Geneticists have read the nuclear DNA of 57 Armenians to study the demographic history of their population. The scientists rejected the hypothesis based on Herodotus' report about the Balkan origin of the ancestors of these people. On the contrary, they confirmed previous observations that people genetically close to modern Armenians lived in this region as early as the Bronze Age. This is reported in an article published in the American Journal of Human Genetics.
The history of Armenians has long attracted the attention of researchers. Not least of all, this is due to the fact that they have their own apostolic church, alphabet and language, which belongs to a separate branch within the Indo-European language family.
Thanks to the reports of the ancient Greek historian Herodotus, a hypothesis emerged that the ancestors of the Armenians migrated to the Caucasus from the Balkans, specifically from Thrace. This possibility was later pointed out by some linguists. However, modern data suggests that a genetically similar population lived in this region at least in the Bronze Age. Moreover, a significant part of the ancestors of modern Armenians, apparently, inhabited the Armenian Highlands as early as the Neolithic era.
Anahit Hovhannisyan from Trinity College Dublin, together with colleagues from scientific organizations in nine countries, presented the results of further research into the demographic history of Armenians. To do this, the scientists read 34 complete genomes of people, four generations of whose ancestors considered themselves representatives of this people. Among them were five Sasun people. In addition, the researchers expanded the sample using wide-genome data for another 23 people, as well as by using previously published ancient and modern genomes.
The study of these genomes confirmed that Herodotus was wrong when he said that the ancestors of Armenians migrated from the Balkan Peninsula. Modern Armenians are a fairly homogeneous population. Only the Sasun people differed slightly from the other analyzed groups. Apparently, this is due to the fact that there was a "bottleneck" in the demographic history of this subpopulation. Scientists did not find any signs that the Sasun people could have Assyrian origins, which was mentioned in ancient sources.
Geneticists have also confirmed that some of the ancestors of modern Armenians lived in the Caucasus as early as the Neolithic era, as previously reported in a large-scale study of ancient genomes. However, modern Armenians were still genetically noticeably different from the population of this region that lived there before the beginning of the Late Bronze Age. Apparently, this happened as a result of the autochthonous population mixing with people who are genetically similar to the Iron Age populations from the Levant. According to researchers, on average, the contribution of this “Levantine” component in modern Armenians is 45 percent (from 28 to 53 percent depending on the region).
Earlier we told how paleogeneticists read the DNA of a representative of the first farmers of the North Caucasus - a carrier of the Darkveti-Meshokov culture, who lived about seven thousand years ago. His remains were excavated almost a hundred years ago in the Nalchik burial ground.
