Horn of Africa
Hodgson et al. states:”The African Ethiopic ancestry is tightly restricted to HOA populations and likely represents an autochthonous HOA population. The non-African ancestry in the HOA, which is primarily attributed to a novel Ethio-Somali inferred ancestry component, is significantly differentiated from all neighboring non-African ancestries in North Africa, the Levant, and Arabia.”According to Hodgson et al. (2014), the non-African ancestry (Ethio-Somali) in the Cushitic speaking populations is distinct and unique to Cushitic and Semitic speaking HOA populations. Hodgson et al. states:”We find that most of the non-African ancestry in the HOA can be assigned to a distinct non-African origin Ethio-Somali ancestry component, which is found at its highest frequencies in Cushitic and Semitic speaking HOA populations.”When calculated the genetic distance (FST) between Ethiosemitic-speaking and Cushitic-speaking Ethiopians, and populations of the Levant, North Africa, and the Arabian Peninsula using two approaches: (1) the whole genome and (2) only the non-African component — in the whole-genome analysis, Ethiopian Semitic and Cushitic populations appear to be closest to the Yemeni; when only the non-African component is used, they are closer to the Egyptians and populations inhabiting the Levant. However this is due to the fact that the similarity is because of the Ethiopian contribution to the Yemeni gene pool. Pagani et al. (2012) states:”The Ethiopian similarity with the Yemeni detected throughout the genome could be explained as an Ethiopian contribution to the Yemeni gene pool, consistent with that observed with mtDNA.”A 2015 study by Dobon et al. identified an ancestral autosomal component of West Eurasian origin that is common to many modern Afroasiatic-speaking populations in Northeast Africa. Known as the ‘’Coptic’’ component, it peaks among Egyptian Copts who settled in Sudan over the past two centuries. The Coptic component evolved out of a main Northeast African and Middle Eastern ancestral component that is shared by other Egyptians and also found at high frequencies among Cushites (≈40–60%), with the remaining 40–60% of the ancestry of Cushites being of sub-Saharan East African origin. However, these percentages are not certain since Figure 3 of the study by Dobon et al. only features these percentages in the k=3 model.