[monocasa]

> many of the peoples who once inhabited those lands have long since been replaced

That is overstated. "Arab" in a lot of cases is more a cultural moniker than a genetic one. For instance the Palestinians are some of the genetically closest modern populations to the ancient Canaanite remains we've studied.

[evolighting]

True, I didn't phrase that perfectly. It is my opinion that climate change poses an even greater threat to the Middle East. It's reaching a point where states and groups can no longer sustain the massive resources required to fuel large-scale warfare like they used to. Therefore, what I am really getting at is that the sheer intensity of competition in East Asia—particularly those existential social upheavals—is the true catalyst for what we call a 'cooperative' culture.

[zozbot234]

This is unsurprising. Wholesale genetic replacement basically doesn't exist unless there's a huge plague that kills 90% of the population or something (this happened in the Americas when the Europeans arrived, there are other cases of it in history but it's plenty rare). From an ancestry perspective, populations tend to be derived from the people that were there thousands of years prior; cultures and even elites can spread and migrate and cause huge material changes, but the bulk of the people just stay put.