Mavi Boncuk |
The first farmers in western Eurasia lived in the Fertile Crescent, a region of the Middle East stretching from the Nile Delta to the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. With their new technology, they were able to live more sedentary lives, support larger populations, and build civilizations. They also began to move rapidly outwards from the Middle East. One of the earliest regions they expanded into was Armenia, a crossroads between the Middle East and northern Eurasia that was transformed into a fertile landscape at the end of the Ice Age. In addition to their culture, some of the men involved in this early migration carried haplogroup J-M172. In fact, their arrival in the region left genetic signatures that can still be seen in the J-M172 lineages found in Armenian men today, especially in Ararat Valley, Gardman, and Lake Van.
Armenian men's most common Y-DNA (paternal) haplogroup is R1b, found in about 28 percent of those studied. J2 is the next most common at a frequency of 22 percent.
See: Neolithic patrilineal signals indicate that the Armenian plateau was repopulated by agriculturalists SOURCE
"Armenia, situated between the Black and Caspian Seas, lies at the junction of Turkey, Iran, Georgia, Azerbaijan and former Mesopotamia. This geographic position made it a potential contact zone between Eastern and Western civilizations.
Presently, Armenians are characterized as a distinct ethnotype, speaking a single Indo-European language, Armenian. 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. With some linguists placing the origins of the Proto-Indo-European and Indo-European languages in either Anatolia or Transcaucasia 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. However, a lack of archaeological support for this notion has led to the alternative supposition that invasions from Balkan or Anatolian tribes introduced an Indo-European language into Armenia, resulting in the observed similarities between Armenian and the Southeastern European languages.
The results of this study suggest that the majority of Armenian Y-chromosomes belong to lineages believed to have originated and expanded during or following the Neolithic, including E1b1b1c-M123, G-M201, J1-M267, J2-M172 and R1b1b1-L23. Previous investigations have found some of these haplogroups, including J1-M267 and J2-M172, to illustrate patterns of distributions that reflect the spread of agriculture and domestication from the Fertile Crescent."
Armenian men's most common Y-DNA (paternal) haplogroup is R1b, found in about 28 percent of those studied. J2 is the next most common at a frequency of 22 percent.
See also: Hamshenis [1] Paper
Paternal lineage analysis supports an Armenian rather than a Central Asian genetic origin of the Hamshenis
The Hamshenis are an isolated geographic group of Armenians with a strong ethnic identity who, until the early decades of the twentieth century, inhabited the Pontus area on the southern coast of the Black Sea. Scholars hold alternative views on their origin, proposing Eastern Armenia, Western Armenia, and Central Asia, respectively, as their most likely homeland. To ascertain whether genetic data from the nonrecombining portion of the Y chromosome are supportive of any of these suggestions, we screened 82 Armenian males of Hamsheni descent for 12 biallelic and 6 microsatellite Y-chromosomal markers. These data were compared with the corresponding data set from the representative populations of the three candidate regions. Genetic difference between the Hamshenis and other groups is significant and backs up the hypothesis of the Armenian origin of the Hamshenis, indicating central historical Armenia as a homeland of the ancestral population. This inference is further strengthened by the results of admixture analysis, which does not support the Central-Asian hypothesis of the Hamshenis' origin. Genetic diversity values and patterns of genetic distances suggest a high degree of genetic isolation of the Hamshenis consistent with their retention of a distinct and ancient dialect of the Armenian language.
[1] The Hemshin people (Armenian: Համշէնցիներ, Hamshentsiner; Turkish: Hemşinliler), also known as Hemshinli or Hamshenis or Homshetsi,[6][7][8] are a bilingual[9] small group of Armenians who practice Sunni Islam after they had been converted from Christianity in the beginning of the 18th century[10] and are affiliated with the Hemşin and Çamlıhemşin districts in the province of Rize, Turkey. They are Armenian in origin, and were originally Christian members of the Armenian Apostolic Church, but over the centuries evolved into a distinct community and converted to Sunni Islam after the conquest of the region by the Ottomans during the second half of the 15th century.
For centuries, the ongoing migration from the geographically isolated highlands to lowlands made Hemshin people settle in the areas near Trabzon, Artvin and in the Western part of the Black Sea coast. Thus, is a significant Hamsheni population were formed in Trabzon, Artvin and Western part of the Black Sea coast.
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