Frequently users ask the same question.

 Frequently users ask the same question. Why samples from Levant, Iran, Anatolia and Caucasus are used to model ancient and modern samples from Armenia, if ancient samples from Armenia are alrwady available.

For the academic papers the answer to this question is simple. They want to have an universal model which they can use for any sample from any time in Near East. For this reason they use the extreme, (from genetic point of view), homogenous populations available from Near East. Which by the way are not necessarily the most successful populations inside Near East.

Anatolian Neolithic farmers for example had a successful expansion in Europe. But in their homeland their ancestry dropped in Chalcolithic when new migrants from historic Armenia/North Mesopotamia settled there. The same is true for Caucasian hunters, Levant Neolithic and Zagros/Iran Neolithic.

All those populations had a serious dilution of their ancestry in Chalcolithic. But given that the main "coupables" of this dilution themselves can be modeled as a mixture of this 4 populations then scholars prefer to use only those 4 source, to avoid too much complication.

If in Anatolian context they say there is an increase of Caucasus then this mean usually a migration from historic Armenia. But an increase of Caucasus in Steppe do not automatically mean a migration from Armenia. If they say an increase in Iran Neo in Anatolia then it means a migration from North Mesopotamia. But an increase of Iran_Neo in Central Asia do not mean migration from Mesopotamia. Etc etc. You must always keep in mind the geography to understand this strange language. It's not a conspiracy but rather an easy way for them.

There are also technical reasons. Old samples from Mesopotamia and historic Armenia are rare and they are not as homogenous as one would want them to be. Most probably in the future this situation will change.

As for citizens, they can do whatever they want. There is no any rule that forbids the use of ancient Neolithic samples from Armenia. I always do that in my charts and they give better fits than just 4 pops from Near East. We can go further and experiment with more samples from ancient Armenia. We have some examples for that also in this group. But they are some constraints. Using too much samples with similar ancestries can create results that are hard to understand and very volatile. For example You will have apparent sharp differences between quite close pops

There is some big data that is accumulating about the Upper Paleolithic period in Caucasus and Europe

 There is some big data that is accumulating about the Upper Paleolithic period in Caucasus and Europe. We have 26000 year old samples from West Georgia and now very important samples from Crimea. (~36000 year old).

This samples from Crimea can be labeled as Proto Gravettian culture. The Gravettian culture is very important for Europe because their autosomes are at the origin of later WHG that appears after the LGM. Gravettian culture is also important because it's the first apparition of the haplogroup I in Europe which later will expand in the form of I2. We had a thread about this subject in the group.

With this new data it's becoming clear that the population that created the Gravettian culture moved via Caucasus to Eastern Europe and from there to Balkans and Western Europe. Replacing the local more archaic humans, who left virtually no ancestry in modern Europeans.

This make sense from the Y DNA point of view because I and J have common ancestors and the oldest cases of J are found in Southern Caucasus.

Based on the Yfull the I and J separated from each other 42000 years ago. Which is consistent with the archaeological dates we have.

And finally the Upper Paleolithic samples from Western Georgia are very unusual. They are quite different from post-LGM period Caucasian hunter-gathers (CHG). Those Caucasian Upper Paleolithic samples have lot shared alleles with Anatolian hunter gatherers and farmers. But even more surprising they had shared alleles with WHG that didn't existed yet at that period. Also they had shared alleles with Eastern European Upper Paleolithic samples like Kostenki14 and Vestonoce cluster, the aforementioned Gravettian culture.

This situation make sense given the common origins of J and I. We could expect that in the deep past they were coming from a population with similar autosomes.

Below in Figure 1 You can see the closest pops to Georgia Upper Paleolithic. As You can see it's more oriented to ancient Europe with high Anatolian and WHG ancestries.

The next puzzle now to solve is the origin of CHG and Iran_Neo. What made them so different from Anatolia forager's/farmers. And the ultimate question were was the common origin of all this folks.

All links are below.

Figure 2. The Gravettian Venus figurine

Ancient DNA from Republic of Armenia.

 

Ancient DNA from Republic of Armenia.

The first table represents them by periods.

The second one by published papers.

The archaeological periods used in the first table are from Pavel Avetisyan ( Պավել Ավետիսյան ) and Arsen Bobokhyan "ARCHAEOLOGY OF ARMENIA IN REGIONAL CONTEXT", 2012.

Notes:

Sarukhan_unknown samples have now radiocarbon dates and are placed in LBA and EIA.

Middle Bronze is based on Lazaridis 2022 classification (5 samples) and plus two samples from Bobokhyan 2023. Reich labs AADR classification is not used, because of inconsistencies.

Reich lab AADR has 217 entries but 4 of them are duplicates. So there 213 aDNA in total. Three recent samples are not included yet there. Which makes overall 216 samples