Genetic evidence from Armenia shows surprising long-term stability

PanARMENIAN.Net - The South Caucasus--home to the countries of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan--geographically links Europe and the Near East. The area has served for millennia as a major crossroads for human migration, with strong archaeological evidence for big cultural shifts over time. And yet, surprisingly, ancient mitochondrial DNA evidence reported in Current Biology on June 29 finds no evidence of any upheaval over the last 8,000 years.

To shed light on the maternal genetic history of the region, the researchers analyzed the complete mitochondrial genomes of 52 ancient skeletons from present-day Armenia and Artsakh, an unrecognized republic bordering Armenia and Azerbaijan. Those specimens span 7,800 years of history. Allentoft's team combined this new data with 206 mitochondrial genomes of modern Armenians and previously published data representing more than 480 individuals from seven neighboring populations.

Their analyses suggest that the population size in the region rapidly increased after the last glacial maximum, about 18,000 years ago. The researchers also used several sophisticated analyses to test five different demographic scenarios that could explain the formation of the modern Armenian gene pool. Despite well-documented cultural shifts in the South Caucasus across the time period in question, their results strongly favor genetic continuity in the maternal gene pool, the researchers report.