scholarly journals The genetic structure of the world’s first farmers

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iosif Lazaridis ◽  
Dani Nadel ◽  
Gary Rollefson ◽  
Deborah C. Merrett ◽  
Nadin Rohland ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Bronze Age ◽  
Near East ◽  
Zagros Mountains ◽  
Hunter Gatherers ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
Eurasian Steppe ◽  
Neanderthal Admixture ◽  
Eurasian Lineage ◽  
Early Farmers ◽  
The Impact

We report genome-wide ancient DNA from 44 ancient Near Easterners ranging in time between ~12,000-1,400 BCE, from Natufian hunter-gatherers to Bronze Age farmers. We show that the earliest populations of the Near East derived around half their ancestry from a ‘Basal Eurasian’ lineage that had little if any Neanderthal admixture and that separated from other non-African lineages prior to their separation from each other. The first farmers of the southern Levant (Israel and Jordan) and Zagros Mountains (Iran) were strongly genetically differentiated, and each descended from local hunter-gatherers. By the time of the Bronze Age, these two populations and Anatolian-related farmers had mixed with each other and with the hunter-gatherers of Europe to drastically reduce genetic differentiation. The impact of the Near Eastern farmers extended beyond the Near East: farmers related to those of Anatolia spread westward into Europe; farmers related to those of the Levant spread southward into East Africa; farmers related to those from Iran spread northward into the Eurasian steppe; and people related to both the early farmers of Iran and to the pastoralists of the Eurasian steppe spread eastward into South Asia.

scholarly journals Dogs accompanied humans during the Neolithic expansion into Europe

2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (10) ◽  
pp. 20180286 ◽  
Author(s):  
Morgane Ollivier ◽  
Anne Tresset ◽  
Laurent A. F. Frantz ◽  
Stéphanie Bréhard ◽  
Adrian Bălăşescu ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Bronze Age ◽  
Dna Sequences ◽  
Near East ◽  
Northern Europe ◽  
Southeastern Europe ◽  
Mitochondrial Lineage ◽  
Domestic Species ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
Neolithic Expansion ◽  
The Bronze Age

Near Eastern Neolithic farmers introduced several species of domestic plants and animals as they dispersed into Europe. Dogs were the only domestic species present in both Europe and the Near East prior to the Neolithic. Here, we assessed whether early Near Eastern dogs possessed a unique mitochondrial lineage that differentiated them from Mesolithic European populations. We then analysed mitochondrial DNA sequences from 99 ancient European and Near Eastern dogs spanning the Upper Palaeolithic to the Bronze Age to assess if incoming farmers brought Near Eastern dogs with them, or instead primarily adopted indigenous European dogs after they arrived. Our results show that European pre-Neolithic dogs all possessed the mitochondrial haplogroup C, and that the Neolithic and Post-Neolithic dogs associated with farmers from Southeastern Europe mainly possessed haplogroup D. Thus, the appearance of haplogroup D most probably resulted from the dissemination of dogs from the Near East into Europe. In Western and Northern Europe, the turnover is incomplete and haplogroup C persists well into the Chalcolithic at least. These results suggest that dogs were an integral component of the Neolithic farming package and a mitochondrial lineage associated with the Near East was introduced into Europe alongside pigs, cows, sheep and goats. It got diluted into the native dog population when reaching the Western and Northern margins of Europe.

scholarly journals The mixed genetic origin of the first farmers of Europe

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nina Marchi ◽  
Laura Winkelbach ◽  
Ilektra Schulz ◽  
Maxime Brami ◽  
Zuzana Hofmanová ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Population Genomics ◽  
Near East ◽  
Demographic History ◽  
Time Frame ◽  
Western Anatolia ◽  
Human Populations ◽  
Climatic Fluctuations ◽  
Genetic Origins ◽  
Early Farmers ◽  
The Impact

SummaryWhile the Neolithic expansion in Europe is well described archaeologically, the genetic origins of European first farmers and their affinities with local hunter-gatherers (HGs) remain unclear. To infer the demographic history of these populations, the genomes of 15 ancient individuals located between Western Anatolia and Southern Germany were sequenced to high quality, allowing us to perform population genomics analyses formerly restricted to modern genomes. We find that all European and Anatolian early farmers descend from the merging of a European and a Near Eastern group of HGs, possibly in the Near East, shortly after the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). Western and Southeastern European HG are shown to split during the LGM, and share signals of a very strong LGM bottleneck that drastically reduced their genetic diversity. Early Neolithic Central Anatolians seem only indirectly related to ancestors of European farmers, who probably originated in the Near East and dispersed later on from the Aegean along the Danubian corridor following a stepwise demic process with only limited (2-6%) but additive input from local HGs.Our analyses provide a time frame and resolve the genetic origins of early European farmers. They highlight the impact of Late Pleistocene climatic fluctuations that caused the fragmentation, merging and reexpansion of human populations in SW Asia and Europe, and eventually led to the world's first agricultural populations.

