I made this map to explain how modern Armenian genetics has formed.

 I made this map to explain how modern Armenian genetics has formed. The map shows the genetic situation in Middle Bronze Age thus 4000 years ago. I deliberately selected those colors to emphasize the clinal nature of this situation.

The yellow is the TVC/Lchashen culture. with high steppe ancestry. Usually labeled here as Etiuni.

The orange has low steppe more or less equal to modern Armenians. Few samples from Van Urartu.

While the red region do not have steppe and have extra affinity to Levantine Bronze Age. Notice those regions were inhabited by Hurrians. We have some samples from Sirnak , Batman. But there are not young enough to see what was the situation in Middle and Late Bronze Age. Dinkha tepe 2 is Middle Bronze Age but it's from northwest Iran so not exactly representative of red region.

Further south the Levant lowland was inhabited by close to red people with a more southern shift . Numerous samples from Alalakh, Ebla.

Modern Armenians have ancestry from this three orange, yellow, red regions. The highest level is from orange region in most Armenians. Eastern Armenians have extra yellow. Armenians from southwestern regions do have significant orange but also have some red ancestry. An important thing to understand is that orange itself can be modeled as a mixture of yellow and red. So we can reduce the colors needed but it can oversimplify the situation. Also some alleles of red regions can be found in eastern Armenians and Armenians of south and western regions also have some alleles from yellow. Overall this makes all Armenians to cluster tight on the PCA.

Another thing to understand is that modern Armenians do NOT have any significant extra ancestry from outside regions other than those colored. In more recent historic times some sporadic influences occurred off course. But they are negligible and can be ignored in calculations. Also Armenians who settled outside of those regions acquired some local ancestry but it occurred in historic times and those extra acquisitions can be verified and are well known.

The reader will have a legitimate question. Why those three regions samples are not used for modeling Armenians. Well the problem comes probably from how those tools work. When You select too close populations that increase the standard errors. While distant populations decrease the standard errors. Notice all this three colors are close to each other despite exaggerated perceptions. That is why sometimes it's easier to choose a distant source from south of red zone and get some feasible models. There can be other problems also that I am probably not aware.

But the real problem is not the models per se. After all Lazaridis also used Levant N as a distal source and it claimed that it increased after the 600BC. And this didn't resulted in any "sensationalistic" titles in media outlets. The problem is the lack of historic interpretations of those models. When You don't interpret Your data based on real known historic events, it's not surprising that others will do it in a way they want.

Those historic events are well known. As I said it's the presence of Hurrian belt all over southern regions of historic Armenia who had a more southern genetic profile. And the formation of Urartu empire and it's expansion. There can be other events also that we could have overlook but those two facts are fully sufficient to explain the peculiarities of modern Armenian genetic profile.

Hopefully our paper with Armen Petrosyan will be published soon in English. We discuss this period of shift in East Armenia and I hope it can be useful for those who want to understand this story better.

PS below in the comments You can see a model mixing yellow and orange with high standard errors. Made by Nareg Asatrian