Prof. Pierre Zalloua

but also other people tracked even more eastward and that's how they populated the East Asia up to Australia.

But what we know of these ancient people who actually came to Arabia, not very much because the climate changed so much in Arabia that I would say some of these early cultures who were actually hunter-gatherers, of course, they lived in very small communities and they lived close to the water

And then as the last glacial period happened, with the ice melting around 18,000 years ago, these communities actually either escaped or went underwater.

That's why we still haven't discovered those people yet.

I think, as I said earlier, we will get to know more about this when we do some underwater archaeology, and I think we're going to get there soon.

So after that, Arabia was dry for a long time up until, as I said, the last, we call it the African humid period.

It started to happen around 14,000 years ago, and then it peaked around 8,000 to 7,000 years ago in Arabia, and then that's when Arabia was populated again.

Well, this is what I think, and I could be wrong, but this is what so far the DNA that I've worked with have told us, is yes, most of modern Arabians that we see today have a huge DNA component from the Levant and that region.

Of course, you also have the Iranian component as well present.

You have the Natufian present as well.

And importantly, you have two other components into modern Arabia.

One from East Africa, you see it.

You see another one from Egypt.

There's a lot of

or common lineages between Egypt and Arabia.

And you see from the East through Dilmun, the Bahrain interaction with the East, you know, with the Indian trade and all of this.

So, but these last three are more recent.

So Egypt, East Africa, and India were much more recent, whereas the Levant input was much older than this to Arabia.

So if I want to say, you know,

The population of Arabia today, I would say, yes, Levantine, mostly Egypt, East Africa, and some part of India.