Judging from the lack of evidence we have of the ancient Sumerians, were the ancient Sumerians more likely to be genetically close to Europeans, Blacks, Mongoloid, Dravidian, or Semites? I am not asking what exactly the Sumerians are.

While there is no ancient DNA evidence retrieved so far from what was Sumer, there are already hundreds of ancient DNA samples extracted, analyzed and published for all interested parties originating in the Levant, Southern Anatolia, the Southern Caucasus and Western Iran (Zagros) stretching from the Mesolithic to the Iron Age. That is, though there are no Sumerian DNA samples proper, we do have genetic evidence about the populations that lived all around Sumer, right to the north, east and west of the Sumerians’ land.

Given how numerous, influential and powerful Sumerians were, it is little credible that they had remained in total genetic isolation from the neighboring nations for hundreds of years, when they were definitely the single biggest cultural influence on the entire West & Southwest Asian region and a civilization that included several large city-states, like Ur, Uruk and Lagash. Nevertheless there is practically no discernible African admixture (not even North African-specific one), East/Northeast Asian admixture or typically South Asian admixture in any of those samples from the periphery of Mesopotamia.

Therefore, I think it’s very unlikely that Sumerians, who presided over such a dominant populaton in the period transitioning between the Copper Age and the Middle Bronze Age, had a genetic makeup that included any significant, even if minor, proportion of any ancestral admixture that didn’t trickle into any of the neighboring lands in the Bronze Age or even afterwards (since Sumerians weren’t expeled or genocided, they were just conquered by Akkadians and became native speakers of a Semitic language after centuries of widespread Sumerian+Akkadian bilingualism, not before profoundly influencing the culture that would be later identified with Semitic-speaking Mesopotamians).

ABOVE: Approximate extent of Sumer marked in red, with the purple-circled areas identifying roughly the parts of West Asia that have already had Ancient DNA samples analyzed in released scientific papers.

Paternal haplogroup J-M171, aka. J2 is Sumerian representative gene. (The grey level represent the ratio of J2 in population of certain local area, not population itself.)

Saudi Arabians, some Sudanese, Caspeans, Dravidans, and even Londoners, Scandinavians, Italians, East Europeans, south part Spanish, north part Algerians, Madagascar people, some Vietnames, Uigur people in xinjjiang, and some northeast Chinese(:birthplace of Koreans) also have the gene.

The main difference between Neolithic West Asia (Anatolian and Levantine DNA samples) and Middle-Late Bronze Age West Asia was a huge expansion of Iranian_Neolithic and Caucasian_Mesolithic admixtures in the DNA samples from the later period in comparison with those from the same general area millennia before. That seems to indicate that the main (though not only) gene flow towards the East Mediterranean involved people who came from the Caucasus, easternmost Anatolia and particularly the Iranian Plateau and moved westward, almost certainly passing through Mesopotamia before they reached Western Anatolia and the Mediterranean shores of the Levant. Mixing with the locals, who were mostly of Natufian-like and Anatolian_Neolithic-like origin, they created the typical genetic makeup of West Asians from the Bronze Age onward, without any dramatic change in the local genetic makeup since then.

Therefore, if we’re talking about likelihood and intending to place a good bet about what the first Sumerian DNA samples will be like, I definitely think the likeliest distribution of sources of ancestry among the Sumerians will turn out to be a roughly even mixture between Iranian_Neolithic/Caucasian_Mesolithic (perhaps of the more diverged, eastern strain that expanded to South Asia in the Neolithic era) and Levant_Neolithic (itself a varying mixture of Natufian-related ancestry with Anatolia_Neolithic ancestry, which happened some time between the Late Mesolithic and the Early Neolithic). also believe that J2 will turn out to be a frequent Y-DNA lineage in Sumer, but it’s very incorrect to say J2 is “Sumerian” or, for that matter, “Greek”, “Phoenician”, “Turkish” or anything like that. For one haplogroups are basically never linked to just one specific ethnicity and region, unless it is a very specific and more geographically and chronologically restricted subclade of a certain haplogroup. J2 in particular is very ancient, its expansion and subdivision into many different clades certainly predates even the end of the Last Ice Age, so it was probably widespread and present in several distinct ethnic and linguistic groups even by 10,000 years ago, let alone after the huge population movements and expansions that postdate the Neolithic Revolution. J2 may have been common in Sumerian males, but that doesn’t make it a “Sumerian-specific lineage”. 

Their very distinctive language isolate could’ve come from anywhere including Anatolia, Iran, Caucasia, South-Central Asia (near Iran), Arabia, the Levant or-Mesopotamia itself (personally, I’ve always considered the possibility Sumerian wasn’t as “exotic” as it seems to many, it may have been just a remnant of the language families spoken in Southwest Asia before the expansion and hegemony of the Afro-Asiatic family, which was probably spread in its origin by North African immigrants into Southwest Asia during the Mesolithic period, not an autochthonous language family). Unlike genes, which can get mixed and recombined without erasing each other, languages replace each other (though linguistic substrates, remnants of a former language, can resist for much longer), and even a minor genetic input, provided the right political, social and economic pressures happen, can cause a wholesale linguistic shift.

Fortunately, we may know Sumerian DNA pretty soon. According to

 two Sumerian DNA samples were collected in 2015 and began being analyzed in 2020. BTW, considering Sumeria’s location right next to Elam, I find it most likely that the Sumerians had mostly Iranian farmer DNA and minor, albeit relevant, amounts of Anatolian farmer and Levantine farmer DNA. What do you think of that, Ygor? It might have existed in a much longer term, going back to the oldest roots of the two populations well before they had their own specific, distinctive cultures, languages and genetic makeups as we know them. It is in my opinion quite likely that the early Sumerians had substantial Iranian_Neolithic ancestry, and Dravidians also have a lot of Iranian_Neolithic ancestry, but it remains to be seen if Sumerians and Dravidians shared the same particular branch of Iranian_Neolithic admixture, because Narasimhan et al. (2019) found out that that cluster split into two (western and eastern) distinct branches probably before 10,000 years ago.

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