An update on North West Caucasians.

 An update on North West Caucasians.

Apparently we missed this story in this group. In Ghalichi et al. 2024 new samples from the Dolmen culture were published and one of them was G2-L1266. This haplotype is very popular among all North West Caucasian speakers. This finding support the possibility that the linguistic ancestors of Abkhaz-Adyghean (NWC) speakers were from the Dolmen culture.

After the Bronze Age in northwestern Caucasus a new Iron Age cultural landscape appears known as Maeotian culture. The name is based on the Greek sources term.

From another paper (Andreeva et al. 2025) two female samples were published supposedly linked to Maeotians.

Their genetic profile was different from the neighbouring Scythians. They had a typical Caucasian genetic profile. This supports the theory that the Greek sources Maeotians had probably a NWC origin.

The G2-L1266 moved to northwestern Caucasus from south. In most likelihood from Anatolia or eastern parts of Anatolia. There is some slim chance that it was from South Caucasus via the Maykop culture.. But current data is not particularly supportive of this possibility.

As for the ultimate origin of NWC languages it can be the same as the haplotype but can be different given that multiple cases of local J2 also were found in Dolmen culture

This map of Kura Araxes sites is from Wilkinson 2014.

 This map of Kura Araxes sites is from Wilkinson 2014. Its possible that he didnt mention all known sites but overall it shows well the pattern of their geographic distribution.

As You can see there are very little known Kura-Araxes sites in middle and lower Kur river region. This is exactly the region where Early Kurganic culture of steppe origin mixed with locals (2550-2300 BC) according the archaeologic studies that i posted earlier.

In Late Chalcolithic period this region was occupied by Leila tepe culture people genetically related to Chaff faced ware horizon. Those people had much more Anatolian/Levantine neolithic related ancestry and less CHG than Kura-Araxes. This is the reason why the succeeding Trialeti Vanadzor culture and Lchashen-Metsamor show excess of Anatolian related ancestry. This shift is visible also in Y DNA. By the presence of haplotypes like E-M84 and T1a1a in Armenia MLBA period. Those haplotypes are very unlikely to represent typical Kura-Araxes haplotypes.

The second picture is a qpadm model made by Nareg Asatrian where it is visible that Yamnaya Moldova works quite well as a source for ancestry for Armenia MLBA. Its a reproduction of the model done in Yediay et al. 2024.

The real reason for samples from Moldova working well is that they have the extra Anatolian farmer related ancestry necessary for Armenia MLBA. For reasons that i explained above and absolutely unrelated to Moldova. Another reason is the extra WHG but it will be a subject for a different post.

In conclusion the linguistic substrate for Proto Armenians was not the Kura-Araxes culture or lets be more cautious was not exclusively the Kura-Araxes. Chaff faced ware and Leila tepe's hypothetic language(s) also must have important influence on Armenian.

I2a2b (SK1270 or Y16419) in Trialeti-Vanadzor culture remains a puzzle

 I2a2b (SK1270 or Y16419) in Trialeti-Vanadzor culture remains a puzzle. We know that its from Europe, we know that it reached South Caucasus via the north. But till now we dont have intermediate specimens between Central Europe and South Caucasus.

Akbari et al. 2026 samples when published can solve this puzzle.

We have three ancient Y DNA that are relatively close to TVC cluster and here how they look genome wide. Their common ancestor with TVC I2a2b is something like 8000-9000 years.

One of them I17647 is something like Ukraine HG intermediate between WHG and EHG. (7500 year old)

The other one I10491 is also heavily WHG and EHG. But it has also Yamnaya related ancestry. Which is important because before moving to South Caucasus the Trialeti Vanadzor lineage must have been present in Yamnaya. (6600 year old)

And the third one I29874 is a typical European farmer similar to Potocani I2a2b from Chalcolithic Croatia.

Based on this we can say that at last I17647 and I10491 are in most likelihood from East Europe. While the last one is from Central Europe.

PS the two first samples are from E zone in suplemments. See the the third picture for the map.

The end of the Kura-Araxes culture and the emergence of new kurgan cultures.

 The end of the Kura-Araxes culture and the emergence of new kurgan cultures. Here I present a short summary of the papers by Ruben Badalyan et al. (2024) and Pavel Avetisyan & R. Badalyan. The two papers are based solely on archaeological data, with no discussion of paleogenetics. The first paper deals mainly with the end of the Kura-Araxes (KA) culture, while the second focuses on Middle Bronze Age cultures.

