Turks: Greek or Armenian?

Posted on August 24, 2021August 25, 2021 by Razib Khan

A new paper on Turkey, The genetic structure of the Turkish population reveals high levels of variation and admixture:

We delineated the fine-scale genetic structure of the Turkish population by using sequencing data of 3,362 unrelated Turkish individuals from different geographical origins and demonstrated the position of Turkey in terms of human migration and genetic drift. The results show that the genetic structure of present-day Anatolia was shaped by historical and modern-day migrations, high levels of admixture, and inbreeding. We observed that modern-day Turkey has close genetic relationships with the neighboring Balkan and Caucasus populations. We generated a Turkish Variome which defines the extent of variation observed in Turkey, listed homozygous loss-of-function variants and clinically relevant variants in the cohort, and generated an imputation panel for future genome-wide association studies.

First, I’m surprised how inbred the Turks are in this paper. They need to get more secular quickly and stop marrying their cousins. Second, there’s the classic issue of assuming East Asian ancestry = Turkic ancestry. The reality is that by the time the Turkic tribes arrived in Anatolia they’d already mixed with Iranian peoples in Central Asia, so they may have been 50% non-East Asian by that time. Here’s the relevant section: “Paternal gene flow based on Y chromosome haplogroups C-RPS4Y and O3-M122, which were previously implicated as Central Asian specific, ranged from 8.5 to 15.6%. Maternal gene flow based on mtDNA haplogroups D4c and G2a, which were previously suggested as Central Asian specific, was 8.13%.” For what it’s worth, 4% of the Y’s are R1a of the Slavic variant and 8% are R1a’s of the Indo-Iranian variant. The main issue with the latter is that some of this might be Turkified Kurds.

But what I’m really interested in is which populations modern Turks are genetically close to. In the argument of whether Turks are Greek or Armenian, these pooled Turks seem more Armenian in the heatmap. I pulled the Turk subgroups and created a table of F_st values. Nothing super surprising.

	Balkan	West	Central	North	South	East
Balkan	–	0.001	0.002	0.002	0.002	0.003
West	0.001	–	0.001	0.001	0	0.002
Central	0.002	0.001	–	0	0	0
North	0.002	0.001	0	–	0	0.001
South	0.002	0	0	0	–	0.001
East	0.003	0.002	0	0.001	0.001	–
Albanian	0	0.002	0.003	0.003	0.003	0.005
Armenian	0.004	0.002	0.001	0.001	0.001	0.001
Assyrian	0.007	0.005	0.004	0.004	0.004	0.003
Bulgarian	0	0.002	0.003	0.004	0.003	0.005
Chechen	0.007	0.006	0.006	0.006	0.006	0.006
French	0.003	0.005	0.007	0.007	0.007	0.009
Georgian	0.007	0.005	0.004	0.003	0.004	0.004
Greek	0.001	0.002	0.003	0.003	0.003	0.004
Hungarian	0.002	0.004	0.006	0.007	0.006	0.008
Iranian	0.005	0.003	0.002	0.002	0.002	0.001
Jew_Turkish	0.004	0.004	0.004	0.004	0.003	0.005
Kumyk	0.003	0.002	0.002	0.002	0.002	0.002
Lebanese	0.004	0.003	0.002	0.002	0.002	0.002
Turkmen	0.009	0.007	0.008	0.009	0.008	0.009
Ukrainian	0.003	0.006	0.008	0.009	0.009	0.01

Turks are Anatolian under the hood, somewhat more Greek than Armenian

Posted on March 11, 2018March 11, 2018 by Razib Khan

My post, Are Turks Armenians Under The Hood?, attracted a little bit of controversy. The main criticism, which was a valid one, is that I did not sample Anatolian Greeks. A reader passed on three Anatolian Greek samples. I also added a Cypriot data set. To my mild surprise, the Anatolian Greeks and Cypriots cluster together, at the end of the Greece cline toward West Asians. Therefore, for further analysis, I pooled the three Greeks with the Cypriots.

Additionally, there are two Balkan Turk samples. Even on the PCA it’s pretty clear that they’re genetically very different from the other Turks (one of them is from what has become Bulgaria), though the shift toward East Asians indicates that Turkification is very rarely a matter purely of religious conversion to Islam and assimilation of the Turkish language (obviously it initially is for many people, but these people then intermarry with those with some East Asian ancestry).

The sons of the wolf

Posted on November 12, 2017November 13, 2017 by Razib Khan

When I am not feeling well I often watch Netflix, since my brain really operates at a lower level (passive, consumptive). Curiously I was recommended a Turkish series about the father of Osman (the founder of the Ottoman dynasty), Ertuğrul. I only watched a little bit of it, but it reminded me of the mini-series from the early 2000s around Attila. There are so many commonalities across the nearly one thousand years that separate the Ottomans and Attila, but it shouldn’t be surprising, as it is highly likely that some element of the Hunnic horde was Turkic in origin.

Though I spend a lot of time on this blog talking about Indo-Europeans, because they are a rather big deal, and, they are prehistoric, I think it is important to remember the Turks as well. The similarities are clear. Both groups began at one end of the great Eurasian steppe but swept repeatedly to the other end. Both were at least in part nomadic, and both integrated with other ethnic groups along with their expansions. But the Turks operated on the edges of, and within, history. We know, for example, the importance of Sogdians in playing the role of Greeks to their Romans.

There is a curious tendency, perhaps somewhat justified, of focusing on the Turks after their predominant conversion to Islam around the centuries of 1000 A.D. But Turkic customs and folkways persisted for many centuries, and continue down to the present in a relatively unadulterated form in places like Kyrgyzstan. In The Turks in World History the author recounts how a Cuman chief leading his host into battle against the Byzantines gave a cry that mimicked a wolf, and how his horde repeated it in en masse. This is a callback to the earliest legends of the origins of the Turks, which assert that they were birthed from a she-wolf, and lived as smiths among other peoples.

Probably the best treatment of their common ancestry is in The Genetic Legacy of the Expansion of Turkic-Speaking Nomads across Eurasia. Though genome-wide the predominant northeast Eurasian character of the original Turks is swamped out by the time one reaches Anatolia, there is still an enrichment of i.b.d. tracts even that far, indicating a lineal which stretched from Siberia down to the Middle East.

Anyone who first sees a map of Indo-European languages is often amazed and surprised by their expanse. How could premodern people be so expansive and widespread? And yet the Turks show exactly how such a thing could happen, and they expanded into a much more densely populated and civilized world than the Indo-Europeans.