Caucasoid Affinities of Somalis

It's been well documented that Ethiopians share a substantial amount of their ancestry with Western Eurasians (Caucasoids), but less talked about is the similar position of Somalis.

Anthropology

When the nonadaptive aspects of craniofacial configuration are the basis for assessment, the Somalis cluster with Europeans before showing a tie with the people of West Africa or the Congo Basin.

[...]

As our data show, the people of the Horn of Africa are craniofacially less distinct from a spectrum of samples marginally including South Asia and running all the way from the Middle East to northwest Europe than they are to any group in sub-Saharan Africa.

Brace et al. "Clines and clusters versus 'Race:' a test in ancient Egypt and the case of a death on the Nile". Am J Phys Anthro, 1993.

Genetics

The most distinct separation is between African and non-African populations. The northeastern-African — that is, the Ethiopian and Somali — populations are located centrally between sub-Saharan African and non-African populations.

[...]

The fact that the Ethiopians and Somalis have a subset of the sub-Saharan African haplotype diversity — and that the non-African populations have a subset of the diversity present in Ethiopians and Somalis — makes simple-admixture models less likely; rather, these observations support the hypothesis proposed by other nuclear-genetic studies (Tishkoff et al. 1996a, 1998a, 1998b; Kidd et al. 1998) — that populations in northeastern Africa may have diverged from those in the rest of sub-Saharan Africa early in the history of modern African populations and that a subset of this northeastern-African population migrated out of Africa and populated the rest of the globe.

+ 13 = Somalis

• 1-7 = Sub-Saharan Africans (Negroid)

• 8-11 = Sub-Saharan Africans (Khoisanid)

Δ 22-25 = Caucasoids (N. Europe and Mid-East)

Tishkoff et al. "Short Tandem-Repeat Polymorphism/Alu Haplotype Variation at the PLAT Locus: Implications for Modern Human Origins". Am J Hum Genet, 2000.

Racial Types

Related: Semitic West Eurasian Ancestry in Africa, Ancient Egyptians and Nubians Were Caucasoid