Ever since October 7, advocates on both sides have been using genetic data to argue that their team is the authentic rightful heir to the Holy Land. Razib Khan explains what the data actually says in his Substack:
More than kin, less than kind: Jews and Palestinians as Canaanite cousins
The cold facts recorded in Jewish and Palestinian genetics today and historicallyRAZIB 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. …
- Are Palestinians descended from invading Arabs (circa 650 AD), native pre-Islamic peoples of the region (or a mix)?
- Are Jewish Israelis today native to the Middle East (specifically Judea), Europe, elsewhere, or a mix?
- Who is genetically closest today to the inhabitants of Judea circa 2,500 years ago?
Razib warns against relying upon a single metric. Consider my (not Razib’s) stylized example: Who is more closely related to the Dutch: the Boers of South Africa or some random European nationality such as the Poles?
A large percentage of ancestors of Boers were Dutch (and many others were German or French). On the other hand, some single metrics for quantifying genetic distance might (I say might because I don’t know if this is true) say that Boers are more distant to the Dutch than the Poles because a modest percentage of the ancestry of self-identifying Boers today come from non-European sources: 4.7% in a recent study.
Granted, 4.7% is not a large fraction, but this is primarily from Cape Coloured predecessors, who are much more genetically distant from the Dutch than any European population. Cape Coloureds includes ancestry from Malays, Indians, Bantus, and Bushmen/Hottentots, who are likely the most genetically unusual group on earth. So, the non-European 4.7% is very different, especially the 1.3% of Afrikaner ancestry that is Bushman.
So you could see how you might get different answers to this Dutch question depending upon the methodology used. Similarly, Palestinian Muslims are often accused of being mostly descended from invading Arabs from the deep south because a simple Principle Components Analysis shows them as closer to Saudis. But,
The admixture results immediately offer a simple explanation for why in the PCA of the 2010 paper the Palestinians were shifted toward the Saudis: they have African ancestry, and the Arabian cluster that is maximized in the Saudis is itself closer to the Nigerian African cluster genetically on the pairwise Fst representation. In other words, any African ancestry in Palestinians will also move them on a PCA toward Saudis even without direct Saudi ancestry per se.
As with my Boer speculation, even a small amount of Sub-Saharan ancestry has a big influence on pairwise Fst representation.
PCA plots are looking at averages, and a 5-10% dollop of African ancestry (representing a human group that definitively diverged genetically from all Eurasians 100,000 or so years ago) has a much bigger impact than long-term separations on the scale of those driven by geographic isolation between Eurasian groups, which date to just 10,000 to 40,000 years ago (the length of the branches in the neighbor-joining tree does roughly correspond to splits of 100,000 years for Africans, 40,000 years for Asians and fewer than 10,000 years between the West Eurasian groups).
The Out-of-Africa theory is usually assumed to imply that science has proven that we are all the same, but it implies that the big division in humanity is between sub-Saharans and the rest of humanity (and there is also another big division between run of the mill sub-Saharans and a few exotic African populations like Bushmen and Pygmies).
These results imply that Palestinians are just another Levantine population, along with Lebanese, Jordanians and Syrians, albeit with recent admixture from Africans and Asians. …
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.
Not to mention Ethiopian Jews, who are about 18% Canaanite and 82% sub-Saharan.
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. …
So it’s the Samaritans, good, bad, and indifferent, for the win.
