Genome-Wide Diversity in the Levant Reveals Recent Structuring by Culture

Article Source: Genome-Wide Diversity in the Levant Reveals Recent Structuring by Culture from the Genetics section of the Public Library of Science, or plosgenetics.org 
Haber M, Gauguier D, Youhanna S, Patterson N, Moorjani P, et al. (2013) Genome-Wide Diversity in the Levant Reveals Recent Structuring by Culture. PLOS Genetics 9(2): e1003316. doi: 10.1371/journal.pgen.1003316

While we do not require articles such as this to prove our position at Christogenea on the history of the Levant or the Near East, this particular article does help to show that our thesis has academic support in certain fields.

The author's own summary, found in the report above, describes our interest:

 Author Summary

Population stratification caused by nonrandom mating between groups of the same species is often due to geographical distances leading to physical separation followed by genetic drift of allele frequencies in each group. In humans, population structures are also often driven by geographical barriers or distances; however, humans might also be structured by abstract factors such as culture, a consequence of their reasoning and self-awareness. Religion in particular, is one of the unusual conceptual factors that can drive human population structures. This study explores the Levant, a region flanked by the Middle East and Europe, where individual and population relationships are still strongly influenced by religion. We show that religious affiliation had a strong impact on the genomes of the Levantines. In particular, conversion of the region’s populations to Islam appears to have introduced major rearrangements in populations’ relations through admixture with culturally similar but geographically remote populations, leading to genetic similarities between remarkably distant populations like Jordanians, Moroccans, and Yemenis. Conversely, other populations, like Christians and Druze, became genetically isolated in the new cultural environment. We reconstructed the genetic structure of the Levantines and found that a pre-Islamic expansion Levant was more genetically similar to Europeans than to Middle Easterners.

It is our opinion that genetic scientists do not really know much of what they are talking about in these areas, since they too often assume that current populations represent ancient populations, and usually ignore or do not even seek to understand the historically recorded migrations of the various peoples. But at least here they admit that the Islamic conquest of the Levant changed the population significantly, introducing a high degree of African admixture, and that originally the population was much closer to the characteristics of European populations.

What must be added are the facts that most of the true Levantine population has been mixed White with Canaanite over the last 2,500 years, that European Whites descend mostly from Whites who passed through the region from circa 3,500 to 500 BC, and that the characteristics of southern Europeans have also changed with the ongoing Islamic conquests in those areas, significant genetic admixtures having been introduced by both Turks and Arabs.