Kendra Sirak, Julian Jansen Van Rensburg, Esther Brielle, Bowen Chen, Iosif Lazaridis, Harald Ringbauer, Matthew Mah, Swapan Mallick, Adam Micco, Nadin Rohland, Kimberly Callan, Elizabeth Curtis, Aisling Kearns, Ann Marie Lawson, J Noah Workman, Fatma Zalzala, Ahmed Saeed Ahmed Al-Orqbi, Esmail Mohammed Ahmed Salem, Ali Mohammed Salem Hasan, Daniel Charles Britton, David Reich
Soqotra, an island situated at the mouth of the Gulf of Aden in the northwest Indian Ocean between Africa and Arabia, is home to ~60,000 people subsisting through fishing and semi-nomadic pastoralism who speak a Modern South Arabian language. Most of what is known about Soqotri history derives from writings of foreign travellers who provided little detail about local people, and the geographic origins and genetic affinities of early Soqotri people has not yet been investigated directly. Here we report genome-wide data from 39 individuals who lived between ~650 and 1750 CE at six locations across the island and document strong genetic connections between Soqotra and the similarly isolated Hadramawt region of coastal South Arabia that likely reflects a source for the peopling of Soqotra...
April 2024: Nature Ecology & Evolution