MtDNA and Y chromosome variation and language replacement in the Caucasus

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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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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.
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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.
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MDS plot based on mtDNA HVI sequence data
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MDS plot based on Y chromosome SNP data
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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.
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MDS plot based on mtDNA HVI sequence data
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MDS plot based on Y chromosome SNP data
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