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Nothing surprising really. I mean, Armenians do have genetic affinity to the Levant due to the migrations of ancient Levantines to Armenia in the early bronze age period still they stop mixing with other west Asians in 1200 BCE according to the article here:Originally Posted by oszkar07
To study the Armenians' genetic relationship to worldwide populations, we computed principal components using 78 populations (Supplementary Table 1) and projected the Armenians onto the plot in a procedure called ‘PCA projection'14 (Figure 2a), which ensures that the PCA patterns are not affected by the large number of Armenians used in the analysis. We observe that Armenians form a distinctive cluster bounded by Europeans, Near Easterners, and the Caucasus populations. More specifically, 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 (Figure 2b). 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.
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.21 We then ran TreeMix allowing it to infer only one migration event, and revealed gene flow from the Iceman to Armenians, accounting for about 29% of their ancestry. The graph structure appeared robust in 100 bootstrap replicates with the first migration (highest weight and lowest P-value), always leading from the Iceman to Armenians (Figure 4).
The expected value of f3(Yoruba; Iceman, X) in the absence of admixture with Yoruba will be a function of the shared genetic history of the Iceman and X (non-African populations). Most shared ancestry of the Iceman is with Sardinians and other Europeans (Supplementary Figure S3). This is followed by shared ancestry with some Near Eastern populations: Cypriots, Sephardic Jews, Armenians, and Lebanese Christians. Other Near Easterners such as Turks, Syrians, and Palestinians show less shared ancestry with the Iceman.
To investigate if the affinity of the Near East genetic isolates to Europeans preceded the arrival of the early farmers to Europe (represented by the Iceman), we repeated the outgroup f3 statistics and replaced the Iceman with a 7000-year-old European hunter-gatherer from Spain (La Braña).24 West European hunter-gatherers have previously been shown to have contributed ancestry to all Europeans but not to Near Easterners.6 Consistent with this, we found reduced affinity and no noticeable structure in the Near Easterners in their relation to La Braña (Supplementary Figure S4; compared with the Iceman).
We investigated Armenians further by inferring their admixture history. The Armenians show signatures of an origin from a mixture of diverse populations occurring from 3000 to 2000 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. We note that these mixture dates also coincide with the legendary establishment of Armenia in 2492 bce. Admixture signals decrease to insignificant levels after 1200 bce, a time when Bronze Age civilizations in the Eastern Mediterranean world suddenly collapsed, with major cities being destroyed or abandoned and most trade routes disrupted. This appears to have caused Armenians' isolation from their surroundings, subsequently sustained by the cultural/linguistic/religious distinctiveness that persists until today. The genetic landscape in most of the Middle East appears to have been continuously changing since then. For example, we detect East Asian ancestry in Turks from admixture occurring 800 (±170) years ago coinciding with the arrival of the Seljuk Turks to Anatolia from their homelands near the Aral sea. We also detect sub-Saharan African gene flow 850 (±85) years ago in Syrians, Palestinians, and Jordanians consistent with previous reports of recent gene flow from Africans to Levantine populations after the Arab expansions.5, 30
The admixture pattern in Armenians appears similar to patterns we have observed in some other genetic isolates in the region, such as Sephardic Jews and Lebanese Christians, who show limited admixture with culturally different neighbouring populations in the last two millennia.5 Our tests suggest that Armenians had no significant mixture with other populations in their recent history and have thus been genetically isolated since the end of the Bronze Age, 3000 years ago. In recent times, we detect genetic structure within the Armenian population that developed ~500 years ago. The date coincides with the start of the Ottoman–Persian wars and the split of Armenia into West and East between the Ottoman Empire in Turkey and the Safavid Empire in Iran.
We find in Armenians and other genetic isolates in the Near East high shared ancestry with ancient European farmers, with ancestry proportions being similar to present-day Europeans but not to present-day Near Easterners. These results suggest that genetic isolates in the Near East – Cypriots (an island population), Near Eastern Jews and Christians (religious isolates), and Armenians (Ethno-linguistic isolate) – probably retain the features of an ancient genetic landscape in the Near East that had more affinity to Europe than the present populations do. Our tests show that most of the Near East genetic isolates' ancestry that is shared with Europeans can be attributed to expansion after the Neolithic period.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4820045/
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