ABSTRACT Sometime between the late Bronze-Age and the early Iron-Age, Iran experienced a linguistic and population replacement. Approximately 2700 years ago, the Indo-Iranian Medes established the Median empire which stretched from north-west Pakistan westwards to Turkey, and thereby brought genetic, linguistic, as well as ideological changes to Iran. Although not much is known about this period in time in Iran, our comprehensive study highlights in detail the changes to the Chalcolithic western Iranian sheep herder genetic substructure that accompanied the linguistic and ideological changes t ..read more

ABSTRACT We present genetic evidence of multiple demographic changes in Armenia and western Iran over the past 7000 years. By about 3000 years ago descendants of the 7000-year-old Chalcolithic Zagrosian herders, hereinafter referred to as Iran-CHL, along with their likely Elamo-Dravidian languages were gradually replaced by invading “Aryan” warriors from around the ancient Ariana (Airyanem Vaejah) and surrounding region of Central Asia. These invaders were likely associated with the Yaz Central Asian culture and likely spoke Avestan. These early Iranians genetically resembled the sample named ..read more

ABSTRACT DNA from hundreds of ancient humans remains spanning the last 7000 years has been sequenced over the past few years in the “Southern Arc” region of West Asia and surrounds. Using DNA we here investigate the demographic changes that occurred over the past 2000 years in the Anatolia region as they pertain to the peopling of Anatolia by Armenians and Kurds, and the ethnogenesis of the Turks in Turkey. Using the qpWave3 framework we investigate whether DNA supports claims by Armenian, Kurd and Turk nationalist claiming their respective ethnic groups have inhabited Anatolia for thousands o ..read more

Abstract The recent 2022 extensive multi-national collaborative study and multiple publications on the origin and dispersal of Indo-European languages by Lazaridis et al 1 showed that proto Indo-European languages and Yamnaya’s paternal ancestors originated in the “Southern Arc” region of Armenia and Northern Iran. Subsequently the modified Indo-European languages dispersed from a secondary staging area on the Eurasian Steppe to Europe and Asia. Here we show that the Indo-European languages spoken in the Kurdistan region and northern Iran were further modified post Iron Age by Parthians from C ..read more

https://iias.huji.ac.il/event/david-reich-lecture ” We present an integrative genetic history of the Southern Arc, an area divided geographically between West Asia and Europe, but which we define as spanning the culturally entangled regions of Anatolia and its neighbors, ‘in both Europe (Aegean and the Balkans), and in West Asia (Cyprus, Armenia, the Levant, Iraq and Iran). We employ a new analytical framework to analyze genome-wide data at the individual level from a total of 1,320 ancient individuals, 731 of which are newly reported and address major gaps in the archaeogenetic record. We rep ..read more

abstract To date there has been very limited analysis on Asian population histories using whole genome sequencing (WGS). Most population history genetics studies only utilize a few hundred thousand SNPs, which is small fraction of the genetic variation in humans. This small fraction of the genetics variation is ascertained using certain populations. An example are the datasets at the Reich Lab at Harvard or Max Plank which utilize the 1240K Affymetrix Axiom chipset SNPs. Another example is the use of the 2.3M SNP datasets ascertained with the Illumina Omni 2.5 chipset, such as various 1000 Gen ..read more

ABSTRACT Sometime between the late Bronze-Age and the early Iron-Age, Iran experienced a linguistic and population replacement. Approximately 2700 years ago, the Indo-Iranian Medes established the Median empire which stretched from north-west Pakistan westwards to Turkey, and thereby brought genetic, linguistic, as well as ideological changes to Iran. Although not much is known about this period in time in Iran, our comprehensive study highlights in detail the changes to the Chalcolithic western Iranian sheep herder genetic substructure that accompanied the linguistic and ideological changes t ..read more

Abstract Genetic analysis conducted by prominent scientists along with our own independent detailed genome analysis formally, using high density genotyped datasets indicates that Central Asian Iron-Age Indo-Iranic Scythians and Sarmatians played a significant role in the ethnogenesis of present day Kurds and a few other Iranic populations. This coincides with the introduction of Indo-Iranian languages into the Iranian plateau during the time of Medes and Parthians 2000 to 2700 years ago, and prior to the arrival of Turkic tribes in the Iranian plateau. Additionally since Kurds and Turkmen have ..read more

DISCUSSION Earlier this month the much awaited Bronze Age Indus Valley Civilization (IVC) paper on the Harappan genomes was released (1). Unfortunately, only one of the sampled skeletons yielded usable DNA fragments. The main conclusions of the paper, which relied primarily on this single sequenced genome, named I6113, and 11 previously sequenced BA individuals in Narasimhan et al (2), from sites in cultural contact with IVC from Eastern Iran and Turkmenistan, were: The individual I6113, recovered from Rakhigarhi in NW India, is from a population that is the largest source of ancestry fo ..read more

DISCUSSION We are proud to announce the availability to the public of our latest genetic admixture inference program named SAPDA (Shared Ancestral Population Defining Alleles). Eurasians, whether Europeans or Asians, are genetically very similar to each other, with genetic similarities far outweighing any differences they have. Most Eurasians have descended from a few thousand individuals who roamed Eurasia during the Upper Paleolithic and thus share a huge amount of DNA. Thus an admixture inference program needs to determine which mutations are shared due to distant common origins and which o ..read more