Eight Millennia of Matrilineal Genetic Continuity in the South Caucasus

Abstract

The South Caucasus, situated between the Black and Caspian Seas, geographically links Europe with the Near East and has served as a crossroad for human migrations for many millennia [1-7]. Despite a vast archaeological record showing distinct cultural turnovers, the demographic events that shaped the human populations of this region is not known [8, 9]. To shed light on the maternal genetic history of the region, we analyzed the complete mitochondrial genomes of 52 ancient skeletons from present-day Armenia and Artsakh spanning 7,800 years and combined this dataset with 206 mitochondrial genomes of modern Armenians. We also included previously published data of seven neighboring populations (n = 482). Coalescence-based analyses suggest that the population size in this region rapidly increased after the Last Glacial Maximum ca. 18 kya. We find that the lowest genetic distance in this dataset is between modern Armenians and the ancient individuals, as also reflected in both network analyses and discriminant analysis of principal components. We used approximate Bayesian computation to test five different demographic scenarios explaining the formation of the modern Armenian gene pool. Despite well documented cultural shifts in the South Caucasus across this time period, our results strongly favor a genetic continuity model in the maternal gene pool. This has implications for interpreting prehistoric migration dynamics and cultural shifts in this part of the world.

Archaeogenetics of Late Iron Age Çemialo Sırtı, Batman: Investigating maternal genetic continuity in north Mesopotamia since the Neolithic

“…Alternatively, if the region's population size was constantly large, any immigrant alleles would be rapidly diluted. Thus, despite the turbulent sociopolitics of north Mesopotamian history, the maternal lineage appears to have remained largely continuous, reminiscent of population continuity reported for the Levant (Haber, Mezzavilla, Xue, & Tyler‐Smith, ) and for Armenia (Margaryan et al, ). Whether this description equally applies to nuclear genomic variation remains to be shown.…”

Demographic Expansion and Contraction in a Neotropical Fish during the Late Pleistocene-Holocene

“…Late Pleistocene-Holocene global climatic oscillations markedly influenced the demographic history of Earth's biota [1] [2] [3]. From the standpoint of demography, departures from stability, experienced as expansion or contraction in population size, are relevant events [4] [5]. Signatures of changes in effective population size are written in the DNA of contemporary populations because of ancestor-descendant transmission of genetic material and the processes of mutation and substitution [6] [7] [8].…”

Archaeogenetics of Late Iron Age Çemialo Sırtı, Batman: Investigating maternal genetic continuity in North Mesopotamia since the Neolithic

“…Alternatively, if the region's population size was constantly large, any immigrant alleles would be rapidly diluted. Thus, despite the turbulent sociopolitics of north Mesopotamian history, the maternal lineage appears to have remained largely continuous, reminiscent of population continuity reported for the Levant (Haber et al, 2016) and for Armenia (Margaryan et al, 2017). Whether this description equally applies to nuclear genomic variation remains to be shown.…”