Opposition leader Nikol Pashinyan was elected prime minister by parliament in May after he spearheaded weeks of mass protests against the ruling party, transforming the country's political landscape. He had piled pressure on the ruling Republican Party through an unprecedented campaign of civil disobedience, leading to the shock resignation of veteran leader Serzh Sargsyan, a week after he shifted to the newly-empowered role of prime minister after serving for 10 years as president.
In December he called a snap election to remove the Republican Party majority in parliament, and his My Step Alliance won an overwhelming majority. The Republicans won no seats. Mr Pashinyan promised to maintain Armenia's strategic alliance with Russia.
But he faced calls for his resignation in late after agreeing to a Moscow-brokered ceasefire with Azerbaijan, which had made major gains in an offensive against Nagorno-Karabakh. President: Armen Sargsyan. Armen Sargsyan was elected president in March , when the country moved from a presidential system of government to a parliamentary one. He briefly served as prime minister from November to March between stints as ambassador to the UK and other diplomatic posts in Europe.
Voters in a referendum backed constitutional changes reducing the powers of the president in favour of the premiership, which critics saw as a ruse to allow outgoing president Serzh Sargsyan to continue to rule as prime minister. Serzh Sargsyan duly became prime minister on the expiry of his second term as president in April , but sparked the largest street protests Armenia has seen for years.
He resigned after several days of unrest. The political changes in had a profound effect on the media, with the main TV stations becoming largely free of state control. The only official language is Armenian, which is spoken by almost everyone, though Russian and English are common as second languages.
Despite the historical turmoil in the region and the presence of other nearby cultures, religions, and kingdoms, Armenian culture has remained remarkably strongly unified across centuries, especially because of the adoption of Christianity in CE and the unique Armenian alphabet created in CE. This has created a lot of cohesion among Armenians, even among the diaspora and communities living well beyond the borders of modern Armenia.
About Us Contact Us. Map of the Near East and surrounding regions. The map shows the location of the present-day Armenia and neighbouring countries. Blue lozenges show the recruitment sites for the Armenian samples used in this study.
Political turmoil during World War I resulted in the displacement of the East Turkey Armenian population orange lozenge to present-day Armenia or to several other nearby countries such as Lebanon.
Previous genetic studies of Armenians are scarce and genome-wide analysis is limited to a few Armenian samples in broad surveys without any detailed analysis. Armenians were found to have genetic affinity to several other populations including the Jews, Druze, and Lebanese Christians, in addition to showing genetic continuity with the Caucasus. In this study, we analyse newly generated genome-wide data from Armenians, as well as available data from 78 other worldwide populations.
We investigate genetic signatures of past events such as the emergence of Armenians as an ethnic group, the cultural changes in the Near East, and the expansions of ancient populations in this region.
PLINK 11 was used for data management and quality control. The two runs were identical, suggesting good convergence. The effective population size of the Armenians was estimated from linkage disequilibrium LD and the time of divergence between the two major groups was calculated using NeON 16 with default parameters.
The function uses Ne and the genetic distance Fst between populations to estimate their time of divergence. Fst was calculated using the software 4P. We used f3 statistics 18 f3 A; B,C , where a significantly negative statistic provides evidence that A is derived from an admixture of populations related to B and C. The reference populations consisted of samples and 53 populations reduced from the original data set by removing populations that are themselves highly admixed Supplementary Table 1.
Sardinians appear to have a distinctive admixture pattern from other West Europeans and are therefore shown separately. Sardinians have a European component but appear to have been less affected than other Europeans by the post-Neolithic demographic changes in Europe.
For tests of genetic affinity to Neolithic Europeans, we merged our samples with the genome of the Tyrolean Iceman. We generated bootstrap replicates by resampling blocks of SNPs to assess the stability of the tree topology. In the absence of admixture with Yoruba, deviation from 0 will be a function of the shared genetic history of the ancient Europeans and the non-African population.
