A Deeper Dive
An overview of the main paternal line among Palestinian Arabs
In my previous post, I mentioned briefly that a majority of Palestinian Arabs carry Y-Chromosomal lineages that are of Peninsular Arab origin. In this post we shall be looking at the data in a more detailed manner.
The above map (courtesy of Phylogeographer), chiefly based on the results of commercial DNA tests, shows the frequency of a lineage known as FGC1722/S21237, a branch of J1-FGC11. Its MRCA [Most Recent Common Ancestor] estimates place the last common ancestor during the 2nd millennium BCE (FTDNA’s estimates ascribe a Middle Bronze Age ancestor, somewhat more realistic in my view), the lineage’s main expansion starts during the Late Bronze Age. Most importantly, as can be seen on the map, it is the main Arab paternal line (but not by any means the only one, even if it is the most prominent), a marker tracking Arab dispersals from the period of Proto-Arab unity to mediaeval times. Its distribution aligns very closely with the extent of Arabic speech and the frequencies, peaking in Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Libya and Algeria, collapse suddenly at the fringes of the Arab world. As such, it is also the main lineage used by Arab genealogists in trying to establish, confirm or infirm the validity of tribal pedigrees, its subclades are therefore strongly correlated with certain tribes and clans and the phylogeny reflects this as well.
Among Palestinian Arabs, S21237 alone accounts for 25% of all samples, making it by far the most common paternal lineage. Looking further into S21237’s sub-branches, the overwhelming majority falls under FGC4415:
But before we take a closer look at FGC4415, I would first like to draw your attention to one of the three ancient S21237 samples at our disposal. Syr005 is an Umayyad-era individual found in Tell Qarassa in what is now Southern Syria (you can find the two remaining ancients labeled as “Tell Masaikh (Arab - Early Islamic)” & “Brekinjova (Balkan IA profile)” on the following map).
While this individual carried a clade which isn’t nestled under FGC4415, the sample is informative for a number of reasons, first because we are dealing with an individual affiliated to an intrusive population, something that is quite clear judging from the sample’s ostensibly Peninsular Arab profile.
In turn, considering that syr005 is certainly representative of the Arab conquerors who invaded the Levant and settled therein during the second half of the 1st millennium CE, this sample’s position on the S21237 tree can be used as a standard through which the other subclades’ relationship to the Arab conquests might be gauged. As indicated above, syr005 carried a clade of Y10887 (FGC1695 on FTDNA, which is also FGC4415’s parent branch), ZS12531:
Now the interesting thing about this clade is that while syr005 is dated 666-768 cal CE its MRCA is only slightly older, circa 404 CE. In simple terms, this enables us to determine that the temporal range for any given branch’s MRCA to be tied to the initial wave of Arab conquests falls within 400-800 CE. ZS12531 is scattered far and wide, from Sudan (Hassania tribe) to Iraq, it also has one subclade comprising a Gazan sample (Y173032 below):
With that in mind, let us return to FGC4415. The latter is commonly seen as a Maˤaddite line (that is to say, tied to the northern “arabised” Adnanite tribes), even though I will not address the convoluted ways in which tribal genealogy and genetics are intertwined in this post. Its distribution does seem to be more northerly, as it peaks in the Jazire (Upper Mesopotamia) and the Nafud desert as well as the Levant, with smaller hotspots in SW Arabia.
FGC4415 is one of the largest sub-branches under Y10887/FGC1695, and it does include clades with a relatively early spread date, that is to say prior to the Arabian conquests of the second half of the 1st millennium CE. This includes branches found among Jews, such as BY527 > FT56715, clades with MRCAs that are invariably bound to predate the migrations of the Arabian conquerors of the 7th to 9th centuries CE and therefore represent an earlier set of migrations.
What of the Palestinian Arab clades under FGC4415 then?
FGC60129 accounts for a very large portion of the Palestinian Arab clades under FGC4415, as can be seen below the MRCA predates the Arab conquests, that being said we’re already seeing a lone Palestinian Arab subclade with a MRCA that lived c. 1000 CE (there’s quite a bit of that as well).
Going further downstream, a pattern emerges, most of the Palestinian Arab clades have MRCAs that fall firmly within the range of the Arab conquests:
This also applies to more discrete Palestinian Arab clades that are not under FGC60129, such as FT350914 > ZS11083:
In a nutshell, the absolute majority of Palestinian Arab clades under FGC4415 are bound to be closely tied to the Arabian conquerors that swept into the Levant starting from the 7th century CE. This counts not only for this particular sub-branch but for much of FGC1722, including minor lines such as Y132447.
This is even true of different clusters of YSC0000080/Z1884 that are not under FGC11, YSC0000076 > ZS1585 deserves special mention since it is the main paternal line amongst Negev Bedouins:
From those J1 lines alone, 1/3 of all Palestinian Arab paternal lines can be uncontroversially tied to the Arab conquerors and are therefore utterly unlikely to have had a presence in the Levant beforehand.
Finally, it should be kept in mind that while the markers that have been discussed in this post are diagnostic Arab markers (that is to say, they are bound to have been present among the Proto-Arabs), they are not the only Peninsular lines found in Palestinian Arabs. Under J1 for example, some of the pre-Arab lines more commonly found in Southern Arabia also make an appearance in some Palestinian Arabs and while one could propose that those cases are sometimes indicative of the line’s Eneolithic-EBA Levantine origin there is much to bet that many of those were also brought by the Arabian conquerors, to say nothing of other haplogroups. Furthermore, we are only dealing with self-reported Palestinians and are not taking either Jordanians nor samples (mainly from the HGDP dataset) labeled as Israeli into account, which would inevitably increase the proportion of Peninsular Arab lines.
In short, this small excursus shows that the claims according to which Palestinian Arabs are merely Arabised in the cultural, religious and linguistic sense and otherwise have only minimal amounts of Arabian ancestry would not withstand even the most superficial form of scrutiny.
could you please do a post on egypt ?
arab muslims over there claim that they are ''arabized or islamized '' copts, therefore trying to claim that they are indigenous which couldn't be further from the truth
Intriguing post Aga, awesome to see you on Substack!
I agree there is a trend for Arabian expansion lineages to have patterns in their structure and TMRCAs for a lot of coalescence to fall in the time frame you identified. But for J-FGC60129 (Top level TMRCA: ca. 300 CE +/- 300 years) and its closest relatives downstream J-ZS10420 (ca. 300 BCE +/- 350 years), why do you think almost all of the samples are Southern Levantines, proximately from Palestine and Jordan? If these are obvious Arabian expansion lineages, why is the clade's distribution skewed so heavily toward the Southern Levant?
Is the idea that J-ZS10420>FGC60129 represents a specific Arabian tribe whose descendants disproportionately ended up in this region? After all, patterns in phylogenetic structure can arise convergently more easily than such patterns in geographic spread, especially given how well tested Arabians are. How might this relate to a clade like J-M10667, which contains Levantines including Palestinians from Gaza and Ramallah within a relatively old clade also downstream J-FGC4415? Might these rather be lineages related to Idumeans and similar populations rather than being tied to Islamic-era Arabian expansions? Thanks for your consideration.