Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Genes Reveal Grain of Truth to Queen of Sheba Story

Luca Pagani of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Hinxton, UK, examined samples of Ethiopian genomes and noticed that some individuals had components of both African and non-African lineages. Delving deeper, Pagani and his colleagues discovered that the non-African genetic components had much more in common with people living in Syria and around the eastern Mediterranean than in the nearer Arabian peninsula. What's more, the gene flow probably took place around 3000 years ago [when Solomon and the Queen of Sheba are supposed to have met].

The finding is backed by linguistic research, which shows that one of the four language families of Ethiopia migrated from the same region about 3000 years ago. "Middle Eastern language came to Ethiopia along with Middle Eastern genes," Pagani says. "And that is when the Queen of Sheba legend is supposed to have happened."

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