That is because I am skeptical that the Fulani would be able to maintain genetic distinctiveness for ~10,000 years from other populations around them. What does that imply? I think that that means that the Fulani have an origin in relatively recent historic time, on the order of 2,000, not 10,000, years. So what can we see here? First, let's reiterate something: as in the case of the populations of the Horn of Africa the West Eurasian element in the Fulani is difficult to find in "pure" form in the populations from which it putatively derived. I also assumed this because in some admixture runs a "pure" Fulani cluster partitions out, which is not unexpected for stabilized hybrid populations ( all human populations are stabilized hybrids if you go back far enough). Additionally, in both the case of the Fulani and the Ethiopian and Cushitic groups the admixture is widely distributed and even enough to imply that they are old events. Geographically these two symmetric admixture events make sense, but the exclusivity is still a bit surprising. These populations also seem to be compounds of a Sub-Saharan Africa element with a West Eurasian one, but in their case the admixture is almost exclusively from a Southwest Eurasian (Arabian) component. To me this serves as a peculiar mirror of what you see in the Cushitic and Ethiopian Semitic peoples of the far east of the Sahel-Sudan latitudinal region. In fact, the non-Sub-Saharan African ancestry of the Fulani is almost exclusively of this origin. The Fulani (Fula) people of the western Sahel seem to have a relatively old West Eurasian component which has distinct affinities with the "Maghrebi" element discerned by Henn et al.
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