[ProtectOurFreedom]

Armenians form a distinctive cluster bounded by Europeans, Near Easterners, and the Caucasus populations. Armenians are close to (1) Spaniards, Italians, and Romanians from Europe; (2) Lebanese, Jews, Druze, and Cypriots from the Near East; and (3) Georgians and Abkhazians from the Caucasus The chart shows Western European and Sub-Saharan Africa genes from 4,000 BC in the Armenians.

It really is incredible to think how mobile ancient civilizations were 2,000 to 4,000 BC. It must of been a combination of trade routes, militaries on the move, and large human migrations. Randy young men moving vast distances into parts unknown, bedding and impregnating the local young women. Did any of the foreign men marry and settle down? Was it consensual illegitimate sex before the men moved on? How many bloodlines were created by rape?

No matter the way the girls got impregnated, it was widespread and common enough to mark the entire ancestral genetic line of the Armenians.

[ckilmer]

All European men trace their patrilineal line to the area that is roughly Ukraine today. What happened? Most of the local European men, who were mixtures of western hunter-gatherers and Anatolian farmers .... were killed or out-competed for the women. Why? The step herders were not just ferocious; they also stood a head taller and were broader at the shoulders than the local men. Then, they also had horses and chariots. But before the step herders even arrived the black plague burned through Europe—decimating whole populations. Stonehenge was built roughly 3000-2500 BC. Over the next 500 years the populations that built stonehenge was replaced by by descendents of step herders from ukraine.

The signatures of the western hunter gatherers and the anatolian farmers remain in the genetic record because they are carried through euopean women.

[Cronos]

Pre-agriculture, people would have been far more mobile than we give them credit for being.

I don’t’ think “settling down” was a factor in nomadic peoples - more like bride swapping.

The Sardinians show the oldest extents of pre-Indo-European hunter-gathers in Europe, to they are probably the closest to the “original Europeans”.

I think a lot of the bloodlines were consensual - for the simple reason that rape would have caused damage to the nomadic communities.

[wafflehouse]

the bronze age (from about 3500 BC to 1200 BC) was a time of advanced, interconnected (nearly) global civilization. One of the most interesting time periods in history.