Tuesday 5 April 2011

Caucasians and Iranians

The Caucasus range and whereabouts is another region where the "Forager A" (picked up by the San pole) element is concentrated. After a few more interesting populations at the individual level, I will present some runs trying to find out more about this, but for now I can say already that it's probably even less related to actual San than ancient Mesopotamians were related to the Chukchi. Foragers groups very likely existed in a genetic continuum worldwide, with few exceptions.

It's noteworthy once again how "Forager A" (and also ("Coastal Migration") disappears in high "Nile Core" areas, especially in populations south of the main Caucasian range, like Georgians. Also Georgian Jews lack it entirely.
In populations North of the highest peaks of the Caucasus, like the Adygei, which were likely spared the full force of the Nile wave by geography, these components are more frequent. This area is where Coastal Migration foragers begin to disappear and "Siberian"-like elements become more frequent. It may have been the route for earlier dispersal of the "Siberian" belt of forager peoples around the World.

Lezgins are an ethnic group from Dagestan and Azerbaijan. Urkarah and Stalskoe are Mountain valley Caucasian towns in Dagestan.
Just as in the West Caucasus, you can see some Siberian/Central Asian Nomadic influence as Turkic and Mongol and other pastoralists made their way into the Middle East.

Armenian-b show all the signs of being mountain people. They have more forager and less second wave components.
Kurds and Iranians now have "Coastal Migration" (attracted to the Papuan+Melanesian pole) as their aboriginal element. In India this component then increases to levels I don't think would exist without an indigenous incipient Neolithic.
You can also see how the "Nile Core" element starts decreasing in Iran. Just as in the West, the high drag of a wave travelling over already Neolithic lands can be observed here.

4 comments:

  1. "Armenian-b show all the signs of being mountain people."

    I presume these are the European admixed Behar Armenians?

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  2. Where do you base that assertion? Old unsupervised ADMIXTURE runs? South European modal, West Asian modal, North European modal etc components are I think only different levels of very old Mesopotamian and Egyptian stabilized admixture. They can't correspond to actual ancestral populations under any proposed model. My run is more homogeneous and provides more reasonable data. Maybe you're right. If you know of reliable sources stating conclusively these Armenians are admixed please provide I'm interested in finding out. I think the high Mongol/Turkic element in one of them suggests other explanations and models. Their high "Northern European" in unsupervised ADMIXTURE runs is simply Mesopotamian element with little or no Nile component IMO.

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  3. Some of the Armenians from Behar et al. do have North European admixture. From my IBS/IBD runs, it seems to be very recent Russian ancestry. I use the following Armenians from Behar et al, after removing the Russian-like Armenians.

    AM GSM536817 0 0 0 -9
    AM GSM536818 0 0 0 -9
    AM GSM536819 0 0 0 -9
    AM GSM536820 0 0 0 -9
    AM GSM536822 0 0 0 -9
    AM GSM536823 0 0 0 -9
    AM GSM536824 0 0 0 -9
    AM GSM536825 0 0 0 -9
    AM GSM536826 0 0 0 -9
    AM GSM536829 0 0 0 -9
    AM GSM536830 0 0 0 -9
    AM GSM536831 0 0 0 -9
    AM GSM536832 0 0 0 -9
    AM GSM536834 0 0 0 -9
    AM GSM536835 0 0 0 -9

    ReplyDelete
  4. Ok, thanks, I'll remove those individuals and others that also appear to have a high degree of recent admixture.

    ReplyDelete