29% of Armenian DNA is "ancient European" 
The Zorats Karer, also called Karahunj or Carahunge, consists of 223 stones in total, arranged in a circle flanked by northern and southern arms. It has been dated to the Middle Bronze Age or possibly the Iron Age. Though its purpose remains unknown, several astronomers have suggested the site is an ancient astronomical observatory due to the circular holes that were bored into several of the standing stones.
An alternative theory is that the stones are what remains of the walls of an ancient Armenian city
As the only present-day population assumed autochthonous for the Armenian
Highland is represented by Armenians, the population is considered for the study of
genetic makeup of the region. The genetic structure of Armenians was analyzed
based on paleoanthropological, dermatoglyphics, isoserological data and using
various genetic markers, such as the NRY, mtDNA, Alu insertion polymorphisms,
and autosomal markers [Nasidze I and Stoneking M, 2001; Weale ME, et al., 2001;
Nasidze I, et al., 2004; Harutyunyan A, et al., 2009; Herrera KJ, et al., 2012, Rootsi
S, et al., 2012; Hovhannisyan A, et al., 2014]. However, the results of uniparental
genetic analyses are relatively different, suggesting the presence of gender-specific
population events [Nasidze I, et al., 2004]. The comparison of Y-chromosomal and
mtDNA diversity within Armenian populations has identified more expressed
geographic pattern for paternal rather than maternally inherited markers. This
indicates the significant impact of the cultural tradition of patrilocality on population
structure [Harutyunyan A, et al., 2009]. Moreover, results of a previous study pointed
to the marked genetic divergence of populations from the mountainous southern
(Syunik, Karabakh) and eastern areas of the Armenian Highland compared to those of
the Ararat valley and the northern, western and central parts of historical Armenia
[Weale ME, et al., 2001]. In addition, the HLA data survey confirmed a significant
geographic stratification of the Armenians and supported their indigenous origin
[Margaryan A, et al., 2011]. A recent high resolution survey of the patrilineal genetic
structure of four Armenian populations of Ararat valley, Gardman, Lake Van and
Sasun, which encompass the full extent of historical Armenia, revealed the greatest
prevalence of Y-chromosomal haplogroups associated with the arrival of the
Neolithic farmers from the Near East, including the J2a-M410-, R1b1b1*-L23-, G2a-
P15- and J1-M267-derived lineages [Herrera KJ, et al., 2012]. I
Armenians represents the only population in the
Caucasus that share Near/ Middle Eastern component and, at the same time, follows
clustering patterns similar to the Caucasus and the Levantine ones [Yunusbayev B, et
al., 2012; Haber M, et al., 2015].
More recent
massive genetic survey of 173 Armenians revealed that the population coupled with
other Near Eastern genetic isolates (Cypriots, Near Eastern Jews and Christians) have
higher genetic affinity to Neolithic European farmers rather than to modern Near
Eastern populations [Haber M, et al., 2015]. Thus, in comparison to other present-day
Near Eastern populations, the genetic isolates preserve the features of ancient
regional genetic landscape.
he Neolithic was a
crucial period not only in terms of invention and spread of agriculture, but also for
mass human migration from the Near East to Europe and the North Caucasus. In this
context, the Armenian Highland, located on the crossroads of the major waves of
prehistoric and historic migrations, could have served as a conduit for Neolithic
human spread.
https://www.peopleofar.com/2014/02/17/new-dna-study-shows-armenian-genetic-traces-across-the-world/
a longer matriarchalhttps://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/55403768/H2a1_Pandoses_2_corrected-libre.pdf?1514586889=&response-content-disposition=inline%3B+filename%3DThe_discreet_Origin_of_H2a1_MtDNA_and_it.pdf&Expires=1745467892&Signature=HaAmiP5HyJ1bngk7GFz-zNqK-OUHCJBWHTm5pPK0EzgkhSVljJnVyIf7Qs86450SJwUcH6WxMF9vgEzovRNxxcSeHXGhx~d1fcQ-~xvBbQWtA06OTXzTrRTrgiBtmKm6lr7xiZaUNykin48x3VBeIpHdy38Su-59BXYADu6iRSN1npLkA0cWY2Vd~2fIHFpTmfGNOfRxG~dKidZj4iNzqq1anU~XyHpA4alCXVCTwqBvMhja5MpHOygzQfp3kge7MvP2juhdmgGWLjwJuyhrx-SQ6xhAEHadUrijUYvkUqtmSRrL65~OvguV9PF7bjOhiHLFtvUvb8TvxoM183ffJg__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAJLOHF5GGSLRBV4ZA
ethnogenesis in the continuation of prior H2 and
H2a hp and on the other hand a high capacity of
integrating and synthetizing local cultures. Thus,
being heir of a prior ethnogenesis linked to Pre-
Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB), H2a1 MtDNA
marks by its presence and absence demic and
cultural diffusions of specific advanced
agricultural and domestication technics from
Fertile Crescent, in particular Pastoralism for
Milk and Cheese Making, revealing the deep
Near Eastern and Southern Lesser Caucasian
sub-structure of the common Indo-European
culture.
