Before I review the recent Yedia et al. 2024 preprint few comments are needed about this chart.

 Before I review the recent Yedia et al. 2024 preprint few comments are needed about this chart.

Armenia Middle and Late Bronze Age samples do have ancestry from three sources. The first one is from Armenia EBA the Kura-Araxes culture which is expected and do not require an explanation.

The second stream of ancestry is marked as Anatolia_C. This could be surprising but has an easy explanation. Anatolia_C is largely derived from historic Armenia Neolithic and Chalcolithic groups known as Chaff faced ware. Those groups lived before the Kura-Araxes and where present in modern Azerbaijan where they were known as Leila tepe culture. When Caucasian HG shifted Kura-Araxes expanded from it's homeland in South Caucasus it didn't replaced all those preceding people and in many places they continued to live. When 4500 years ago steppe ancestry came from north they first crossed what is now Azerbaijan and in most likelihood encountered the remnants of Leila tepe culture. They mixed with them acquired the "Anatolia_C" like ancestry and then moved to upper sources of Kur-Debed rivers and mixed with the Armenia EBA related people. Another source of Anatolia_C like ancestry could be from southern regions of Arax plain.

This by the way was noted by Skourtanioti 2024 also but they gave a wrong explanation thinking that there was a two separate migrations. One from Anatolia and another from Steppe during the same period. Genetic bloggers have noticed this much earlier and Davidski has even a thread dedicated to it.

And finally the presence of so called CWC ancestry. It is obviously not real because CWC is highly associated with R1a and there was no any R1a in Middle and Late Bronze Age South Caucasus ( from Armenia and Georgia). The reason why CWC appears there is because the group of steppe people that moved to South Caucasus most probably had some WHG affinity. This extra WHG/UNHG affinity was present in east of Azov region even before Yamnaya formed and most probably is the plausible explanation of the apparition of I2a2b in ancient Armenia. Notice that CWC is similar to Yamnaya but has extra 10% UNHG related ancestry and some 20% of Euro-Anatolian farmer ancestry. Even a small 1% introgression of WHG into a Yamnaya population will create an effect of presence of 10% CWC ancestry and given the excess of Anatolian ancestry in MLBA it's not surprising that the calculator assumed that he deals with CWC rather than a Yamnaya. So this is without doubt an artefact of calculation which nevertheless has its objective causes.

The same can be said about Urartu samples where the Anatolia_C is higher, thus the ancient Neolithic ancestry is higher while steppe ancestry is lower. Except one outlier who was a migrant from Etiuni