8000 years of mtDna continuity in the South Caucasus

Angela

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See:

See:
Eight Millennia of Matrilineal Genetic Continuity in the South Caucasus

http://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(17)30695-4

Allentoft and Willerslev are in on this one.

"The South Caucasus, situated between the Black and Caspian Seas, geographically links Europe with the Near East and has served as a crossroad for human migrations for many millennia [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. Despite a vast archaeological record showing distinct cultural turnovers, the demographic events that shaped the human populations of this region is not known [8, 9]. To shed light on the maternal genetic history of the region, we analyzed the complete mitochondrial genomes of 52 ancient skeletons from present-day Armenia and Artsakh spanning 7,800 years and combined this dataset with 206 mitochondrial genomes of modern Armenians. We also included previously published data of seven neighboring populations (n = 482). Coalescence-based analyses suggest that the population size in this region rapidly increased after the Last Glacial Maximum ca. 18 kya. We find that the lowest genetic distance in this dataset is between modern Armenians and the ancient individuals, as also reflected in both network analyses and discriminant analysis of principal components. We used approximate Bayesian computation to test five different demographic scenarios explaining the formation of the modern Armenian gene pool. Despite well documented cultural shifts in the South Caucasus across this time period, our results strongly favor a genetic continuity model in the maternal gene pool. This has implications for interpreting prehistoric migration dynamics and cultural shifts in this part of the world."

Shades of the Lazaridis paper about the mixing population into the steppe.

Click to enlarge
8000 milennia of mtDna continuity in the South Caucasus-Armenia.jpg

8000 milennia of mtDna continuity in the South Caucasus-Armenia bar plot.jpg

8000 milennia of mtDna continuity in the South Caucasus-Armenia PCA.jpg

If someone has a list of steppe mtdna, it might be interesting to compare.

I didn't recognize one of the cultures; it's Bronze-Iron Age

"The spreading area of these belts encompassed almost the whole Transcaucasia (the present Armenia, Georgia, the north and the west parts of Azerbaijan). The culture of Lchashen-Metsamor was distributed in territory of Armenia in this period (the end of 16th century/the beginning of 15th century-8th century B.C.) and in 8th century B.C. these territories were subjugated by Urartu. According to their thematic scenes, they are divided to some types: hunting, military, mythological, genre, elemental movement. There are belts with only geometric ornaments and plain, unornamented ones. According to their width the belts were wide and narrow from 4-22 sm."

http://arvestagir.am/en/english-bronze-belts-of-lchashen-metsamor-culture-in-the-sculptures-of-the-same-period/

Interestingly, this is from one of the Bronze Belts.



Bronze-belts-of-Lchashen-Metsamor-09.jpg
 
*Why people always choose fancy names instead of reality?
All ancient skeletons came from Armenia ( nearly just quarter of all South Caucausia )

As they accept:
"Due to the lack of available ancient and modern mtDNA genomes from other regions of the South Caucasus, we have here used Armenians as a representative group of the region. "

but there can't be representive group in a place where has very mix genetic history.

*There are also 300 years old skeletons. Why? They are limited very small number but also irrelevant. if the aim was also checking that timeline, there would be more sample.

*It would be great, if they didn't put all historical samples under one name.

*It would be great, if they created division between Western Armenians and Eastern Armenians. I mean is there any Syrian, Istanbul, Cilician Armenian in the research, if yes what is the difference.

*The ancient results are so colorful, which I didn't expect

*and the second thing which I learnt
"We observe none of the typical East Eurasian mtDNA lineages (A, C, D, F, G, and M) among the ancient individuals, and only one individual with haplogroup D is present in the modern Armenian maternal gene pool (Artsakh). "

That's it
 
To be clear, there are modern samples from all the surrounding areas, including Turks.
 
To be more clear modern samples are coming from other research.

and thanks to remind, putting Turk in one category, is another catastrophe. We are talking about one of the most heterogeneous nation
 
To be more clear modern samples are coming from other research.

and thanks to remind, putting Turk in one category, is another catastrophe. We are talking about one of the most heterogeneous nation

Who cares who collected the samples? It's irrelevant. They included the data.

The fact is, whether you like it or not, and no matter the culture, the mtDna at least has stayed largely the same since the Neolithic. If uniparental markers can be deemed native to an area, the Armenian mtDna is "native" to that area. From the autosomal data, there is a good amount of continuity to that as well.

Whatever agenda you have against the Armenians, whatever fables are told in Turkey, leave it outside this Board.
 
U4a from Trialeti Vanadzor culture. A predictable result.
 

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