Dr. Julian Jansen van Rensburg has been working closely with local communities on Soqotra, Yemen in an exciting project funded by National Geographic that has just been published in Nature. This multidisciplinary project brought together experts using the latest in scientific methods coupled with oral and written histories to better understand the population history of Soqotra. Highlights from this study of the ancient DNA data from 39 individuals who lived on the island of Soqotra from 650-1750 CE include new evidence that there was not a complete population replacement between the Pleistocene and Holocene throughout the Arabian Peninsula. And, that unlike modern Arabians who derive their Levantine/Anatolian-related ancestry from a Neolithic farmer-related source, the medieval Soqotris had relatively more ancestry from ancient groups closer to Natufian hunter-gatherers.
Click here to read the full paper: https://rdcu.be/dx9iH
