I'm going to use this as an opportunity to 'dump' things I did not include in the original post because I realize they are probably relevant, and also because I haven't really compiled this all in text yet so it is helpful.
I think there are two main factors that make specifically Christians in the Levant almost universally get >90% Levantine, and Maronites like me get 100% or very close to it.
1. Any injections into our gene pool are not recent— though we do marry European Christians fairly often nowadays, we spent a shitton of time in isolation from other groups. This is less so but still significant amongst those like the Greek Orthodox and Melkite (Greek Catholics), who for the most part cohabited but did not intermix with other groups, but us Maronites just straight up lived in the mountains away from everyone else. We're greatly against consanguineous relations— we have
no provable problems with inbreeding/cousin marriage as a population, unlike some of our neighbors— but we're kind of our own, 'unmixed' ethnic group for the most part. You see this also with some smaller Muslim groups and the Druze, even more so in the Druze because they don't allow conversions in or out, or intermarriage. Seriously, they have chopped
2. Because of 1, we are often used as the "Levantine" samples for these types of DNA tests, so other admixture components from our history (Canaanite/Phoenician, Anatolian, Cypriot, minor Byzantine/Greek and Caucauses elements, maybe some mixed in Crusades as well) that could be theoretically identified by markers are factored into 'Levantine' populations— so obviously someone who is just like the sample will get 100%. We are still very similar to the most native modern Levant group though, the Samaritans.
I have all the normal Maronite genetic markers, but being a Syrian Maronite I have a little bit less Canaanite influence and higher Anatolian influence. I put a PCA below with me are Maronite_Tartous compared to a few other populations.
https://i.imgur.com/jXRos2H.png
This is why I plot moreso along the lines of ancient Anatolian samples, and why G25 calculators are biased to give me things like "95% Cypriot 5% [Peninsular] Arab," etc— most of the samples are Lebanese Maronite or Lebanese Orthodox, who are a bit more mixed with the native Canaanite populations than we are, even though we all do have that as a significant component. I've compiled a
small Imgur of my modelling troubles/fun because they are very silly honestly. I also carry a lot of alleles/have actually homozygous genotypes that are mostly found in European populations, but since what these indicate (lighter skin, light hair, colored eyes) is not that rare in my specific area of Syria amongst Christians/Shias etc, that's probably just a coastal Syrian thing really.
What matters is:
- My actual DNA markers are still in common with the mostly Lebanese Maronite sample
- I don't show any obviously weird mixture in the last few centuries, so there were not many opportunities to introduce H4a as a mtDNA haplo because of our isolation
I doubt my dad will also have a heavily European-dominated yDNA haplogroup because that would be far too much of a coincidence lol, but it would be funny. The DNA markers on tests like 23andMe I believe just suggest that I have a more "preserved" Anatolian component that comes from Maronite origins in Antioch and migration from there, and these markers are still associated w/ Lebanese Maronites despite the fact that we are slightly divergent, so I think it is not unreasonable to infer I am part of the 'original' group (I use this term very loosely) that was left behind as the majority progressed down to the Mount Lebanon region.
So yes, that's about all things vis-à-vis this topic/theory I can think of off the top of my head right now. All of these things really are just fascinating to me lmao. Today I am an Arab because I speak Arabic, I'm a citizen of the Syrian
Arab Republic, but I am quite different genetically and culturally from what I think the majority of the West associates with my country and my people (dark skin, Muslim, all of those stereotypes), so I like to learn more about where my ancestors "came from" because it helps me understand how I fit into all of it. :cool: