[John Will]

I remember an article about the topic in Scintific America stating that there is a High percentage of European blood in the black population in America.

Probally a reason some Arabs look like Europeans. The Roman Empire certinaly helped out with Genetic mixing between the populations of Europe and the Middle East and Africa.

[demecleze]

It is thought by most historians (although they avoid mentioning it for PC reasons) that Indo-Europeans ruled the middle east(like at least 4000 years ago) as they did India. But the caste system in India remained (with inevitable mixing) while the Semitic peoples (loose racial grouping that includes Arabs and Jews) appeared to have finally revolted with the advent of Islam.

As far as I am aware the Palestinians were originally an Indo-European tribe.

One has to be careful with mtDNA as this is indicative of line of mothers, one has to look at chromosomal DNA and determine genetic distance values for populations. I have looked at these and are about what you would expect if your read history. But it is certainly conceivable that Semitic people in the middle east have mixing with Sub-Saharan Africans over the years.

So in the end you have alot of mixing in the middle east over the years.

This subject is a little faux pas as the Germans went a little bit berserk with the advent of racial science. I see it finally coming back into vogue, that is great for historians. As the composition of existing populations can help figure out quandaries. Such as the English being very close to Frisian and Danish which seems to indicate that the Celtic Britons were pushed off the land or killed during the Anglo-Saxon invasions.