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MtDNA and Y chromosome variation and language replacement in the Caucasus. Ivan Nasidze & Mark Stoneking Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany.
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MtDNA and Y chromosome variation and language replacement in the Caucasus Ivan Nasidze & Mark Stoneking Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany
Question: the presence of populations who are linguistically-related to populations outside the Caucasus, such as Armenians (who speak an Indo-European language) and Azerbaijanians (who speak a Turkic language) raises the question as to whether language affiliation or geographic proximity best explains the genetic relationships of these Caucasian populations.
Analyze populations whose linguistic neighbors are not their geographic neighbors A B C Which best explains their genetic relationships? A B C A C B Geography! Language!
Genetic markers used in our studies We addressed this question by studying sequence variation in the first hypervariable segment (HV1) of the mtDNA control region, Y chromosome bi-allelic and STR markers in the Caucasian populations.
M124 C T P1 P M45 G A P* M173 A C R R1* K M9 C G M17 1bp del R1a1* K* F M89 C T F* M201 G T G G* M172 T G J J2* M170 A C I I* C RPS4Y (M130) C T C* E YAP E*
J2* E* R1* I* G* OS_D OS_A F* R1a1* AB P* C* KA DA IN P1 K* ABK RU CH LE K SV GE LE OS AZ AR TUR IR_I IR_T
___________________________________________________ Caucasian Indo-Eur. Turkic speakers speakers speakers ___________________________________________________ Armenians (mtDNA) 0.013 0.014 - Armenians (Y-chr.) 0.053 0.146 - Azerbaijanians (mtDNA) 0.019 - 0.099 Azerbaijanians (Y-chr.) 0.047 - 0.105 ___________________________________________________ Table 1. Pairwise Fst values between Armenians, Azerbaijanians and neighboring groups.
Genetic relationships of Armenians and Azerbaijanians Azerbaijanians Armenians Caucasians Caucasians Indo-Europeans Turkic Geography best explains genetic relationships!
Os MDS plot based on Y chromosome SNP data
Conclusions Armenians and Azerbaijanians are more closely-related genetically to their geographic neighbors in the Caucasus than to their linguistic neighbors elsewhere. The genetic results thus suggest that both the Armenian and Azerbaijanian languages represent language replacements via elite dominance. Overall, we did not find correlation between linguistic and genetic classifications in the Caucasus.