilation of many Levantine groups into the Ummah, but certain groups retained their identity, especially by the practice of endogamy. In that way these groups preserved a DNA profile that corresponds more closely to the ancient profile. Khan goes there, and the results confirm common sense:

Megiddo_MBLA ancestry is the ancestry of ancient Levantines, so in the end, modern Palestinians retain a greater fraction of Hebrew-like ancestry.

Drilling down even further, independent researchers, including myself, who have collated and compared private and public datasets despite political sensitivities find that Lebanese Christians, Palestinian Christians and the Jewish-adjacent sect of Samaritans exhibit the smallest genetic distances to Bronze and Iron Age Canaanite samples. The 7th-century AD Islamic conquest reduced these groups to dhimmi status and made them endogamous populations, freezing their genetic profile about 1,300 years ago.

Private analysis of Palestinian Christians and Samaritans comparing them to Palestinian Muslims shows more Arabian-like ancestry and less Iranian-like ancestry in the non-Muslim Palestinian minorities, who, like Lebanese Christians also do not show much cosmopolitan ancestry from Africa and Asia (I double-checked this myself with the genotype of Richard Hanania, who is half Palestinian Christian and half Jordanian Christian, and all this is true in his case). So, with Muslim Palestinian populations, you have migration from elsewhere enriching them for more Iranian-like and African ancestry atop the primary Levantine genetic stock shared with their Christian and Samaritan neighbors.

So, who are the actual indigenous people of Israel, the West Bank and Gaza? If by this you mean those populations with the deepest and most substantial genetic roots in a geographical region, then that would be Palestinian Christians and Samaritans. …

There’s a bit of irony in that result. If you recall, the Bible portrays the Samaritans as a sort of mongrel population. So we end up with the spectacle, not really so surprising, of a substantially European demographic group, driven by a non-reality based ideology, invading a territory and attempting to cleanse it of its millenia old population.