Murder in Mesopotamia

2020 ◽  
pp. 191-215
Author(s):  
Billie Melman
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Near East ◽  
Active Part ◽  
Detective Story ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
Human Habitation ◽  
Agatha Christie ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Modern Technologies ◽  
Remote Past

Chapter 6 examines the diffusion of ancient Near Eastern history and its archaeological discovery to popular culture. It focuses on the archaeological murder mysteries of Agatha Christie, one of Britain’s top-selling writers and a popular modernist. An amateur archaeologist, Christie took an active part in excavations in Iraq and Syria for nearly three decades, working with her husband, archaeologist Max Edgar Lucien Mallowan. The chapter considers her domestication of the remote past and role as a mediator between archaeology and Mesopotamian antiquity, and a broad and mainly middle-class readership of her “whodunnits”. It draws on her seven imperial archaeological novels set in the Near East, especially in mandate territories, particularly Murder in Mesopotamia, An Appointment with Death, espionage thriller They Came to Baghdad, and archaeological autobiography Come Tell Me How You Live, as well as on other autobiographical and archival material. The chapter demonstrates Christie’s comparison between archaeology and detective work, the archaeologist and the sleuth, and between deciphering a murder and the interpretation of clues to the past. The chapter considers the impact of archaeological imagery and practices on the classical detective story whose heyday coincided with that of the new culture of antiquity, examining Christie’s adaptation of the overarching image of the Tell, or man-made mound, built of layers of human habitation and destruction, as the unifying image in her writing. At the same time as domesticating antiquity, Christie related it to modern technologies of transport and industrialization.

scholarly journals Extensive farming in Estonia started through a sex-biased migration from the Steppe

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lehti Saag ◽  
Liivi Varul ◽  
Christiana Lyn Scheib ◽  
Jesper Stenderup ◽  
Morten E. Allentoft ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Bronze Age ◽  
Sequence Data ◽  
Animal Husbandry ◽  
Whole Genome Sequence ◽  
Late Neolithic ◽  
Hunter Gatherers ◽  
X Chromosomes ◽  
Steppe Belt ◽  
Extensive Farming ◽  
Early Farmers

AbstractFarming-based economies appear relatively late in Northeast Europe and the extent to which they involve genetic ancestry change is still poorly understood. Here we present the analyses of low coverage whole genome sequence data from five hunter-gatherers and five farmers of Estonia dated to 4,500 to 6,300 years before present. We find evidence of significant differences between the two groups in the composition of autosomal as well as mtDNA, X and Y chromosome ancestries. We find that Estonian hunter-gatherers of Comb Ceramic Culture are closest to Eastern hunter-gatherers. The Estonian first farmers of Corded Ware Culture show high similarity in their autosomes with Steppe Belt Late Neolithic/Bronze Age individuals, Caucasus hunter-gatherers and Iranian farmers while their X chromosomes are most closely related with the European Early Farmers of Anatolian descent. These findings suggest that the shift to intensive cultivation and animal husbandry in Estonia was triggered by the arrival of new people with predominantly Steppe ancestry, but whose ancestors had undergone sex-specific admixture with early farmers with Anatolian ancestry.

scholarly journals Neolithic and Bronze Age migration to Ireland and establishment of the insular Atlantic genome

2015 ◽  
Vol 113 (2) ◽  
pp. 368-373 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lara M. Cassidy ◽  
Rui Martiniano ◽  
Eileen M. Murphy ◽  
Matthew D. Teasdale ◽  
James Mallory ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Bronze Age ◽  
Population Change ◽  
European Population ◽  
Mendelian Disease ◽  
High Coverage ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
Eye Color ◽  
Genome Data ◽  
A Genome ◽  
Early Farmers