Although it has been demonstrated that farmers
from Levant and Zagros mountains were
commonly strongly genetically differentiated58,
we propose a different approach dominated by
the hypothesis of a minority as vector of
advanced technics whose transmission was a
mean of survival and synonym of high position
in complex societies. In other words, the
transmission of specific knowledge triggered
what we can already call a ‘proto-caste’ that, in
this case, could have sustained a matriarchal
organization based on domestication and
medicine/ veterinary knowledge.
Indeed, we believe that all kind of form of
Pastoralism could have increased competition
with predators like felines or wolves and that
domesticated canids could have been a solution
to delimitate a non-competitive perimeter by a
mutual tolerance (reward made of meat). Thus,
domesticating tolerant canids could have allowed
the transfer of a significant part of the shepherd’s
activity (vigilance) to a third part that permitted a
better care of the herd and veterinary
intervention. This is probably why64 the wolf was
the first animal65 to be domesticated more than
14 Kya66.
The modern etymology of the modern
*turtle (n.) leads us to Transcaucasia and seems
to be originated from a proto-Azeri noun that we
can find in modern times under the form of *dəri
that means ‘leather’ or ‘skin’86 and probably
composes the name of *Tərtər, name of the river
that takes its source few kilometres away from
the Hakari and plunges into the Kura River. The
name survived in Christian Latin under
*Tartaruchus that literally means ‘from Hell’ or
‘from the Tartar’87 used to call heretics. A Pre-
Pottery Neolithic site, Körtik Tepe (Batman,
south-west to Lake Van, Turkey) shows a similar
use of tortoise and the funerary tradition
remained in nearby post Assyrian Kavusan
Höyük88.
Samara and the Volga were thus not where the Yamnaya were formed: the answer was in the west, in the part of the steppe north of the Black Sea.
Our analysis showed that the Yamnaya population was formed by admixture around 4000BCE and expanded after 3300BCE. The “core Yamnaya” group emerged from a small founding population of just a couple of thousand people between 3700-3300 BCE, then expanded explosively in just a few centuries, breaking connections between geography and genetics so that descendants in Hungary and Mongolia were almost as closely related to each other as people buried just a few hundred kilometers apart. The oldest core Yamnaya individual, from the site of Mykhailivka in Ukraine (described in the related article in Nature by Nikitin, Lazaridis et al.), dated to around 3600-3400 BCE, was from one of the few sites where there was undisrupted settlement from Copper Age to Yamnaya times, making this a candidate for the location where the Yamnaya formed from their genetically nearly identical but culturally quite different predecessors, the Serednii Stih culture of the Dnipro-Don area.
https://communities.springernature.com/posts/indo-european-origins-a-new-solution-to-an-old-puzzle
Half a dozen individuals buried near the Halys river (modern Kızılırmak) in Central Anatolia24 stood out among their contemporaries in possessing a sliver of about a tenth Berezhnovka ancestry, the rest coming from Mesopotamian farmers.28 Alwin Kloekhorst had proposed22 that the crossing of the Halys river was a final step in a long “Anatolian trek” from the west. Our results find putative Anatolian speakers in just the right time and place but the Mesopotamian ancestry and Berezhnovka traces in Bronze Age people from Arslantepe25 in eastern Turkey, Areni-1 in Armenia,29 and Maikop27 in the North Caucasus, reverse the direction. This eastern entry hypothesis resembles Kristian Kristiansen’s maritime entry scenario,30 but proposes that CLV people crossed the Caucasus leaving breadcrumbs we can detect along an inland route, mixing with native people of Mesopotamia and its environs before finally reaching Central Anatolia.
There was a “Caucasus-Lower Volga” (CLV) cline of ancestry with Neolithic Armenia on one end and Berezhnovka people on the other. The Yamnaya had about four fifths of their ancestry from this cline. The Black Sea steppe was where the Yamnaya grew to maturity during the 3000s BCE but many of their ancestors had wandered there from the Caucasus-Volga zone during the 4000s BCE.
