>>14404395>East Asians (surprisingly) have the highest amount of Neanderthal DNA despite Neanderthals mainly living in Europe and the Middle East.We now don't think that neanderthals lived in the middle east, or if they did only very few were around. The reason why Europe has less neanderthal dna is due to them being partially descendants of a group known as basal Eurasians, who left Africa about 100k years ago and lived from north Africa to Iran. Basal Eurasians never encountered Neanderthals, and indeed the more basal Eurasian ancestry you have, generally the less neanderthal ancestry you have. East Asians generally lack basal Eurasian ancestry, while basal Eurasian ancestry is maximized in near Easterners, Palestinians to be exact.
Actually did you know that about 6k years ago Arabs used to be completely indistinguishable from southern Euros, they were the exact same on a PCA. However due to large scale migrations across the planet a group of sub saharans moved north into the levant, giving rise to modern Arabs, who derive about 10% of their recent ancestry from the sub saharans. This actually indicates that Arabs used to have even less basal Eurasian, and only after that admixture did the ancestral component rise in frequency.
This is also why that if you look at modern Ethiopians/Khoe-san people, they have varying amounts of European ancestry, and that ancestry is indistinguishable from ancient Italian/Spaniard DNA. The ancient arabs also moved southwards, forgot to mention that, which is why Ethiopians are about half arab, genetically speaking, while they contributed some arab dna to khoe-sans.
