When discussing the Kura-Araxes culture and its people it's important to understand these key points:
- there is Eastern European steppe ancestry in Kura-Araxes samples, and if you're not seeing it then you're not looking hard enough
- Armenian Kura-Araxes samples are mainly a mixture between three different groups currently best represented in the ancient DNA record by ARM_Areni_C, IRN_Hajji_Firuz_C and RUS_Darkveti-Meshoko_En
- ergo, most of the steppe ancestry in the Kura-Araxes population of what is now Armenia must have been mediated via local Chalcolithic groups like ARM_Areni_C
- Kura-Araxes samples show Mesopotamian-related ancestry, and this mustn't be ignored.
Oh, you don't believe it because you just read a big paper in
Science claiming otherwise?
Well, the authors of that paper,
Lazaridis, Alpaslan-Roodenberg et al., used distal mixture models to study the ancestry of their Kura-Araxes samples, and such models can miss important details.
Consider these three proximate mixture models for a relatively high quality and very homogenous Kura-Araxes sample set from the aforementioned paper. They were done with the qpAdm software
ARM_Kura-Araxes_Berkaber
ARM_Areni_C 0.239±0.068
IRN_Hajji_Firuz_C 0.379±0.068
RUS_Darkveti-Meshoko_En 0.382±0.054
P-value 0.285122 (Pass)
Full output
ARM_Kura-Araxes_Berkaber
IRN_Hajji_Firuz_C 0.569±0.051
RUS_Darkveti-Meshoko_En 0.363±0.058
RUS_Progress_En 0.068±0.020
P-value 0.20306 (Pass)
Full output
ARM_Kura-Araxes_Berkaber
IRN_Hajji_Firuz_C 0.531±0.060
RUS_Darkveti-Meshoko_En 0.469±0.060
P-value 0.0132579 (Fail)
Full output
Some caveats apply. For instance, the pass threshold (P-value ≥0.05) is arbitrary. But the point is that the models look much better with steppe-related and steppe reference populations (ARM_Areni_C and RUS_Progress_En, respectively).
Moreover, the unique and vital Darkveti-Meshoko population is represented by just one individual. I also have the genotypes of his brother and sister, but relatives aren't allowed in these sorts of tests.
Including a singleton in the analysis means that I can't use the
inbreed: YES option, which apparently can be a bad thing. Nevertheless, these models do look very solid.
Indeed, I can also model ARM_Kura-Araxes_Berkaber as practically 100% RUS_Maykop_Novosvobodnaya, perhaps with some excess ARM_Areni_C-related input.
ARM_Kura-Araxes_Berkaber
ARM_Areni_C 0.094±0.087
RUS_Maykop_Novosvobodnaya 0.906±0.087
P-value 0.284259 (Pass)
Full ouput
This makes good sense, because RUS_Maykop_Novosvobodnaya can also be modeled solidly as a mixture between IRN_Hajji_Firuz_C, RUS_Darkveti-Meshoko_En and RUS_Progress_En.
RUS_Maykop_Novosvobodnaya
IRN_Hajji_Firuz_C 0.614±0.056
RUS_Darkveti-Meshoko_En 0.307±0.064
RUS_Progress_En 0.080±0.022
P-value 0.141468 (Pass)
Full output
I don't know whether the genetic relationship between ARM_Kura-Araxes_Berkaber and RUS_Maykop_Novosvobodnaya shown in my model is due to Maykop ancestry in the former. It might just be a coincidence in the sense that the same or similar processes led to the formation of both groups. Feel free to let me know your thoughts about that in the comments.
The fact that the Kura-Araxes people harbored steppe ancestry might be very important in the debate over the location of the so called Indo-Anatolian homeland. For instance, it's possible that the proto-Anatolian language spread from the North Caucasus into Anatolia via the Kura-Araxes culture.
But, admittedly, such a solution doesn't have strong support from historical linguistics data, which suggest that the Indo-Anatolian homeland was located in what is now Ukraine and that Anatolian speakers entered West Asia via the Balkans:
Indo-European cereal terminology suggests a Northwest Pontic homeland for the core Indo-European languages
See also...
R-V1636: Eneolithic steppe > Kura-Araxes?
Dear Iosif...Yamnaya
But Iosif, what about the Phrygians?