AI overview:
In 6000 BCE, Armenia was primarily inhabited by various tribes and the earliest evidence of settlement can be traced back to this period. The region was part of the larger Shulaveri-Shomu culture, one of the earliest prehistoric cultures in the Transcaucasus area. This period also saw the emergence of Neolithic cultures and the beginning of agriculture, with evidence of domesticated grapes in the area
British scholar Dr. Robert Ellis describes in his book The Armenian Origin of the Etruscans :
“The Armenians, like the Celts, are now few in number. They belong once to a longer extent of a country where they spread westward from Armenia to Italy under the names of Phrygians, Thracians, Pelasgians, Etruscans and also spread to other locations.”
Norwegian scholar Dr. Bugge, also suggested that the Etruscan language was of Armenian extraction. Other scholars like Vahan M. Kurkjian have identified Urartean art, architecture, language and general cultural traces of kinship to the Etruscans of the Italian peninsula. Armenian genetic traces among the populations of Tuscany therefore corroborate with the Etruscan-Armenian theory.
It is safe to assume that Eastern Turkey would show even greater Armenian genetic contribution which would corroborate with the notion of Turks being acculturated Armenians as was previously discussed by various scholars.
Science 14 February 2014:
Vol. 343 no. 6172 pp. 747-751
DOI: 10.1126/science.1243518
A Genetic Atlas of Human Admixture History
Garrett Hellenthal et al.
Modern genetic data combined with appropriate statistical methods have
the potential to contribute substantially to our understanding of human
history. We have developed an approach that exploits the genomic
structure of admixed populations to date and characterize historical
mixture events at fine scales. We used this to produce an atlas of
worldwide human admixture history, constructed by using genetic data
alone and encompassing over 100 events occurring over the past 4000
years. We identified events whose dates and participants suggest they
describe genetic impacts of the Mongol empire, Arab slave trade, Bantu
expansion, first millennium CE migrations in Eastern Europe, and
European colonialism, as well as unrecorded events, revealing admixture
to be an almost universal force shaping human populations.
http://admixturemap.paintmychromosomes.com/
Mitochondrial Genetic Diversity in the Armenians: A Review.
Hovhannisyan, H.; Yepiskoposyan, L.
Armenians are the indigenous people of the Armenian Highland with strong and distinct ethnocultural charateristies. Being a crossroad linking Europe and Asia, the Armenian Highland has experienced numerous ancient and recent migrations of different tribes and ethnic groups. To describe the role of the Armenian plateau in these migrations and how the last influenced the ethnogenesis of the Armenian population, numerous population genetics studies have been recently performed on the Armenians. However, the matrilineal genetic legacy of the Armenian population, which is characterised by maternally transmitted mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is still poorly investigated. Here, we review the current state of genetic studies performed so far on the Armenian matrilineal genetic structure.
We checked the degree of continuity of modern Armenians with ancient inhabitants of the eastern Armenian highlands and detected a genetic input into the region from a source linked to Neolithic Levantine Farmers at some point after the Early Bronze Age. Additionally, we cataloged an abundance of new mutations unique to the population, including a missense mutation predicted to cause familial Mediterranean fever, an autoinflammatory disorder highly prevalent in Armenians.
This period has been characterized by extensive genetic interactions between the Caucasus, northern Levant, Iran, and Anatolia over a long time span,6,7 with a notable gene flow from the South-Caucasus-like source to Anatolia, starting after the end of the Neolithic.7 Another well-documented post-Neolithic event was the onset of a population movement from the Caucasus into the steppe, which ultimately genetically contributed to the formation of Yamnaya ancestry.7,8,9 The Bronze Age in the Armenian highlands is marked by the rise and fall of a number of archaeological cultures, including the Early Bronze Kura-Araxes culture, Middle Bronze Age Early Kurgan, Trialeti-Vanadzor, Sevan-Artsakh, Karmir-berd, and Karmir-vank ceramic traditions, and the Late Bronze and Early Iron Age Lchashen-Metsamor culture.10 Approximately after the Early Bronze Age period, a migration from the steppe in a southeastern direction introduced Yamnaya-related ancestry to the region (though predominantly not reaching western and central parts of the Armenian highlands).7 These aforementioned gene flows, backed by linguistic evidence of the formation of the proto-Armenian language during the second part of the Bronze Age (∼4,000 years ago),11 position the Armenian highlands as either near or a potential candidate for the proposed homeland of the Proto-Indo-European languages from where they subsequently radiated into western Europe, central Asia, and India.
