Eastern Slavs, Armenians and Anatolians all have an Aryan ancestor
Let's consider one more question: But what about the Caucasus, Anatolia, the Middle East, the Arabian Peninsula as possible ancestral home of the Aryans, the genus R1a, the Proto-Slavs? Let's see.
Armenia. The age of the common ancestor of the genus R1a is 4400 years ago.
Asia Minor, Anatolian Peninsula. Historic crossroads between the Middle East, Europe and Asia. It was the first or second candidate for the "Indo-European ancestral home". However, the common ancestor of R1a lived there the same 4500-4000 years ago. But this is an "Indo-European" common ancestor. And the migration route of the earliest carriers of R1a passed through Anatolia to the west, towards Europe, about 10-9 thousand years ago. This migration was caught by linguists, who placed the proto-Indo-European language in Anatolia the same 10-9 thousand years ago.
Panorama of the environs of the fortified settlement Arkaim. Photo from the site ru.wikipedia.org
Only this is not the "ancestral home" of the Indo-European language, it is a transit from the east to Europe. And the Balkans is not an ancestral home, it is also a transit. And the Black Sea steppes are not an ancestral home, they are also transit. So the situation is clearing up with linguists who cannot find the "ancestral home" of the Indo-European languages for two hundred years now, and there is no gap.
There is not and cannot be a "ancestral home" for a language that has been in progress for millennia, in the effects of divergence and convergence, and at the same time its speakers, in this case R1a as carriers of the Proto-Indo-European and then Indo-European languages, aka the Aryan language, passed a long way from southern Siberia to Europe, from about 20 thousand years ago to 10-9 thousand years ago, and then about 5 thousand years ago went to the east and further in the Trans-Urals up to China, to the southeast to India and Iran, to south through the Caucasus to Mesopotamia and further to Arabia and to the Indian Ocean.
Perhaps they washed their boots in it. So again dialectics, development in a spiral. So, both the Eastern Slavs, and Armenians, and Anatolians - all have either the same Aryan ancestor, or the ancestors are very close in time, within several generations.
It should be noted that 4500-4000 years before the common ancestor of the Aryans in Anatolia agrees well with the time of the appearance of the Hittites in Asia Minor in the last quarter of the 3rd millennium BC, since there is evidence that the Hittites rebelled against Naramsin (2236-2200 BC). AD, that is, 4244-4208 years before our time).
Haplotypes of the genus R1a on the Arabian Peninsula (countries of the Gulf of Oman - Qatar, United Arab Emirates). And yet - in Crete. The names of these countries sound unusual in relation to the genus R1a, but our ancestors, or the descendants of our ancestors, also visited there in ancient times, and modern owners of R1a in those parts carry their Y chromosomes.
The age of the common ancestor in the Arabian Peninsula, determined by haplotypes, is 4000 years. This date agrees well with 4000-4500 years before the common ancestor in Armenia and Anatolia, if we take as a reasonable option the direction of the flow of the Aryans from the Central Russian Plain through the Caucasus mountains and further south to Arabia. In other words, the migration wave came from Europe, preserved the time of the common ancestor in the Caucasus and Asia Minor, and already at its dying end reached Arabia, shifting the time of the common ancestor by 400-500 years.
In principle, haplotypes of the genus R1a could have been brought to Arabia by slaves brought to those lands four thousand years ago. But it is up to historians to answer this question. In light of the latest data on R1a haplotypes in Arabs, this becomes extremely unlikely. The most famous and high-ranking clans have R1a speakers.
A series of haplotypes from the island of Crete has been published in the literature. They were collected from the inhabitants of the Lasithi plateau, where, according to legends, their ancestors escaped during the eruption and explosion of the Santorini volcano 3600 years ago, and the rest of the haplotypes were collected in the adjoining territory of Heraklion Prefecture. The calculation of the lifetime of a common ancestor in Crete was carried out by us in several different ways, but the result is the same - 4400 years ago. Respectful 800 years before the explosion of the Santorini volcano. This value corresponds to the average times of the European dispersal of the genus R1a.
The DNA of our contemporaries shows that the most ancient European roots of the Aryans, genus R1a, 10-9 thousand years ago, are located in the Balkans - in Serbia, Kosovo, Bosnia, Croatia, Macedonia. After 5000-6000 years, this genus will expand to the northeast, to the Eastern Carpathians, forming the Proto-Slavic, Trypillian culture and initiating the great migration of peoples in the IV-III millennia BC. At the same time, the genus R1a advanced along the southern arc, and 4300 years ago - according to records in our DNA - appeared in Lebanon.
