Abstract
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. Medieval Soqotri can be modelled as deriving ~86% of their ancestry from a population such as that found in the Hadramawt today, with the remaining ~14% best proxied by an Iranian-related source with up to 2% ancestry from the Indian sub-continent, possibly reflecting genetic exchanges that occurred along with archaeologically documented trade from these regions. In contrast to all other genotyped populations of the Arabian Peninsula, genome-level analysis of the medieval Soqotri is consistent with no sub-Saharan African admixture dating to the Holocene. The deep ancestry of people from medieval Soqotra and the Hadramawt is also unique in deriving less from early Holocene Levantine farmers and more from groups such as Late Pleistocene hunter–gatherers from the Levant (Natufians) than other mainland Arabians. This attests to migrations by early farmers having less impact in southernmost Arabia and Soqotra and provides compelling evidence that there has not been complete population replacement between the Pleistocene and Holocene throughout the Arabian Peninsula. Medieval Soqotra harboured a small population that showed qualitatively different marriage practices from modern Soqotri, with first-cousin unions occurring significantly less frequently than today.
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Data availability
The aligned sequences are available through the European Nucleotide Archive under accession number PRJEB66485. Genotype data are available at https://reich.hms.harvard.edu/datasets. Any other relevant data are available from the corresponding authors upon reasonable request.
Code availability
The custom code used in this study is available at https://github.com/DReichLab/ADNA-Tools.
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Acknowledgements
We thank N. Adamski, R. Bernardos and Z. Zhang for contributions to data generation, processing and curation. We acknowledge the help and support we received from the Soqotra Heritage Project team, including A. E. A. S. Al-Rumali, M. T. H. Ali, A. S. S. A. Al-Ameri and S. M. O. Sulaiman. We thank N. Salem for translation of the manuscript title and abstract to Arabic. The work of J. Jansen van Rensburg in Soqotra was supported by the National Geographic Society (NGS-61123R-19). D. Reich is an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), and the ancient DNA laboratory work and analyses were also supported by National Institutes of Health grant HG012287, by John Templeton Foundation grant 61220, by the Allen Discovery Center program, which is a Paul G. Allen Frontiers Group advised program of the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, and by a gift from J.-F. Clin. This article is subject to HHMI’s Open Access to Publications policy. HHMI lab heads have previously granted a nonexclusive CC BY 4.0 licence to the public and a sublicensable licence to HHMI in their research articles. Pursuant to those licences, the author-accepted manuscript of this article can be made freely available under a CC BY 4.0 licence immediately upon publication.
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K.S., J.J.V.R. and D.R. designed the research. J.J.V.R., A.S.A.A.-O., E.M.A.S., A.M.S.H. and D.C.B. excavated and/or contributed to the acquisition and description of the osteological and archaeological data. K.S., E.B., B.C., I.L., D.R. and H.R. carried out population genetics analyses. M.M., S.M., A.M. and A.K. contributed to data generation, processing and curation. K.C., E.C., A.M.L., J.N.W. and F.Z. performed laboratory work under the supervision of N.R. K.S. and J.J.V.R wrote and revised the manuscript with input from all co-authors.
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Sirak, K., Jansen Van Rensburg, J., Brielle, E. et al. Medieval DNA from Soqotra points to Eurasian origins of an isolated population at the crossroads of Africa and Arabia. Nat Ecol Evol 8, 817–829 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-024-02322-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-024-02322-x