The Levant

Two papers in Cell. One is "Genomic History of Neolithic to Bronze Age Anatolia, Northern Levant, and Southern Caucasus" doi 10.1016/j.cell.2020.04.044. The other is readable, "Genomic History of the Bronze Age Southern Levant".

Together they agree that all the action in the Levant, which is Bronze Age Canaan, happened to the place from the north and northeast. So, we need to understand the north before we understand Canaan. The key, which I expect will appear in the press-releases, is During the Late Chalcolithic and/or the Early Bronze Age, more than half of the Northern Levantine gene pool was replaced.

Following that, the latter paper notes "Hurrian" personal names appear in the 15th and 14th centuries BC, at Megiddo and Taanach. The Hurrians proper were along the Jazira. Behind them, I think, were protoUrartians around Lake Van. At home, they weren't admixing with others much. Abroad, under the Mitanni especially they became a strong force in the Jazira. Note that they brought their women: ALA019 at Alalakh was an Aryanette. (Obviously she didn't bear a Y chromosome, they weren't #woke enough for that back then.)

At Chalcolithic Arslantepe, Davidski finds an R1b, in one man. That is not Aryan and, indeed, it's pre-Mitanni. R1b-V1636 is rare today but back then, it was rife in the North Caucasus Piedmont steppe which, in Eurogenes parlance, means Crimea on east and northeast. This piedmont proper - the old Circassian forest - should be Maykop and points south.

Back to pre-Palestine besides the admixture and incidental foreigners, the latter Cell paper makes clear that the genes correlate with the historical Canaan. Analogy is made with Yamnaya. It makes sense then to consider a Canaani ethnos.

Relative to that baseline, the coastal ports Sidon and Ashqelon were mixed-ethnic. So was Baq‛a, here more tilted to some eastern population.