“Presuming any of these persons or populations existed

key issue. i don’t think we can go much further than the mid-first millennium BCE, so abraham, etc., is somewhat moot. additionally, the scholarship that i’ve seen suggests that abram’s sumerian origins may either be a translation error (a different ur than that of sumeria), or, an attempt to establish a mythological deep tie to mesopotamia during the first exile”
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OK, of course I have to defer to your scientific knowledge of genetics, but I would like to learn more about this.

I understand that even the Neanderthal genome is being worked out now, down to the 3 billion base pairs. So that must mean they are working with samples originating at least 30,000 years ago. It might be that while sets of the entire base pair structure can be worked out, perhaps the haplotypes which are used to work out population sub groups, are no longer available typically in samples from prior to 500 BCE as asserted above? If so, I find this surprising.

On the other hand, I have seen some studies of Sumerian burials where some genetic studies were attempted, and they must range back to 4000 to 6000 BCE.

I have also never heard before that anyone questioned the Sumerian origins of “Abram”.

Abram, could have well been a mythical person, and we do not have his remains to test genetically, but I would also like to know what good scholarship exists to dispute the Sumerian origins of Abram, again, presuming he is not entirely a fictional character.

There also must be well identified ancient burial places in Israel, which are associated with specific regional areas associated with different tribal settlements, according to the Old Testament, and again, if enough resources were applied over time it might be possible to see if those populations show a single family relationship, over all the tribal areas that can be identified.

My guess again would be that there would be more diversity found among ancient burials as well, and that not all ancient Hebrews do descend from a single family, a good concept for building social cohesiveness, but genetically likely, – maybe not.

A few comments.
1. The myth of the Jewish Berber Kahina is just that – a myth. Never happened.
2. Regarding mass conversions during the Roman Empire – this is not fully established. There were conversions but to what extent nobody knows at all. We have no figures. In fact the most probable theory is that most of these converts were never more than “Judaizing” and were then the first to convert to Christianity.
3. The Pharisee were the vast majority of Judean Jews and the mainstream, not just a sect among others. The situation was maybe different in Alexandria, we don’t know for sure, and it seems that “Hellenic Judaism” was much stronger there. But in the end, rabbinical Judaism has been the mainstream form of Judaism for 2300 years.

FWIW, my understanding is that while there are a few lines of evidence to suggest that some of the Khazar nobility / royalty adopted Judaism or at least Jewish practices, there was never any decent evidence for a “mass conversion” of the Khazar people as a whole.

The Italian / southern European connection would be fascinating to explore in more depth. I have read claims that a significant number of people from Calabria have Jewish ancestry (either through the Sephardic exodus or earlier migrations). It’d be very interesting to have a finer-grained look at Italy and perhaps southern France as well to see if there are particularly strong connections with any Jewish sub-groups.

Is the x-axis the same eigenvector on both? (And the y-axis different eigenvectors in each?) (Possibly both x-axises being the principal component?)

Also, what are the eigenvalues of each of these eigenvectors? It’s difficult to judge what is and isn’t negligible without the eigenvalues.

I.e., without knowing what the eigenvalues are for each of the eigenvectors (which are the axises in those PC plots) it’s difficult to know if all the variation we see in those graphs actually “matters” or if some of it can be considered “negligible”. (Well, assuming I’m reading those PC plots correctly.)

Like previous commenters, I’d also like to know more about the relationship between modern Jews and modern (non-Jewish) Palestinians. The default hypothesis is that the Palestinians are also hybrids between the Jews who stayed and converted, and migrants from Christian and Muslim areas.

The difficulty is that much of these migrations would come from neighbouring regions, which are likely to share much genetic heritage with the original Jewish population. I understand that the “Cohen modal haplotype” is more common in Jordan than among Cohanim (?) So if you find that Palestinians are closer to their neighbours than Jews, what does that tell you? Ancient origin, or migration?

So, regarding those far-flung, and “non-mainstream” Jewish groups, such as the Ethiopian, Keralite and Chinese, I assume that if they were put into the picture, they might not differ that much from their local Asians and Africans?

If these people simply converted en masse to judaism, “Khazar style”, without any significant influx of people, then yes. But if they were founded by Jewish settlers, then you could still detect a genetic signal – presumably on the Y chromosome.

For the Ethiopians, some people have already looked. Verdict: negative. OTOH, there seems to be a clear signal among the Southern African Lemba.

This autosomal study found little evidence of introgression from either Germans or Slavs, and based on uniparental markers as well as the pattern of clustering and the genetic distance data, admixture from southern Europeans (Romans/Italians, Greeks and probably Anatolians who were heavily Greek influenced during the Hellenistic period) during the pre-Christian era has been proposed. This fits the known presence of significant, proselytizing Jewish populations in these areas from at least 100 B.C.E. Moreover, intermarriage was severely punished by both sides after the rise of Christianity.

The Adygei don’t look so close in PC1 (4.4).

Mohammed, it’s all stolen from the Neandertals.