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Ethnogenesis of the Arabs
By Agamemnon:
It makes perfect sense really.Long version: FGC1695 is one of the branches of FGC1723 associated with the emergence and dispersal of the earliest Arabic-speaking communities. That being said, odds are this branch, much like FGC1723, did not arise in the Arabian peninsula. All the evidence so far indicates that the Proto-Arabs came from an area encompassing what is now Southern Syria, Northern Jordan and NWern Saudi Arabia, a region which is roughly congruent with the Harrat ash-Shamah desert. The earliest mention of the Arabs in the epigraphic record is to be found on the second column of Shalmaneser III's inscription in the Kurkh monolith (line 94) in reference to the battle of Qarqar during the mid-9th century BCE:
The above translates roughly as "one thousand camels of Gindibu of the land of Arabia". The name "Gindibu" is probably an early version of the Arabic جندب jundub meaning "grasshopper". The oldest Arabic inscriptions are to be found in the form of the language of the Safaitic and Hismaic inscriptions, here's a map detailing the distribution of these early forms of Arabic:
As you can see, both Safaitic and Hismaic were spoken in the easternmost parts of the Levant and, at best, the NWern edge of the Arabian peninsula. Keep in mind that most of the other languages on the map (Thamudic B/C/D; Dadanitic; etc) cannot be categorised as Old Arabic and one of those (Taymanitic) could be tentatively classified as a NW Semitic language underscoring a fairly complex linguistic history in Arabia. A more precise map of the exact geographic distribution of these inscriptions gives us a good idea of the extent of the Proto-Arabic homeland:
So the spread of the early Arabs followed a north-to-south pattern, and not a south-to-north one from Yemen which is what traditional Arab historiography generally claims. Likewise, the spread of FGC1723 and its immediate branches (FGC8712, FGC1695, etc) also seems to follow a north-to-south pattern. The presence of FGC11 in one of the Bronze Age Sidonians further strengthens the current consensus placing the Proto-Semitic homeland in the Levant, in fact even FGC3723 is bound to have originated in the Levant even though this branch of FGC11 undoubtedly migrated deep into Arabia (all the way to Yemen) at least a thousand years before FGC1723.
Short version: Yes, while FGC1695 as a whole is strongly correlated with the emergence and dispersal of the earliest Arabs, in all likeliness its origin cannot be traced back to Arabia proper but rather to the eastern Levant (and that's because the Proto-Arabs themselves came from that area). While this branch is apparently tied to the ethnogenesis of the Arabs, this does not mean that the correlation is perfect, this lineage could've remained in some small isolated pockets in the Levant.
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I would surmise that they were more similar to Jordan_EBA (which is now called "Levant_BA_South"), in fact I would not be surprised if these samples turned out to be virtually identical to the Proto-Semites. Harney et al. seem to be of the same opinion, though they couch it in more cautious terms the idea is essentially the same:
We obtained additional insight by running qpAdm with Levant_BA_South as a target of two-way admixture between Levant_N and Iran_ChL, but now adding Levant_ChL and Anatolia_N to the basic 09NW “Right” set of 11 outgroups. The addition of the Levant_ChL causes the model to fail, indicating that Levant_BA_South and Levant_ChL share ancestry following the separation of both of them from the ancestors of Levant_N and Iran_ChL. Thus, in the past there existed an unsampled population that contributed both to Levant_ChL and to Levant_BA_South, even though Levant_ChL cannot be the direct ancestor of Levant_BA_South because, as described above, it harbors Anatolia_N-related ancestry not present in Levant_BA_South.
[...]
The Levant_BA_South population may thus represent a remnant of a population that formed after an initial spread of Iran_ChL-related ancestry into the Levant that was not affected by the spread of an Anatolia_N-related population, or perhaps a reintroduction of a population without Anatolia_N-related ancestry to the region."
Sidon_BA obviously has additional Iran_Chl and Armenia_EBA-like ancestry, while the Saudis are generally a poor proxy source (and that's ignoring the sheer diversity not just within Saudi Arabia but the Arabian peninsula as a whole, some populations such as the Mahra are much more appropriate if we are to use contemporary populations as proxies).
https://anthrogenica.com/showthread....lade-of-FGC11)
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Originally Posted by tipirneni
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