Who are the Iranians genetically today?

If you have been a reader of this blog, you are likely familiar with the amazing history of the region.

How Celtic is Iran?

But what about today?

Regueiro et al (2006) and Grugni et al (2012) have performed large-scale sampling of Y chromosome haplogroups of different ethnic groups within Iran. They found that the most common paternal haplogroups were:

• J1-M267; commonly found among Semitic-speaking people, was rarely over 10% in Iranian groups.
• J2-M172: is the most common Hg in Iran (~23%); almost exclusively represented by J2a-M410 subclade (93%), the other major sub-clade being J2b-M12. Apart from Iranians, J2 is common in northern Arabs, Mediterranean and Balkan peoples (Croats, Serbs, Greeks, Bosniaks, Albanians, Italians, Macedonians, Bulgarians, Turks), in the Caucasus (Armenians, Georgians, Chechens, Ingush, northeastern Turkey, north/northwestern Iran, Kurds, Persians); whilst its frequency drops suddenly beyond Afghanistan, Pakistan and northern India. In Europe, J2a is more common in southern Greece and southern Italy; whilst J2b (J2-M12) is more common in Thessaly, Macedonia and central – northern Italy. Thus J2a and its subgroups within it have a wide distribution from Italy to India, whilst J2b is mostly confined to the Balkans and Italy,  being rare even in Turkey. Whilst closely linked with Anatolia and the Levant; and putative agricultural expansions, the distribution of the various sub-clades of J2 likely represents a number of migrational histories which require further elucidation.
• R1a-M198: is common in Iran, more so in the east and south rather than the west and north; suggesting a migration toward the south to India then a secondary westward spread across Iran. Whilst the Grongi and Regueiro studies did not define exactly which sub-clades Iranian R1a haplogrouops belong to, private genealogy tests suggest that they virtually all belong to “Eurasian” R1a-Z93. Indeed, population studies of neighbouring Indian groups found that they all were in R1a-Z93. This implies that R1a in Iran did not descend from “European” R1a, or vice versa. Rather, both groups are collateral, brother branches which descend from a parental group hypothesized to have initially lived somewhere between central Asia and Eastern Europe.
• R1b – M269: is widespread from Ireland to Iran, and is common in highland West Asian populations such as Armenians, Turks and Iranians – with an average frequency of 8.5%. Iranian R1b belongs to the L-23 subclade,  which is an older than the derivative subclade (R1b-M412) which is most common in western Europe.
• Haplogroup G and subclades: most concentrated in the Caucasus, it is present in 10% of Iranians.
• Haplogroup E and various subclades are frequently found among Middle Easterners, Europeans, northern and eastern African populations. They are present in less than 10% of Iranians.

Was there ever a society which was 100 percent rh negative?