Tuesday, August 29, 2023

"Migration Processes In The Armenian Highland From The Ancient Times" conference papers are now available online.

 "Migration Processes In The Armenian Highland From The Ancient Times" conference papers are now available online.

Yervand Grekyan's paper is also related to the subjects discussed in our group. He describes Catacomb culture and the apparition of that burial type in South Caucasus after 2500BC. The main reason of their migration was most probably the significant change in climatic conditions in most of West Eurasia during that period.
The paper is in Armenian with pictures.

Sunday, August 27, 2023

Some Urartian terms are discussed in this paper of Armen Petrosyan.

 Some Urartian terms are discussed in this paper of Armen Petrosyan.

+Urart. personal name Lubšuṣini is etymologized as Arm. lousacin "luminous" / "born of light"
Note that Urartian [b] can denote the phoneme [w] so this personal name can be related to Armenian Lousacin. Old form would be Lousocin.
This would be another word with a root -cin (ծին) in it. The most famous being the Diucini.
+ Arm. kot‘oɫ կոթող “monument, tower” corresponds to Urart. qudula-ni "temple, tower", which denoted the specific tower temples of Haldi.
Apparently the Armenian word kot'ol is a loanword from the Urartian.

Saturday, August 26, 2023

A new paper about the origin of Armenians

 A new paper about the origin of Armenians in the light of recent archaeogenetic data. The authors are Armen Petrosyan and me. It is published by the Institute of archaeology and ethnography in a collection of conference papers dedicated to migration processes in Armenian Highlands since to old times to 20th century. The chief editor is Yervand Grekyan, thanks to whom we have a well presented paper.

The paper is in Armenian and if I am not wrong it is one of the first attempts to present to Armenian audience the available genetic data from the Lazaridis 2022 paper about the Southern Arc. The most recent publications of 2023 are not discussed given that this paper was written four months earlier.
The English version will be available in the future. Old members of our group already know about the content of this paper. We discussed them many times. But still it can be useful to read it once more.

Thursday, August 10, 2023

Hrach Martirosyan discuss etymologies of three musical terms in Armenian

 Hrach Martirosyan discuss etymologies of three musical terms in Armenian. One of them is quite famous because it has a parallel in non-IE Hattic language.

It's the word jnar (ջնար, meaning lyre, harp) which can be compared to Hattic zinar a type of musical instrument, lyre. The cuneiform z can stand for j also.
Similar words are attested in neighbouring languages also. The Greek word kithara is also probably from the same arealic origin.
But it's Armenian and Hattic that are specifically in palatalized form. One theory explained this by an unattested Luwian word from which supposedly Hattic borrowed. But given that this Luwian word is not attested that theory remains purely hypothetic. Here Martirosyan propose a different trajectory for this word. Armenian and Greek borrowed from the same substratic source. Later in Armenian the satemic shift transformed it into jnar and it ended up in Hattic.
Notice that the similar root in Hurrian is not palatalized kinnar. This Hurrian word is usually connected to a Semitic words with similar meaning. It's remarkable that this word is also found in Armenian in the form k'nar ( քնար ). Usually assumed to be a Semitic loanword.
Returning to jnar,I can't evaluate how likely is this theory, but one thing is certain: Hattic and Armenian haf a genuine lexical parallel that is accepted by many scholars.
Here the list of those terms in Wiktionary.

Sunday, August 6, 2023

Peopling of Eurasia and origins of haplogroup K and P.

 Peopling of Eurasia and origins of haplogroup K and P.

If You follow genetic forums You probably had noticed unusual theories placing the homeland of haplogroup K or K2 in South East Asia and by consequence the haplogroup P would have moved to Siberia via the China. While later P supposedly moved to west in the form of R and Q. There is no much evidence for this theory but it is still there. So let's see what aDNA tells us.
We have quite old cases of haplogroup P from NE Russia (site Yana). And we have the occasion to check their autosomes and possible route of migration. Those samples are dated to 33.000 years ago so for modeling them we would need more older sources to avoid the effect of shared ancestry. I chose the available Upper Paleolithic samples from Eurasia. Unfortunately no such a sample is available from West Asia.
As You can see the fit is decent for Upper Paleolithic samples. It's clear from the model that Yana people had predominantly Western Eurasian Upper Paleolithic ancestry. They almost certainly migrated to North East Russia from/via the Central Asia.
They have also some China Tianyuan ancestry. Tianyuan is a 40.000 year old sample from North China. So it's quite possible that the first settlers of Siberia had some contacts with Paleolithic North Chinese populations, but this do not mean that they came from China.
It's remarkable that the paper discussing those samples says the same thing. G25 gives the same result as academic tools. So it should not be surprising that the paper says nothing about a migration via SE Asia.
Even more interesting is that the most important source of ancestry is the Vestonice16 which is associated to Gravettian culture and not more older BachoKiro and more proximate Ust-Ishim from Russia.
In the distance charts You can see that Yana and Tianyuan are from different worlds. It seems Tianyuan moved there from South ( although it's possible that it has a different route ) while Yana moved to Siberia from Western Eurasia.
.
As for the presence of minor branches of P in South East Asia they are simply a result of minor migrations from Western Eurasia to Indochina via the India. See the Yfull https://www.yfull.com/tree/K/
In sum the homeland of haplogroup P was in Western Eurasia. From there the main group moved to Siberia and North Eurasia while some minor branches moved to South East Asia