Up for public comment at bioRxiv this week is this paper on the population history of the Near East, with a special focus on Armenians. Here's the abstract:
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 Armenians and compare them to 78 other worldwide populations. We find that Armenians form a distinctive cluster linking the Near East, Europe, and the Caucasus. We show that Armenian diversity can be explained by several mixtures of Eurasian populations that occurred between ~3,000 and ~2,000 BCE, a period characterized by major population migrations after the domestication of the horse, appearance of chariots, and the rise of advanced civilizations in the Near East. However, genetic signals of population mixture cease after ~1,200 BCE when Bronze Age civilizations in the Eastern Mediterranean world suddenly and violently collapsed. Armenians have since remained isolated and genetic structure within the population developed ~500 years ago when Armenia was divided between the Ottomans and the Safavid Empire in Iran. Finally, 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.
Unfortunately, the authors failed to even mention the main cause of what they're seeing; the massive influx of Ancient North Eurasian (ANE) admixture into the Near East. They included ancient genomes Oetzi the Iceman and La Brana-1 in their analysis, but not MA-1 or Mal'ta boy, the main ANE proxy.
MA-1 is a low coverage genome, and not easy to work with, but until better ANE reference genomes are sequenced, it simply can't be ignored in studies on the population history of West Eurasia. Here's why:
Above is my Fateful Triangle PCA. Note the eastern shift of the Islamic Near Eastern groups relative to their non-Islamic neighbors. Here are the relevant ANE ancestry proportions:
Anatolian Turks ~16.54%The differences aren't very dramatic, but they're consistent and, as per the PCA, hard to overlook. Indeed, the contrast would be even more obvious if we were to add to the list other exotic admixtures, such as East Asian, South Asian and/or Sub-Saharan.
Armenians ~15.48%
Iranians ~19.61%
Iranian Jews ~14.01%
Lebanese Muslims ~9.82%
Lebanese Christians ~7.14%
If you're wondering why it is that Muslims generally carry more ANE than their non-Muslim neighbors, it's probably because the Islamic expansion had a homogenizing effect on the Near East, and it didn't have as much of an impact on the religious minorities in the region.
How and when ANE arrived in the Near East is still a mystery which can only be solved with ancient DNA. However, my bet is that most of it came after the Neolithic from the Eurasian steppe, the northeast Caucasus and the Altai, with the Indo-Europeans, Kura-Araxes people and Turks, respectively.
Citation...
Marc Haber et al., Genetic evidence for an origin of the Armenians from Bronze Age mixing of multiple populations, bioRxiv, Posted February 18, 2015. doi: https://dx.doi.org/10.1101/015396
See also...
First look at an ancient genome from Neolithic Anatolia
411 comments:
«Oldest ‹Older 401 – 411 of 411@Mike
Don't know about the cities you mention.
Regarding Epiros and the Zagoria, the Mountain centers that I specifically reference above, they have remained continually Greek speaking from antiquity to the present day:
See:
The Despotate of Epiros 1267 -1779: A Contribution to the History of Greece in the Middle Ages, Donald M. Nicol:
http://www.cambridge.org/US/academic/subjects/history/european-history-1000-1450/despotate-epiros-12671479-contribution-history-greece-middle-ages
In 1430, Ioannina (Yannina), the Zagoria, Metsovo and Agrafa were granted the privilege to continue to speak their language, keep their land, not be settled, and practice their religion, under the condition that they accept the authority of the Ottomans.
http://dergiler.ankara.edu.tr/dergiler/66/1680/17911.pdf
This privileged status continued until 1868.
The likely reason that the Ottomans did this might have been so they could keep peace in the critical mountain passes between Turkey and Corfu.
These centers were among the first to revolt against the Ottomans, starting in 1854.
@Mike
"", but I suspect that the Greek language did not arrive in Greece with Steppe invaders"
Possibly. Might have come directly from Anatolia."
