Indian DNA in Roman Era Levant

 A Genetic History of the Near East from an aDNA Time Course Sampling Eight Points in the Past 4,000 Years

The Iron and Classical Ages in the Near East were marked by population expansions carrying cultural transformations that shaped human history, but the genetic impact of these events on the people who lived through them is little-known. Here, we sequenced the whole genomes of 19 individuals who each lived during one of four time periods between 800 BCE and 200 CE in Beirut on the Eastern Mediterranean coast at the center of the ancient world’s great civilizations. We combined these data with published data to traverse eight archaeological periods and observed any genetic changes as they arose. During the Iron Age (∼1000 BCE), people with Anatolian and South-East European ancestry admixed with people in the Near East. The region was then conquered by the Persians (539 BCE), who facilitated movement exemplified in Beirut by an ancient family with Egyptian-Lebanese admixed members. But the genetic impact at a population level does not appear until the time of Alexander the Great (beginning 330 BCE), when a fusion of Asian and Near Easterner ancestry can be seen, paralleling the cultural fusion that appears in the archaeological records from this period. The Romans then conquered the region (31 BCE) but had little genetic impact over their 600 years of rule. Finally, during the Ottoman rule (beginning 1516 CE), Caucasus-related ancestry penetrated the Near East. Thus, in the past 4,000 years, three limited admixture events detectably impacted the population, complementing the historical records of this culturally complex region dominated by the elite with genetic insights from the general population.

Hellenistic and Early Roman Period Levantines carried about 7-8% Iron Age South Asian ancestry. This is confirmed by the haplogroups found in these Roman era Levantines. 

 The relationship of ancient Lebanon with Central and South Asia also manifests in the presence of haplogroup L1a1-M27 among the modern Lebanese Y chromosome lineages (Figure S10). Haplogroup L1a1-M27 is common today in Central and South Asia but rare elsewhere.  We tested46 (see Supplemental Methods) the coalescence of the five L1a1-M27 Lebanese chromosomes and found that they all derived from a man who lived around 450 BCE–50 CE, a time interval overlapping with the Hellenistic period

The resuslts are further confirmed by haplotype segment sharing.

We then analyzed haplotype segments shared between the ancient Lebanese and modern populations in set 2 by using ChromoPainter44 on 2.5 million imputed SNPs and found that two Hellenistic individuals (SFI-5 and SFI-12) and one early Roman individual (SFI-11) had excess haplotype sharing with Central and South Asians (Figures 2E and S9), thus confirming the qpAdm results.

So some Indian men carrying L1a1-M27 migrated to the Levant around the Hellenistic Period, the time when and their haplogroup exist till date in the modern Lebanese, along with trace Indian admix.