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Map of the Near East and surrounding regions. The map shows location of present-day Armenia and neighbouring countries. Blue lozenges show the recruitment sites for Armenian samples used in this study. Political turmoil during World War One resulted in the displacement of the East Turkey Armenian population (orange lozenge) to present-day
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The Armenians are a culturally isolated population who historically inhabited a region in the Near East bounded by the Mediterranean and Black seas and the Caucasus, but remain underrepresented in genetic studies and have a complex history including a major geographic displacement during World War One. Here, we analyse genome-wide variation in 173...
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... have previously shown that studying genetic isolates also provides insights into human genetic variation and past demographic events. 5 For example, by studying Jews, Druze, and Christians from the Near East, we showed the region had more genetic affinity to Europe 2,000 years ago than at present. 5 In the present study, we investigate the Armenians, a population today confined to the Caucasus but who occupied Eastern Anatolia, reaching as far as the Mediterranean coast, up until the start of the 20 th century (Figure 1). Political turmoil in the region during World War One resulted in the displacement of the Armenian population and its restriction today to an area in the Caucasus between the Black and Caspian seas. ...
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... The vast majority of male individuals belonged to one of five Y-chromosome lineages (E1b1b1c-M123, G-M201, J1-M267, J2-M172 and R1b1b1-L23) associated with the Neolithic Expansion, and not with Indo-Aryan expansions or with southeastern European populations(Myres et al. 2011;Herrera et al. 2012).55 The data themselves are remarkable because they serve to establish a potential interface for Levantine and Caucasus populations, and, in anticipation of conclusions reached byHaber et al. (2015), with prehistoric Europe. These four main Y-chromosome lineages (plus a fifth, the rarer T-M184) comprise a substantial portion of those seen in the Caucasus, suggesting that eastern Anatolia and Armenia may have served as a staging ground for one or more of the critical human settlement events in the region. ...
This study investigates the genetic diversity and ethnohistory of Svaneti and its neighboring highland Georgian and breakaway regions in order to better understand the complex population history of the South Caucasus. The objectives of this project are to (1) document the biological diversity in contemporary settlements in the region of Svaneti; (2) compare patterns of gene diversity with Svaneti’s western and eastern neighbors, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, respectively; and (3) determine whether gene frequencies in Svaneti are evently distributed across geographic space by characterizing any village-level structuring. We will contextualize the findings within broader studies that address major regional population settlement events during the Upper Paleolithic, Neolithic, and Metal Ages, as well as the putative ‘Alan migration’ in the 4th century AD. To accomplish these goals, biological samples were collected from participants in Svaneti for genetic analysis, providing a more thorough coverage of village districts in Svaneti than has been achieved in previous studies. In addition, local-level ethnohistorical interviews were conducted in an effort to distinguish patterns of diversity resulting from long-term inhabitation versus those arising from recent immigration into the region. These DNA samples were characterized for mitochondrial DNA and Y-chromosome variation, and the resulting data analyzed with statistical and phylogenetic methods to define the biological affinities of highland Georgian populations, and reconstruct the migration and settlement history of the region. Data from published and unpublished sources on the genetic diversity of the greater Near East and Caucasus, specifically Abkhaz and Ossete populations, were used for phylogeographic and statistical comparison. The results revealed reduced Y-chromosome haplogroup diversity in Svans, with a predominance of G2a, although their paternal lineages occurred at frequencies comparable to those of neighboring highland populations. By contrast, mtDNA haplogroup diversity in Svans was both very high and reasonably similar in terms of frequency to other regional populations, with W6 and X2 occurring at unusually high frequencies. Interestingly, there was no geographic patterning of Y-chromosome or mitochondrial DNA diversity within Svaneti at the village level. Nevertheless, strong Y-chromosome affinities with eastern and western populations (i.e., Ossete and Abkhaz, respectively) living adjacent to the Svans indicated a common gene pool for these three ethno-linguistic groups in spite of linguistic differences at the language family level, and minimal contribution to the Ossete gene pool from Indo-European-speaking Alans.
