Karachay Genetics: Abstracts and Summaries

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Karachay (meaning "Black River") — also spelled Karachai — are a people living in the North Caucasus. Most of them reside in the Karachay-Cherkess Republic (Karachayevo-Cherkesskaya Respublika), part of the Russian Federation. The Soviet government temporarily exiled them from their homeland between 1943 and 1957.

Some researchers believe the Karachays descend mainly from medieval Kipchaks (Cumans) and Alans. There are also theories according to which the Khazars, Bulgars, and/or Huns helped to form this people.

The Karachay-Balkar language is a member of the Northwestern (Kipchak) subdivision of the Turkic linguistic family. These days it's written with a Cyrillic alphabet, but many decades ago had been written with the Arabic script.

S. Litvinov, Ildus A. Kutuev, Bayazit Yunusbayev, Rita Khusainova, R. Valiev, and Elza K. Khusnutdinova. "Alu Insertion Polymorphisms in Populations of the South Caucasus." Balkan Journal of Medical Genetics 11/2 (2008): pages 25-30. 162 Karachays were genetically sampled.

Ivan Nasidze, E. Y. S. Ling, D. Quinque, I. Dupanloup, R. Cordaux, S. Rychkov, O. Naumova, O. Zhukova, N. Sarraf-Zadegan, G. A. Naderi, S. Asgary, S. Sardas, D. D. Farhud, T. Sarkisian, C. Asadov, A. Kerimov, and Mark Stoneking. "Mitochondrial DNA and Y-Chromosome Variation in the Caucasus." Annals of Human Genetics 68 (2004): pages 205-221. This is a comprehensive collection of data on the peoples of the Caucasus Mountains region. Table 1 indicates that they tested the mtDNA of 13 "Karachaians", and Table 2 says those Karachaians had 10 different mtDNA haplotypes resulting in a nucleotide diversity of 0.015 and haplotype diversity of 0.949. However, Karachay Y-DNA isn't studied here; the text notes how "The number of Avarian, Balkarian and Karachaian male samples was insufficient for Y chromosome analyses."

Siiri Rootsi, Natalie M. Myres, Alice A. Lin, Mari Järve, Roy J. King, Ildus A. Kutuev, Vicente M. Cabrera, Elza K. Khusnutdinova, Kärt Varendi, Hovhannes Sahakyan, Doron M. Behar, Rita Khusainova, Oleg Balanovsky, Elena Balanovska, Pavao Rudan, Levon Yepiskoposyan, Ardeshir Bahmanimehr, Shirin Farjadian, Alena Kushniarevich, Rene J. Herrera, Viola Grugni, Vincenza Battaglia, Carmela Nici, Francesca Crobu, Sena Karachanak, Baharak Hooshiar Kashani, Massoud Houshmand, Mohammad H. Sanati, Draga Toncheva, Antonella Lisa, Ornella Semino, Jacques Chiaroni, Julie Di Cristofaro, Richard Villems, Toomas Kivisild, and Peter A. Underhill. "Distinguishing the co-ancestries of haplogroup G Y-chromosomes in the populations of Europe and the Caucasus." European Journal of Human Genetics Forthcoming in print. First published online on May 16, 2012. According to Supplementary Table 1, 69 Karachay males were genetically tested here, and 22 of them (31.9%) were found to carry the haplogroup G. 23.2% of the Karachays belonged to subhaplogroup G-P16.