Syunik particularity.

 Syunik particularity.

Davidski has made new G25 coordinates of Skourtanioti et al. 2025 paper, including the 25 new files from Syunik. He cleaned noisy SNPs which are almost certainly a result of postmortem damage and after this the PCA of "Hellenistic" era Syunik samples are more compact and less heterogeneous. While modern Syunik people "cloud" plots inside the Aghitu Hellenistic "cloud".

The conclusions are the same as in the previous post about those Aghitu cave samples.

Some samples shifted to Iranian plateau are probably from Achaemenid/Orontid era (600-300BC) rather than Hellenistic (300-1AD). The shift to Iranian plateau was even more stronger in Late Antique era sample from Caucasian Albania Shamakhi region, so we could say that Iranian influence was probably stronger in eastern parts of South Caucasus than in other parts of historic Armenia and Caucasus. However this influence was transient in Armenia given that modern Syunik Armenians don't have any strong shift to Iranian plateau.
The reason why in Syunik we don't see an abrupt genetic change in post - Urartian period, similar to Araratian plain, Sevan and Shirak regions is probably due to the fact that Urartu didn't have a strong control of Syunik and didn't build there new cities with new relocated population. As a result the Etiuni genetic profile lasted longer and the change to the modern one was gradual.
We can expect that similar pattern of gradual change occurred in other parts of historic Armenia that didn't witnessed a strong control of Urartian empire. Examples are Artsakh, Utik and parts of Gugark.

This data support the theory that we proposed in Petrosyan and Palyan 2023 about the post-Urartian genetic shift. We proposed that is the consequence of Urartu's population relocation activities.

Additionally it's possible that after the fall of Biainean dynasty in Van the Biainean elite moved to Araratian plain. A theory that was suggested by some scholars. However this theory require more data to be confirmed or falsified.