The genetic palimpsest of the Middle East

TreeMix on 100,000 SNPs, migration parameter = 5 When I read Genome-Wide Diversity in the Levant Reveals Recent Structuring by Culture in PLoS Genetics last week, one of my thoughts was "where is the tree"? Thankfully all the data is online, so I simply ran TreeMix on it. After a number of runs I know understand perhaps why there is no figure emphasizing a tree. There just isn't that much informative yield from what I can tell, though the basic inference from the paper is recapitulated. You can see the results in the figure above, from one of my TreeMix runs. Overall, what this paper reinforces is that there are sharp genetic distinctions across ethno-religious boundaries within the modern Middle East which confound attempts to use geography to predict variation.