Indeed, a comparison of both ancient and modern mitochondrial genomes (mtDNA), across a time span of 8,000 years, revealed a remarkably high level of matrilineal genetic continuity in the region....Taken as a whole, our results support the lack of significant genetic input from the Balkans into ancient and modern populations of the Armenian highlands....Although the Balkan hypothesis has long been considered the most plausible narrative on the origin of Armenians, our results showed that modern Armenians are genetically distinct from both the ancient and present-day populations of the Balkans. While a recent study7 speculates that the dilution of the EHG ancestry after the Iron Age could suggest Balkan-related gene flow, our results reveal a different source for this genetic input.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0002929724003914
Altogether, our results suggest a gene flow from a Neolithic-Levantine-Farmers-like source into the eastern parts of the Armenian highlands, presumably during/after the end of the Bronze Age, which differentiated modern Armenians from their regional ancestors.
Of note, all Armenian populations shared high genetic similarities with the populations in close geographic proximity, including Assyrians,
we revealed a high level of regional genetic continuity in eastern parts of the Armenian highlands for well over 6,000 years, confirming analyses in previous studies.14,15 A recent study also suggests a similar level of stability up to the Bronze Age in the South Caucasus (there was no test for later inputs, as this study used only aDNA).6 This pattern stands in contrast to most other western Eurasian populations, which have undergone multiple large influxes and turnovers.
The Middle Bronze Age saw the emergence of diverse cultures, a predominant nomadic lifestyle, and active relations with Anatolia and the Aegean. The Late Bronze Age, on the other hand, was characterized by intense cultural interactions with neighboring populations, including the Hurrians, Hittites, and Mesopotamians.In summary, we conclude that there was a large-scale movement across the Middle East at some point after the Early Bronze Age. From the genetic point of view, this movement has led to a sizable input of Neolithic-like ancestry in the populations inhabiting the region. In particular, this movement reached the mountainous regions of the eastern parts of the Armenian highlands, resulting in the genetic divergence of the modern populations from their regional ancestors.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31372716/
About third of the mtDNA subhaplogroups found in Armenian gene pool might be considered as Armenian-specific, as these are virtually absent elsewhere in Europe, West Asia and Transcaucasia.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4820045/
The Armenians are a culturally isolated population who historically inhabited a region in the Near East bounded by the Mediterranean and Black seas and the Caucasus,
We show that Armenian diversity can be explained by several mixtures of Eurasian populations that occurred between ~3000 and ~2000 bce, a period characterized by major population migrations after the domestication of the horse, appearance of chariots, and the rise of advanced civilizations in the Near East. However, genetic signals of population mixture cease after ~1200 bce when Bronze Age civilizations in the Eastern Mediterranean world suddenly and violently collapsed.
Armenians have since remained isolated and genetic structure within the population developed ~500 years ago when Armenia was divided between the Ottomans and the Safavid Empire in Iran. Finally, we show that Armenians have higher genetic affinity to Neolithic Europeans than other present-day Near Easterners, and that 29% of Armenian ancestry may originate from an ancestral population that is best represented by Neolithic Europeans.
They have their own church, the Armenian Apostolic Church, which was founded in the first CE and became in 301 CE the first branch of Christianity to be adopted as a state religion. They have also their own alphabet and language, which is classified as an independent branch of the Indo-European language family. The Armenian language is a subject of interest and debate among linguists for its distinctive phonological developments within Indo-European languages and for its affinity to Balkan languages such as Greek and Albanian. The historical homeland of the Armenians sits north of the Fertile Crescent, a region of substantial importance to modern human evolution. Genetic and archaeological data suggest that farmers expanding from this region during the Neolithic populated Europe and interacted/admixed with pre-existing hunter-gatherer populations.6 Furthermore, Armenia's location may have been important for the spread of Indo-European languages, since it is believed to encompass or be close to the Proto-Indo-European homeland (Anatolia or Pontic Steppe) from which the Indo-Europeans and their culture spread to Western Europe, Central Asia, and India.
We observe that Armenians form a distinctive cluster bounded by Europeans, Near Easterners, and the Caucasus populations. More specifically, Armenians are close to (1) Spaniards, Italians, and Romanians from Europe; (2) Lebanese, Jews, Druze, and Cypriots from the Near East; and (3) Georgians and Abkhazians from the Caucasus (Figure 2b). The position of the Armenians within the global genetic diversity appears to mirror the geographical location of Turkey.
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