The Problem of Armenian Origins in the Light of Recent Archaeogenetic Data

Abstract

The article presents the latest archaeogenetic data on the basis of which one of the most major problems of the history of Armenia—the origins and formation of the Armenian people—is examined. According to these data, regardless of the localisation of the early Indo-European (Indo-Hittite) Urheimat, the late Indo-European homeland was formed in the steppe and forest-steppe regions of Eastern Europe, from the Volga to the Dniester basins. It was from there that all the present Indo-European languages originated. Archaeogenetic data convincingly prove a migration of people across the Caucasus from the East European steppes to the South Caucasus and the Armenian Highland starting from the mid-third millennium BC. Those migrants and their descendants created the Trialeti-Vanadzor, Sevan-Artsakh, Van-Urmia, and Lchashen-Metsamor cultures of the Middle, Late Bronze, and Iron Ages. Even at the end of the kingdom of Urartu (seventh–sixth centuries BC), the local population in the territory of modern Armenia (the land Etiuni of Urartian sources) still had a significant steppe patrilineal DNA (75%). Armenian should have been the language of the creators of those cultures, and archaeogenetic data testify in favour of the Etiuni hypothesis of the origin of the Armenians.