Common ancestor of Greek, Armenian and Albanian.

 Common ancestor of Greek, Armenian and Albanian.

In Petrosyan and Palyan 2023 we proposed a theory that the common ancestor of Greek and Armenian was the Catacomb culture. The rationale for this proposal was the date when steppe ancestry appears in respective regions. Around 2500BC in South Caucasus and 2300BC in southern Balkans Greece.

However the increasing number of ancient DNA from Balkans and Greece do not support this theory. Instead in Yediay et al. 2024 preprint the common ancestor of Graeco-Armenian was named the late Yamnaya period.

Yamnaya indeed had a massive expansion in Balkans after 3000BC. While Catacomb did not have apparently. See the maps.

Neverthless the Yamnaya culture did not reached central and southern Greece during the Yamnaya wave. The old Minoan and Anatolian farmer related ancestry was still present in EBA south Greece.

Proto-Greek alongside Phrygian and Paionian apparently formed in Bulgaria - North Macedonia region in Early Bronze Age as a result of mixture between Yamnaya and local Balkanian farmers. Later after 2300BC a new wave of migration moved to south Greece where the Mycenean culture formed after 1700BC.

This new version explains why Mycenean Greeks had a such diluted steppe ancestry. Because it was diluted twice. It also explains the strong presence of J2-Z6064 in Mycenean culture. This J2 was Euro-Anatolian farner lineage that integrated into the the emerging Proto-Greek community and expanded with them to central and south Greece. Albanian is another language that almost certainly descend directly from Yamnaya migration to Balkans. Even though they apparently had additional linguistic influences from later Thracian groups (E-V13).

This new version does not change much overall the picture. Except that the separation of Armenian and Greek is pushed back by some 200-250 years.

It also do not contradict to available linguistic data (Martirosyan, Kim etc) which will be discussed in a sepaeate topic.