RT Journal
A1 Rodriguez-Flores, Juan
A1 Fakhro, Khalid
A1 Agosto-Perez, Francisco
A1 Ramstetter, Monica
A1 Arbiza, Leonardo
A1 Vincent, Thomas
A1 Robay, Amal
A1 Malek, Joel
A1 Suhre, Karsten
A1 Chouchane, Lofti
A1 Badii, Ramin
A1 Al-Nabet Al-Marri, Ajayeb
A1 Abi Khalil, Charbel
A1 Zirie, Mahmoud
A1 Jayyousi, Amin
A1 Salit, Jacqueline
A1 Keinan, Alon
A1 Clark, Andrew
A1 Crystal, Ronald G.
A1 Mezey, Jason
T1 Indigenous Arabs are descendants of the earliest split from ancient Eurasian populations
JF Genome Research 
JO Genome Research 
YR 2016 
FD January 04 
DO 10.1101/gr.191478.115 
SP gr.191478.115 
UL http://genome.cshlp.org/content/early/2016/01/04/gr.191478.115.abstract 
AB An open question in the history of human migration is the identity of the earliest Eurasian populations that have left contemporary descendants. The Arabian Peninsula was the initial site of the out of Africa migrations that occurred between 125,000 - 60,000 years ago, leading to the hypothesis that the first Eurasian populations were established on the Peninsula and that contemporary indigenous Arabs are direct descendants of these ancient peoples. To assess this hypothesis, we sequenced the entire genomes of 104 unrelated natives of the Arabian Peninsula at high coverage, including 56 of indigenous Arab ancestry. The indigenous Arab genomes defined a cluster distinct from other ancestral groups and these genomes showed clear hallmarks of an ancient out of Africa bottleneck. Similar to other Middle Eastern populations, the indigenous Arabs had higher levels of Neanderthal admixture compared to Africans but had lower levels than Europeans and Asians. These levels of Neanderthal admixture are consistent with an early divergence of Arab ancestors after the out of Africa bottleneck but before the major Neanderthal ad-mixture events in Europe and other regions of Eurasia. When compared to worldwide populations sampled in the 1000 Genomes Project, while the indigenous Arabs had a signal of admixture with Europeans, they clustered in a basal, outgroup position to all 1000 Genomes non-Africans when considering pairwise similarity across the entire genome. These results place indigenous Arabs as the most distant relatives of all other contemporary non-Africans and identify these people as direct descendants of the first Eurasian populations established by the out of Africa migrations.