Biological basis
Any nation consists of two most important components — language and biological basis (we will not touch culture). However, they do not always coincide.
If we talk about language, then Azerbaijanis, of course, are Turks, but from the biological point of view everything is not so.
To begin with, it is worth noting that the Turks in their original form had a mongoloid appearance, for the Turkic languages were formed in the zone of settlement of the mongoloid race.
All Turks, who look like Caucasoids, are descendants of non-Turkic peoples, who passed to the Turkic language. And it fully refers to Azerbaijanis.
This is approximately how Turks looked like in the very beginning.
Anthropological studies have shown that the peoples of Iran are the closest to Azerbaijanis. It is as «easy» to find a Mongoloid component among Azerbaijanis as among Russians.
Have you heard the saying «scrape a Russian and you will find a Tatar«? So this is pure fiction, because we have scraped and not once, and found nothing special.
In the same way you can scrape Azerbaijanis in search of Mongoloids: you will scrape the skin, but you will not find anything, because Azerbaijanis in biological terms were formed mostly on the basis of autochthonous population.
Who were they?
Note: it may seem to the reader that being Mongoloid or Tatar is something worse than being Caucasoid or Slavic or something like that. This is nothing more than an illusion.
The author himself is a native of Mongoloid Turkic-speaking Yakutia and has a good opinion of both Mongoloids and Turks.
So when I say that Azeris are not Mongoloids, it has no context at all. It is simply a statement of fact.
The biological basis was the ancient population of the Middle East that migrated from the Fertile Crescent.
We can only guess what languages these tribes spoke, but one thing is certain — they were among the first agriculturalists on the planet.
They came to the lands of present Azerbaijan in the Stone Age and never went anywhere else, changing only their ethnicity.
The very «Fertile Crescent», from the territory of which the distant ancestors of Azerbaijanis came to Transcaucasia back in the Stone Age.
In later epoch these peoples were formed in the form of various ethnic groups, which spoke Iranian, Agvan, Nakh-Dagestani languages. In a word, this was the population of ancient Caucasian Albania, plus Atropatene.
It is worth noting that Armenians also lived on these lands and were also a part of Caucasian Albania, though not the most important one. Accordingly, Armenians also took part in the ethnogenesis of future Azerbaijanis.
From the anthropological point of view, the most significant component in the appearance of Azerbaijanis is Iranian. Genetics speaks about the same: present Azerbaijanis are descendants of the autochthonous population of this region.
Azerbaijani carpet merchants of the 19th century. Their ancestors looked about the same way one, two and three thousand years ago. Only costumes changed.
Turkic factor
The influence of Turkic peoples on the formation of the future Azerbaijani nation took place in the I millennium A.D., but it was episodic. Even the invasion of Oghuz Turks in XI-XIII centuries had its own specificity, which is worth to dwell on in detail.
When people say that Turks came to Transcaucasia and settled there, they often draw a fundamentally wrong picture of Mongoloid nomads who came from Altai.
In fact, Turkic-speaking nomads did come from Altai, but by the time they reached Transcaucasia, they were already Turks only in language, and in racial terms they were already far from the original version.
Biologically it was «the seventh water on the sour plateau», because the Turks mixed with Finno-Ugric and Iranian-speaking peoples in the strongest way.
And it was with this multinational cocktail, and not with pure Altai Turks, that the indigenous population of Caucasian Albania faced in the XI-XIII centuries.
Caucasian Albania in the 4th century AD.
Some scientists have previously suggested that the autochthons of Caucasian Albania were either forced into the mountains or destroyed by the Oghuz, and the current Azerbaijanis are the descendants of racially heterogeneous Turks in the first place, but anthropological and genetic studies have refuted this view, proving that the Azerbaijanis are local.
In fact, Turkization was purely a linguistic influence. One can say that it was not the Turkic people as a biomass that migrated to Azerbaijan, but almost exclusively the language.
Most likely, this is explained by the fact that the Turkic people subjugated the local population, making up only a tiny percentage of the local population, which occupied a high position. This led to the spread of the language, and no more. Actually, it was then that the Azerbaijani people as a cultural and linguistic community began to form.
…
Personally, what is interesting to me about Azerbaijanis is that, on the one hand, they are the oldest autochthonous population of this region (as far back as the Stone Age), and on the other hand, they are a very young people in terms of culture and language.
It was finally formed at the end of the Middle Ages, somewhere in the 15th century.
Some people will find such youth offensive, because everyone wants to be older than Adam and Eve for some reason, but in my opinion, this is the most promising and the most underestimated feature.
If Lev Gumilev was right, and the average active life expectancy of an ethnos is 1000-1200 years, then this nation has at least half a thousand years to leave a trace in history.