‘The Middle East is an important region to understand human history, migrations, and evolution: it is where modern humans first expanded out of Africa, where hunter-gatherers first settled and transitioned into farmers, where the first writing systems developed, and where the first major known civilizations emerged,’ says Mohamed Almarri of the Wellcome Sanger Institute, UK. ‘However, despite this importance, the region has been historically understudied in genomic studies.’

 

In the new study, Almarri, Marc Haber (@MarcHaber, University of Birmingham, UK), and their colleagues sequenced 137 whole genomes from eight Middle Eastern populations.