Found this today:
"The place of Armenian in the Indo-European language family: the relationship with Greek and Indo-Iranian"
Hrach Martirosyan
Leiden University
http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=cw6SAgAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA85&dq=greek+armenian&ots=akVn77Qpgi&sig=f2b4FYXorz0vpw7ryCxFqBFgDUc#v=onepage&q=greek%20armenian&f=false
Yes I have no doubt about the 15th century. I was clearly talking about the early Middle Ages; at a time when "nationality" didn't really exist in moreover. But i forgot to mention also butrint and dyrrachion.
So yes no doubt that some late roman, greek speaking groups remained in NW Greece. But the region was also the heartland of slavic tribes like the Vainuiti. Afterall ; Zagoria is obvously a slavic word which still survives despite systematic greek governmental expunging of slavic toponyms.
My focus lies in bronze age Greece , mind you
I want to know what caused the rise of places like Mycenae, Argos, etc. There is little evidence for steppe intrusions apart from some similarities to catacomb culture horse gear, which otherwise is dwarved by the amount of near eastern connections
I'm surprised how little new age stuff has been written on it
@Mike
I agree about nationality not really existing in the Greek Middle Ages.
What did exist was the Orthodox Church. And certainly within the Orthodox Church, people moved across the Balkans and spoke both Slavic and Greek languages.
I don't know how it happened, but somehow, they continued to speak Greek up in the Zagoria, Agrafa, Yannina, and adjacent regions.
There's some kind of blur between the traditional form of Greek spoken here, to the point that Andy (my husband) can half understand Macedonian, yet can also easily understand Athenian Greek.
I like the old village Mountain Greek. It's very emphatic and full of hyperbole. If you speak it in the cities, people will tell you that you're a hick.
"I want to know what caused the rise of places like Mycenae, Argos, etc."
Me too.
"otherwise is dwarved by the amount of near eastern connections"
Hammond suspected the connection between Asia Minor and Greece. I guess as more archaeology is done in Turkey, Greece and the Balkans, especially with some of the new methods, including precise dating and other methods, we'll learn more.
I even noticed a paper published just this week in quaternary international a three million year old mammoth find on the head waters of the Haliacmon (very close to Mount Voion.)
Haliacmon means the Salt River. I suspect that animals and humans have been going their for eons, attracted by the salt in the river.
Yes Marnie
I agree with the undeniable correspondences between greek , Armenian and Indo- Iranian; which doesn't really sit well with a steppe hypothesis.
Moreover , I suspect the Iranian spoken by the the Black Sea Scythians arrived there later in prehisotry rather than having been there since PIE times
Sorry for double-posting
Smolensk hunter-gatherer ~4000 BC was R1a
http://www.academia.edu/9452168/Archaeology_of_lake_settlement_IV-II_mill._BC_Mazurkevich_A._Polkovnikova_M._Dolbunova_E._ed (table is on page 294)
@Davidski
"What I'm seeing in the data are not two different Near Eastern or West Asian components, but two different types of ANE; one mostly found across northern Europe, Siberia and the Americas, and now basically known as EHG, and another mostly limited to West Asia, Central Asia and South Asia."
That'll be interesting.
@Mike
Yes, I agree that the hypothesis of the Pontic steppe being central to the IE migrations is very weak at this point. Its role will be secondary at best.
But the important thing is that David is now into something interesting, willing to explore much more interesting options and try to come out with something new that will make a lot more sense and will be much more helpful.
I don't doubt that when he gets his mind into a more scientific mode he can do a lot of things with it, so let's wait for him to get the genomes and see what he learns from them.
With that information we can better discuss the details, routes, etc... and bring the discussion into a new level (instead of being stuck as we've been lately, sounding a bit like broken records).
I totally agree. Im already detecting a change ... :)
As gifted as Dave is though with formulating, there is no substitue for hard data - aDNA. However, at present, some 80% of west Eurasia is still a blank
Yes, of course. We're still missing a lot of data and still bound to speculate. But hey, that's part of the fun :)
Another thing: Anatolian Turks are 15% to 20% blue/green eyed. ANE descendants?
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