RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Genetic evidence for an origin of the Armenians from Bronze Age mixing of multiple populations
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 015396
DO 10.1101/015396
A1 Marc Haber
A1 Massimo Mezzavilla
A1 Yali Xue
A1 David Comas
A1 Paolo Gasparini
A1 Pierre Zalloua
A1 Chris Tyler-Smith
YR 2015
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/02/18/015396.abstract
AB 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.