The Neolithic and Bronze Age transitions were profound cultural shifts catalyzed in parts of Europe by migrations, first of early farmers from the Near East and then Bronze Age herders from the Pontic Steppe. However, a decades-long, unresolved controversy is whether population change or cultural adoption occurred at the Atlantic edge, within the British Isles. We address this issue by using the first whole genome data from prehistoric Irish individuals. A Neolithic woman (3343–3020 cal BC) from a megalithic burial (10.3× coverage) possessed a genome of predominantly Near Eastern origin. She had some hunter–gatherer ancestry but belonged to a population of large effective size, suggesting a substantial influx of early farmers to the island. Three Bronze Age individuals from Rathlin Island (2026–1534 cal BC), including one high coverage (10.5×) genome, showed substantial Steppe genetic heritage indicating that the European population upheavals of the third millennium manifested all of the way from southern Siberia to the western ocean. This turnover invites the possibility of accompanying introduction of Indo-European, perhaps early Celtic, language. Irish Bronze Age haplotypic similarity is strongest within modern Irish, Scottish, and Welsh populations, and several important genetic variants that today show maximal or very high frequencies in Ireland appear at this horizon. These include those coding for lactase persistence, blue eye color, Y chromosome R1b haplotypes, and the hemochromatosis C282Y allele; to our knowledge, the first detection of a known Mendelian disease variant in prehistory. These findings together suggest the establishment of central attributes of the Irish genome 4,000 y ago.

scholarly journals The Bronze Age of Kazakhstan in the context of Asian cultural relations

2020 ◽  
Vol 130 (1) ◽  
pp. 50-63
Author(s):  
М. Pedracki ◽  
◽  
G. Bukesheva ◽  
М. Khabdulina ◽  
◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Bronze Age ◽  
Near East ◽  
Ancient Near East ◽  
Cultural Relations ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Palace Reliefs ◽  
The Military ◽  
The Bronze Age

It seems that there are some events in the history of Ancient Near Eastern civilizations directly related to the Bronze Age of Kazakhstan. Those events have taken place in the first half of the second millennium BC and were associated with the invasion of mobile groups chariot warriors who brought with themselves a cult of a horse, a war chariot, advanced weapons, and some new ideologies to the Ancient Near East. Those chariotry men became the military aristocracy in many new founded states in Ancient Near East They propagated a heroized image of a warrior- king ride in a chariot, which was widely used in the palace reliefs of the countries of the Ancient Near East. During the last fifty years the archeologists discovered many Bronze Age monuments in Kazakhstan, with cultural indicators which coincided with the characteristics of the historical tribes that invaded early agricultural civilizations of Near East at the beginning of the 2nd millennium BC and created new dynasties of rulers. The names of those incomers are preserved in the writing sources of the Near Ancient East states. They are mentioned as: Hyksos, Kassites, Amorites, Mariannu. It is known that some part of them were Indo-Aryans by language. For many decades, linguists, historians and archaeologists have been searching for their ancestral home. The purpose of the article is to characterize the main cultural factors of the Bronze Age cultures of Ural-Kazakhstan steppes and to investigate the possibility of the steppe origin of the chariot warriors income to the Near East in the first half of second millennium BC and thus show the contribution of the ancient population of the Kazakhstan steppes to the world historical process.

scholarly journals Genomes From Verteba Cave Suggest Diversity Within The Trypillians In Ukraine

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pere Gelabert ◽  
Ryan W. Schmidt ◽  
Daniel M. Fernandes ◽  
Jordan K. Karsten ◽  
Thomas K. Harper ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Bronze Age ◽  
Early Bronze Age ◽  
Forest Steppe ◽  
Genetic Profile ◽  
Hunter Gatherers ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
Steppe Region ◽  
Third Millennium Bce ◽  
Transition To Agriculture ◽  
Fifth Millennium Bce

Abstract The transition to agriculture occurred relatively late in Eastern Europe, leading researchers to debate whether it was a gradual, interactive process or a colonization event. In the forest and forest-steppe regions of Ukraine, farming appeared during the fifth millennium BCE, associated with the Cucuteni-Trypillian Archaeological Complex (CTCC, 4800-3000 BCE). Across Europe, the Neolithization process was highly variable across space and over time. Here, we investigate the population dynamics of early agriculturalists from the eastern forest-steppe region based on analyses of 20 ancient genomes from the Verteba Cave site (3789-980 BCE). The results reveal that the CTCC individuals’ ancestry is related to both western hunter gatherers and Near Eastern farmers, lacks local ancestry associated with Ukrainian Neolithic hunter gatherers and has steppe ancestry. An Early Bronze Age individual has an ancestry profile related to the Yamnaya expansions but with 20% ancestry related to the other Trypillian individuals, which suggests admixture between the Trypillians and the incoming populations carrying steppe-related ancestry. A Late Bronze Age individual dated to 980-948 BCE has a genetic profile indicating affinity to Beaker-related populations, detected close to 1,000 years after the end of the Bell Beaker phenomenon during the Third millennium BCE.

