Armenians Have A High Genetic Affinity To Ancient
Europeans, New Study Reveals
By Siranush Ghazanchyan
armradio.am / peopleofar.com - 26/2/2015
A new study into Armenian genetics reveals that present day
Armenians are a mixture of local Bronze Age people who have retained
homogeneity for over three thousand years, and show great affinity
to Neolithic Europeans, PeopleOfAr reports.
Armenians are an ethno-linguistic-religious group distinct from their
surrounding neighbors. They have their own church, the Armenian Apostolic
Church, which was founded in the 1st century CE, and became in 301 CE the
first branch of Christianity to become a state religion.
They have also their own alphabet and language which is classified as an
independent branch of the Indo-European language family.
The historical homeland of the Armenians sits north of the Fertile
Crescent, a region of substantial importance to modern human evolution.
Genetic and archaeological data suggest farmers expanding from this region
during the Neolithic populated Europe and interacted/admixed with preexisting huntergatherer populations.
Furthermore, Armenia's location may have been important for the spread of
Indo-European languages, since it is believed to encompass or be close to
the Proto-Indo-European homeland (Anatolia or Pontic Steppe) from which the
Indo-Europeans and their culture spread to Western Europe, Central Asia and
India.
Bel tried to impose his tyranny upon Hayk's people. But proud Hayk refused
to submit to Bel. As soon as his son Aramaneak was born, Hayk rose up and
led his people back into his ancestral land of Ararad. At the foot of the
mountain he built a village and called it with his name "Haykashen".
According to a new study into Armenian genetics, published on the bioRxiv
preprint service for biology, the Armenian people derive their ancestry
from a number of local Bronze age tribes. A team of international scholars
(from UK, Spain, Italy and Lebanon) led by Marc Haber have analysed
Armenian genes and compared them to 78 other worldwide populations
including some ancient DNA samples. They conclude that:
The Armenians show signatures of an origin from mixture of diverse
populations occurring 3,000 to 2,000 BCE. This period spans the Bronze Age,
characterized by extensive use of metals in farming tools, chariots and
weapons, accompanied by development of the earliest writing systems and the
establishment of trade routes and commerce.
These mixture dates also coincide with the legendary establishment of
Armenia in 2,492 BCE.
However, unlike Armenian neighbors the Armenians show no significant traces
of further admixture after 1,200 BCE, some three and a half thousand years
ago. It appears that Armenians have stopped mixing around that time and
today carry little to no mixture of foreign populations, retaining their
ethnic and cultural homogeneity since the end of the Bronze Age. Haber et.
al describe:
Tests suggest that Armenians had no significant mixture with other
populations in their recent history and have thus been genetically isolated
since the end of the Bronze Age, 3,000 years ago.
The authors explain the cessation of Armenian admixture as resulting from a
collapse of Bronze Age civilizations coupled with a development of Armenian
cultural distinctiveness.
Admixture signals decrease to insignificant levels after 1,200 BCE, a time
when Bronze Age civilizations in the eastern Mediterranean world suddenly
collapsed, with major cities being destroyed or abandoned and most trade
routes disrupted. This appears to have caused Armenians' isolation from
their surroundings, subsequently sustained by the cultural/linguistic/
religious distinctiveness that persists until today.
Armenians' adoption of a distinctive culture early in their history
resulted in their genetic isolation from their surroundings. Their genetic
resemblance today to other genetic isolates in the Near East, but not to
most other Near Easterners, suggests that recent admixture has changed the
genetic landscape in most populations in the region.
We compared patterns of admixture in Armenians to other regional populations
and detected signals of recent admixture in most other populations. For
example, we find 7.9% (±0.4) East Asian ancestry in Turks from admixture
occurring 800 (±170) years ago coinciding with the arrival of the Seljuk
Turks in Anatolia from their homelands near the Aral Sea. We also detect
sub-Saharan African gene flow 850 (±85) years ago in Syrians, Palestinians
and Jordanians, consistent with previous reports on recent gene flow from
Africans to Levantine populations after the Arab expansions. This genetic
isolation makes Armenians quite unique in the region as the study goes on
to describe:
The genetic landscape in most of the Middle East appears to have been
continuously changing. Modern Armenians much more so than the Turks,
therefore appear to be a prime representatives of ancient Anatolian
inhabitants:
The position of the Armenians within the global genetic diversity is unique
and appears to mirror the geographical location of Anatolia.
Previous genetic studies have generally used Turks as representatives of
ancient Anatolians. Our results show that Turks are genetically shifted
towards Central Asians, a pattern consistent with a history of mixture with
populations from this region.
These results seem to corroborate with previous studies (Hellenthal et.
al., 2014) which also didn't find admixture with Armenians for the past 3
to 4 thousand years.
Affinity to Ancient Europeans
The Armenian Highlands and Anatolia form a bridge connecting Europe, the
Near East and the Caucasus. Anatolia's location and history have placed it
at the centre of several modern human expansions in Eurasia: it has been
inhabited continuously since at least the early Upper Palaeolithic, and has
the oldest known monumental complex built by huntergatherers in the 10th
millennium BCE (Armenian Portasar commonly known as Gobekli Tepe). It is
believed to have been the origin and/or route for migrating Near Eastern
farmers towards Europe during the Neolithic, and has also played a major
role in the dispersal of the Indo-European languages. Armenia's location at
the northern tip of the Near East suggests a plausible relationship to the
expanding Neolithic farmers.
In order to compare Armenians with ancient Europeans the authors have
analysed ancient DNA samples from Europe including that of Otzi the Iceman
(a 5,300-year-old individual discovered on the Italian part of the Otztal
Alps). The study concludes:
We show that Armenians have higher genetic affinity to Neolithic Europeans
than other present-day Near Easterners, and that 29% of the Armenian
ancestry may originate from an ancestral population best represented by
Neolithic Europeans.
We find in Armenians and other genetic isolates in the Near East high
shared ancestry with ancient European farmers with ancestry proportions
similar to presentday Europeans but not to present-day Near Easterners...
Our tests show that most of the Near East genetic isolates ancestry shared
with Europeans can be attributed to expansion after the Neolithic period.
The long period of genetic isolation makes Armenians in particular unique
to the region. The study of the Armenian DNA is therefore very interesting
to scholars who study European DNA, because to them Armenians are like an
image of what the DNA groups were before they started spreading out.These
results suggest that the Armenians (the genetic isolates in the Near East)
probably retain features of an ancient genetic landscape in the Near East
that had more affinity to Europe than most of the present day Near Eastern
populations do.
Founded in 1890, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory is a private, non-profit
institution with research programs focusing on cancer, neuroscience, plant
genetics, genomics and quantitative biology
The study has been conducted by Marc Haber, Massimo Mezzavilla, Yali Xue, David Comas,
Paolo Gasparini, Pierre Zalloua and Chris Tyler-Smith
http://www.armradio.am/en/2015/02/26/armenians-have-a-high-geneticaffinity-to-ancient-europeans-new-study-reveals/
http://www.peopleofar.com/2015/02/25/armenians-have-a-high-geneticaffinity-to-ancient-europeans/