Projecting Ancient Ancestry in Modern-Day Arabians and Iranians: A Key Role of the Past Exposed Arabo-Persian Gulf on Human Migrations.

ABSTRACT: The Arabian Peninsula is strategic for investigations centered on the early structuring of modern humans in the wake of the out-of-Africa migration. Despite its poor climatic conditions for the recovery of ancient human DNA evidence, the availability of both genomic data from neighboring ancient specimens and informative statistical tools allow modeling the ancestry of local modern populations. We applied this approach to a data set of 741,000 variants screened in 291 Arabians and 78 Iranians, and obtained insightful evidence. The west-east axis was a strong forcer of population structure in the Peninsula, and, more importantly, there were clear continuums throughout time linking western Arabia with the Levant, and eastern Arabia with Iran and the Caucasus. Eastern Arabians also displayed

SUBMITTER: Ferreira JC 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8435661 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature