Y-DNA evidence argues against Indo-European expansion into Europe from Armenia

Most scholars agree that the early Indo-Europeans most likely expanded from somewhere in Europe into Asia. However, the main competition to that theory has been the idea that the proto-Indo-Europeans pushed into Europe from what is now Armenia and surrounds. The latter supposition has now taken a major knock, thanks to a new study comparing European and Armenian Y-chromosome lineages. Indeed, it appears as if most genetic ties between Armenia and Europe date back to the pre-Indo-European era.

Linguistic analyses have found that Armenian represents one of the oldest living Indo-European languages and exhibits its greatest affinities with Greek and Balkan languages.12 With some linguists placing the origins of the Proto-Indo-European and Indo-European languages in either Anatolia or Transcaucasia,12 it has been proposed that Armenians represent close descendants of the ancestral Indo-European population and that subsequent migrations from Armenia into Greece were responsible for the language group’s dispersal into Europe.13,14 However, a lack of archaeological support for this notion has led to the alternative supposition that invasions from Balkan or Anatolian tribes15 introduced an Indo-European language into Armenia, resulting in the observed similarities between Armenian and the Southeastern European languages.16,17

...

However, we note very limited haplotype sharing among Armenian and European populations, an observation congruent with the MDS plot (Figure 3a). Similarly, the network based only on individuals belonging to the R1b1b*-M269 and R1b1b1*-L23 lineages (Supplementary Figure 2b) exhibits a wide distribution of Armenian haplotypes and does not identify a segregation between individuals of Armenian and East European descent, which is not inconsistent with older gene flow between the two regions.

...

Shortly after the arrival of early farmers in Armenia and Anatolia (8 kya), agriculture spread to Greece and the Balkans, before rapidly expanding across Europe.47.Furthermore, the classification of Armenian as an old Indo-European language with similarities to the ancestral Proto-Indo-European languages has led to the supposition that agriculturalists migrating from Armenia into Europe were responsible for the establishment of Indo-European languages in the continent.13,14 However, despite the close linguistic relationship between Armenians and the Indo-European speaking populations of Europe,12 we see little genetic support for this claim. The derived M412 allele, which is found in nearly all haplogroup R1b1b1*-L23 chromosomes in Europe,27 is absent in the sampled Armenians, which also exhibit a scarcity of haplotype sharing with Europeans, suggesting a limited role for Armenians in the introduction of R1b into Europe.

Herrera et al., Neolithic patrilineal signals indicate that the Armenian
plateau was repopulated by agriculturalists, European Journal of Human Genetics (2011), 1–8