1. MtDNA and Y chromosome variation and language replacement in the Caucasus Ivan Nasidze & Mark Stoneking Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany

4. 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.

5. Analyze populations whose linguistic neighbors are not their geographic neighbors ABC Which best explains their genetic relationships? A B C Geography! A C B Language!

7. 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.

8. MDS plot based on mtDNA HVI sequence data

9. M124 C T M45 G A M173 A C M17 1bp del M9 C G M89 C T M201 G T M172 T G M170 A C RPS4Y (M130) C T YAP P R K F I J G C E P1 P* R1a1* R1* K* F* G* J2* I* C* E*

10. AB IN DA LE AZ GE AR K OS SV TUR ABK OS_D OS_A IR_T IR_I RU LE KA CH J2* F* R1a1* I* G* C* R1* K* E* P* P1

11. MDS plot based on Y chromosome SNP data

12. ___________________________________________________ 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 F st values between Armenians, Azerbaijanians and neighboring groups.

13. Armenians Indo-Europeans Caucasians Azerbaijanians Turkic Caucasians Geography best explains genetic relationships! Genetic relationships of Armenians and Azerbaijanians

16. MDS plot based on mtDNA HVI sequence data

17. MDS plot based on Y chromosome SNP data Os

18. Conclusions The genetic results thus suggest that both the Armenian and Azerbaijanian languages represent language replacements via elite dominance. Armenians and Azerbaijanians are more closely-related genetically to their geographic neighbors in the Caucasus than to their linguistic neighbors elsewhere. Overall, we did not find correlation between linguistic and genetic classifications in the Caucasus.