Greek History

2019 ◽  
Vol 66 (2) ◽  
pp. 295-303
Author(s):  
Kostas Vlassopoulos
Keyword(s):  
Near East ◽  
Labour Force ◽  
David Lewis ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
Chronological Change ◽  
Greek History ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Comparative Study ◽  
The Impact

Ancient Greek history can have no serious future in which the study of slavery does not play a prominent role. But in order to fulfil this role, the study of slavery is in urgent need of new approaches and perspectives. David Lewis’ new book is a splendid contribution in this direction. Lewis stresses the fact that slavery is primarily a relationship of property, and develops a cross-cultural framework for approaching slavery in this manner. Using this framework, he shows that Greek slavery cannot be equated with slavery in classical Athens, but consisted of various epichoric systems of slavery. Spartan helots and Cretanwoikeiswere not serfs or dependent peasants, but slave property with peculiar characteristics, as a result of the peculiar development of these communities. These findings have major implications for the study of Greek slavery. At the same time, he presents a comparative examination of Greek slave systems with slave systems in the ancient Near East (Israel, Assyria, Babylonia, Persia, and Carthage). While previous scholarship assumed that slavery in the Near East was marginal, Lewis shows that slaves constituted a major part of elite portfolios in many of these societies. This has revolutionary implications for the comparative study of Mediterranean and Near Eastern history in antiquity. Finally, he presents a model for explaining the role and significance of slavery in different ancient societies, which includes the factors that determine the choice of labour force, as well as the impact of political and economic geography. It is remarkable that an approach to slavery based on a cross-cultural and ahistorical definition of property does not lead to a homogenizing and static account, but on the contrary opens the way for a perspective that highlights geographical diversity and chronological change.

scholarly journals Ancient human genomes suggest three ancestral populations for present-day Europeans

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iosif Lazaridis ◽  
Nick Patterson ◽  
Alissa Mittnik ◽  
Gabriel Renaud ◽  
Swapan Mallick ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Great Majority ◽  
Upper Paleolithic ◽  
Southern Sweden ◽  
Hunter Gatherers ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
Human Genomes ◽  
Eurasian Lineage ◽  
West European

We sequenced genomes from a ~7,000 year old early farmer from Stuttgart in Germany, an ~8,000 year old hunter-gatherer from Luxembourg, and seven ~8,000 year old hunter-gatherers from southern Sweden. We analyzed these data together with other ancient genomes and 2,345 contemporary humans to show that the great majority of present-day Europeans derive from at least three highly differentiated populations: West European Hunter-Gatherers (WHG), who contributed ancestry to all Europeans but not to Near Easterners; Ancient North Eurasians (ANE), who were most closely related to Upper Paleolithic Siberians and contributed to both Europeans and Near Easterners; and Early European Farmers (EEF), who were mainly of Near Eastern origin but also harbored WHG-related ancestry. We model these populations' deep relationships and show that EEF had ~44% ancestry from a "Basal Eurasian" lineage that split prior to the diversification of all other non-African lineages.

scholarly journals MIGRATION PROCESSES IN THE SOUTHERN URALS DURING THE TRANSITION TO THE LATE BRONZE AGE

2020 ◽  
Vol 69 (4) ◽  
pp. 24-31
Author(s):  
Stanislav A. Grigoriev ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Bronze Age ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Near East ◽  
Southern Urals ◽  
Late Bronze Age ◽  
The Southern Urals ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
Middle Bronze Age ◽  
Reliable Sign

The article is devoted to the problem of identifying migrations on the base of archaeological and paleogenetic data during the transition from the Middle Bronze Age (MBA) to the Late Bronze Age (LBA) in the Southern Trans-Urals. It discusses the methodological problems of detecting migrations from archaeological sources. Their most reliable sign is the appearance in some area not of separate features, but a complex of features of material culture from some remote area, as well as those features that reflect the introduction of new social relations and religious ideas. Such a complex could not be borrowed, and it is a reliable sign of migration. During the transition to the LBA in the Trans-Urals, new cultures appeared (Sintashta, Petrovka, and Alakul) and the penetration of features is recorded that had previously been formed in the Near East and Eastern Europe. These features are irregularly distributed: those from the Near East — mainly in the Sintashta culture, and Eastern European and Near Eastern features form a mixture in the Petrovka and Alakul cultures. These archaeological data correspond exactly to the results of paleogenetic studies: a significant contribution of Anatolian farmers was revealed in the genes of the Sintashta population, and it decreases in the Andronovo genes in favor of the Yamnaya-Poltavka component.

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