Key points

The depopulation of KA sites started earlier, around the 27th–26th centuries BC, than the appearance of the new Middle Bronze Age cultures.
The appearance of new cultures in the Kura-Araxes region was rather a consequence than a cause of this depopulation.
The depopulation was not complete but there was a 15-20 fold drop in settlement numbers. The last period of KA coexisted with Early Kurgans.
In most cases (though not all), traces of burning and fire in KA settlements were not caused by invaders, but had internal causes — either spontaneous or deliberately carried out by the inhabitants themselves (ritualistic or sanitary?). After the fires, the settlements were rebuilt. A similar tradition also existed in the Balkans.
KA sites in the Upper Euphrates and Tigris regions did not experience the same depopulation. On the contrary, they developed into urban centers with active trade connections to Mesopotamia.
The earliest manifestations of the new kurgan cultures begin around 2550 BC in the Kur River basin. The Kur basin appears to have been the core region of this new culture. This date fits very well with the chronology calculated by Lazaridis et al. (2022) (my comment).
Early kurgan culture was not homogeneous. It had two variants: the Martqopi variant and the Bedeni variant. Martqopi shares more features with the preceding Kura-Araxes culture, while Bedeni shares very few. Trialeti seems to have been closer to Martqopi. Bedeni used tin bronze, whereas KA and Martqopi relied mainly on arsenical bronze. Tin-bronze technology originated in Europe.
Early kurgan sites are not frequent in the Republic of Armenia and appear only after 2450 BC. No early kurgan burials have been found south of the Araxes River.
After 2200 BC, the Trialeti-Vanadzor culture expanded throughout the Kura-Araxes basin and south of the Araxes. It had two types of pottery: monochrome pottery with dot decoration and painted pottery. The painted type apparently emerged in the south and became the predominant type in the regions south of the Araxes River.
The painted type expanded from south to north and remained rare in Georgia. In the territory of modern Armenia, painted pottery constituted about fifty percent of the pottery assemblage in Trialeti-Vanadzor culture layers, and it was the dominant type south of the Araxes River.
After 1900 BC, new cultures derived from the Trialeti-Vanadzor culture formed on top of the TVC horizon. These included the Karmirvank (Van-Urmia) culture, the Sevan-Artsakh (Uzerlik) culture, and the Karmirberd culture.

My next post will be about the comparison of available paleogenetic data with this vision based on archaeology.

The King Pharnavaz (Փառնավազ)

In Armenian historical tradition, the post-Urartian period — which, incidentally, is also the post-Assyrian period — is marked by the emergence of new elites.

In Movses Khorenatsi’s history, the first crowned king of Armenia (after Assyrian rule) was Paruyr Skayordi. He was an ally of the Medes and, according to Khorenatsi, participated in the destruction of the Assyrian Empire. However, the historian Sebeos reports a different story about the same period [1]. He mentions a certain Pharnavaz who was loyal to the Babylonians and was recognized by Babylon as king of Armenia. Afterward, this Pharnavaz and his descendants controlled lands in the southwestern regions of historical Armenia (Ałdznikʿ and Tsopkʿ).

The Assyrian Empire was destroyed by an alliance of Babylon and the Medes in 614–609 BC. After this, Babylonian sources report three additional campaigns in northern Mesopotamia in which the lands of Urartu are mentioned as targets of attack and plunder. It is quite possible that, after the annihilation of Assyrian political influence, Babylon had interactions with rulers located in the southern parts of historical Armenia and recognized one of the local rulers as king. Thus, the reports of the Babylonian Chronicles fit well with Sebeos’s account of Pharnavaz.

The name Pharnavaz is absent from Urartian texts; however, Assyrian texts mention a certain tribe, the Parnaki, dwelling in a region north or east of Assyria, in the northern Zagros. A derivation of the personal name Pharnavaz from the Parnaki tribe is quite plausible and is supported by historical parallels found in Anatolia, where the satrapal Pharnacid dynasty bore both the names Pharnaces and Pharnabazus. The term Pharnavaz itself is composed of two Iranian words: *farna* (“glory,” “splendor”) and *bāzu* (“arm”), which, according to Armenian phonetic rules, could have developed into Pʿarnawaz (Փառնաւազ).

Assuming that Sebeos’s story has a real historical background, we can reconstruct the following chronology of events:

**8th–7th century BC.** A minor Iranian tribe, not directly affiliated with the Medes or Persians, was dwelling near historical Armenia. They are mentioned by the Assyrians. In the Armenian patriarchal list, the name Pʿarnak is also present in ancient times.

**At the end of the 7th century BC.** The destruction of Assyria and the extreme weakening of the Biainean dynasty triggered migrations and the emergence of new elites. The Parnaki tribe most probably settled in the southwestern regions of Armenia, had occasion to interact with the Babylonians, and became part of the local ruling class. It was assimilated by the Armenians, and the memory of King Pharnavaz became part of Armenian historical tradition. 

Another Pharnavaz is also important in Georgian historic tradition. He is the king of Iberia around ~300BC and the founder of Pharnavazid dynasty. I will dedicate a separate post about the possible relation of this two Pharnavaz' and the position of Pharnacid dynasty of Anatolia in all this.

During the same post Assyrian period, or slightly earlier, Paruyr Skayordi was probably ruling in the eastern regions of historical Armenia — in or around the territory of the modern Republic. In that location, Paruyr Skayordi would have had occasion to interact with the Medes, and this memory was recorded by Khorenatsi. It must be noted that Khorenatsi also mentions Pharnavaz as a “grandson” of Paruyr Skayordi, but gives no further information about him. The Urartian cuneiform texts referring to the lands of Išqigulu and to Sagaputra (“son of Saka”) as king may also be interpreted as evidence for a Skayordi domain in the eastern regions.

In conclusion, the end of the Assyrian Empire was also a period of weakening for the Biainean dynasty and of political fragmentation in the Armenian Highlands. New elites appeared, possibly some of Iranian origin, and were assimilated into the Armenian-Urartian cultural milieu. Slightly later, the Orontid (Eruanduni) dynasty emerged and unified the country.

References

[1] Tsakanyan, R., The Versions of Khorenatsi and Sebeos on the Fall of Assyria, VEM, 2017, № 4(60), pp. 230-239, in Arm.

See also

• A tribe Parnaki is attested in Iron Age Assyrian texts