ARMENIANS HAVE A HIGH GENETIC AFFINITY TO ANCIENT EUROPEANS, NEW STUDY REVEALS
16:16, 26 Feb 2015
Siranush Ghazanchyan
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 pre-existing 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.
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