We observe that Armenians form a distinctive cluster bounded by Europeans, Near Easterners, and the Caucasus populations. The position of the Armenians within the global genetic diversity appears to mirror the geographical location of Turkey.
Previous genetic studies have generally used Turks as representatives of ancient populations from Turkey. Our results show that Turks are genetically shifted towards Central Asians, a pattern consistent with a history of mixture with populations from this region.
Armenians individuals were projected to the plot and therefore did not contribute to the observed global structure. These diversity patterns observed in the PCA motivated formal testing of admixture in Armenians and other regional populations. To formally test for population mixture in Armenians, we performed a 3-population test 25 in the form of f3 Armenian; A, B , where a significantly negative value of the f3 statistic implies that Armenians descend from a mixture of the populations represented by A and B , chosen from the 78 global populations.
We found signals of mixture from several African and Eurasian populations Table 1 , Figure 3. The most significantly negative f3 statistics are from a mixture of populations related to Sardinians and Central Asians, followed by several mixtures of populations from the Caucasus, Arabian Peninsula, the Levant, Europe, and Africa.
We sought to date these mixture of events using exponential decay of admixture-induced LD. Later, several mixture events occurred from to bce involving diverse Eurasian populations Table 1 , Figure 3. Genetically inferred source populations for Armenians, admixture times and genetic structure.
Admixture events were estimated using decay of linkage disequilibrium with regional populations as sources for Armenians. Each horizontal coloured line indicates an admixture event and its width reflects the estimated date of admixture and SE. The plot also shows the estimated date of establishment of genetic structure within Armenians — CE. Major historical events and cultural developments in the Near East are shown at the bottom.
We compared the patterns of admixture in Armenians with those of other regional populations and detected signals of recent admixture in most other populations. For example, we find 7. To investigate the presence of genetic structure within the Armenian population, we performed model-based clustering on the values of the Armenian samples from the global PCA.
We observe the following: 1 Armenians in the diaspora that trace their origin to historical Western Armenia modern-day East Turkey form one group Supplementary Figure S1 , Cluster 1.
We then constructed a tree that infers population relationships and similarities Supplementary Figure S2. We found, similarly to our previous clustering results, a fine genetic structure that splits Armenians into two major groups that are more similar to each other than to any other global population. The node containing most Armenians is deep compared with many other nodes containing several diverse regional populations.
This probably reflects a prolonged isolation of the Armenians from their surrounding populations as suggested by the LD-based admixture tests. We estimate from the LD patterns that divergence between the two major Armenian groups started — years ago Figure 3. We used TreeMix 19 to construct a tree of genetic relationships using representative regional populations plus Armenians and Turks from the Near East. TreeMix uses a model that allows for both population splits and gene flow to better capture historical relationships between populations.
We obtained a tree that recapitulates the known relationships among population groups. Furthermore, the tree shows that the Iceman shared drift with Sardinians, as previously reported. The graph structure appeared robust in bootstrap replicates with the first migration highest weight and lowest P -value , always leading from the Iceman to Armenians Figure 4. Inferred population tree with one mixture event. The graph was inferred by TreeMix allowing one migration event.
The graph is stable in bootstrap replicates. This structure was further investigated using outgroup f3 statistics. The origins of the Armenians and their cultural uniqueness are poorly understood.
Here, we investigate the information that can be obtained by genetic analysis of present-day Armenians and comparisons with other present-day and ancient samples. The position of the Armenians within global genetic diversity appears to mirror the geographical location of Turkey, which forms a bridge connecting Europe, the Near East, and the Caucasus.
We investigated Armenians further by inferring their admixture history. The Armenians show signatures of an origin from a mixture of diverse populations occurring from to bce.
This period spans the Bronze Age, characterized by extensive use of metals in farming tools, chariots, and weapons, accompanied by development of the earliest writing systems and the establishment of trade routes and commerce. Many civilizations such as in ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Indus valley grew to prominence.
Major population expansions followed, triggered by advances in transportation technology and the pursuit of resources. Our admixture tests show that Armenian genomes carry signals of an extensive population mixture during this period.
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