Direct descendants of those first settlers live in Lebanon today. Among them, the descendants of the Aryan clan - Muslim Shiites from southern Lebanon, Muslim Sunnis from the north of the country and from the Bekaa Valley, Maronite Christians from the Lebanese north, Druze living in the Lebanese mountains.
As part of this migration, apparently caused by the development of agriculture and the transition to its extensive forms, as well as the development of the economy, the same genus R1a advanced westward to the Atlantic and the British Isles, and northward to Scandinavia. The same family came to the near north and east - to the lands of modern Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, Russia, with a common Proto-Slavic ancestor who lived 4800 years ago.
This same ancestor gave surviving offspring, now living throughout Europe, from Iceland to Greece and Cyprus, and spreading to the south of the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf of Oman.
Descendants of the same ancestor, with the same haplotype in DNA, went to the southern Urals, built settlements there 4000-3800 years ago, one of them (discovered in the late 1980s) became known as Arkaim, and under the name of the Aryans left for India, having brought there their Proto-Slavic haplotypes 3500 years ago. In the same II millennium BC, a rather large group of the genus R1a, who also called themselves Aryans, moved from Central Asia to Iran.
This is the only, but significant linkage that allows the entire genus R1a to be called the genus of Aryans. It also leads to the identity of "Indo-Europeans", Aryans, Proto-Slavs and the genus R1a within the framework of DNA genealogy. It is this link that places the ancestral home of the "Indo-Europeans", Aryans, and Proto-Slavs in the Balkans. The same link matches the place of the Balkan European “ancestral home”, the migration flow of the Aryan-Proto-Slavs, the dynamic chain of archaeological cultures and the corresponding flow of Indo-European languages, and shows the place and time of the appearance of the “Indo” particle.
Only the concept of "ancestral home" here is not a linguistic ancestral home, but the presumptive place of arrival of R1a speakers in Europe, and from there it spreads across the continent. For R1a in a broader sense, this is, of course, not the "ancestral home". In general, the search for “ancestral homelands” for migrations and languages in their dynamics over many millennia and at distances of many thousands of kilometers is a hopeless and unpromising occupation, but for some reason it is incessant. Inertia?
True, many linguists define the “ancestral home” of the Indo-European language not as the place of origin of the language, but as its divergence into branches, and they try to understand from which one archaeological culture this originated.
This occupation is no less hopeless, since the divergence of the Indo-European language, to call it Proto-Indo-European or Proto-Indo-European, took place all the time during those very 20 thousand years of the existence of the haplogroup R1a, but in fact much earlier, again in the dynamics of the language over the past 60 -55 thousand years, since the appearance of the Caucasians. And not only divergence - divergence, but also fusion-convergence, and many other seemingly disordered linguistic processes.
Finally, the same connection described above, which makes it possible to call the entire genus R1a a genus of Aryans, convincingly shows that it was not the Proto-Slavs who spoke the "Indo-Iranian" languages, but, on the contrary, the descendants of the Proto-Slavs brought their Aryan languages to India and Iran, and the times when these languages appeared in India and Iran, established by linguists, are fully consistent with the time of arrival of the descendants of the Pre-Slavs there - the time recorded in the form of mutations in the DNA of our contemporaries of the genus R1a. This is about 3500 years ago, but these are the times of the appearance of languages in India and Iran, the languages themselves were formed much earlier, as described above.
Apparently, the divergence of the Aryan language into "Indo-Aryan", "Iranian", and the language of the Mitannian Aryans, "Middle Eastern", occurred during the divergence of the Aryans in these directions from the Russian Plain, about 4500 years ago, in the middle of the 3rd millennium BC. But migratory flows (or military expeditions) diverge quite quickly, and the language is a conservative business, so the divergence of the languages themselves can be dated about 4000 years ago.
By the time the Aryans crossed over to India and the Iranian plateau, about 3500 years ago, the languages had already diverged enough to form the indicated branches of the Aryan language.
But how did the genus R1a get to the Balkans, and from where? With the "ancestral home of the Indo-Europeans", which turned out to be the Aryans, they are also Proto-Slavs, we figured it out. And where is the "ancestral home" of the "proto-Indo-Europeans"? When and where did the Nostratic languages originate, if we accept this not universally accepted name? What is the picture of the flows, migrations of the "proto-Indo-Europeans" that led to the appearance of the Aryans, the Proto-Slavs in their historical ancestral home today? More on this later.
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