Genomic analysis shows long-term genetic mixing in West Asia before world's first cities
New research on one history's most important trading hubs provides some of the earliest genetic glimpses at the movement and interactions of populations that lived in parts of Western Asia between two major events in human history: the origins of agriculture and the rise of some of the world's first cities.
The work reveals how a high level of human movement in the region not only led to the spread of ideas and material culture but to a more genetically connected society well before the rise of cities, not the other way around, as previously thought.
The researchers, made up of an international team of scientists including Harvard anthropology professor Christina Warinner, looked at DNA data from 110 skeletal remains in West Asia dated 3,000 to 7,500 years ago. The remains came from archaeological sites in the Anatolia (present-day Turkey), the Northern Levant which includes countries on the Mediterranean coast such as Israel and Jordan, and countries in the Southern Caucasus which include present-day Armenia and Azerbaijan.
Based on their analysis, the scientists describe two genomic events that occurred around 8,500 years ago and 4,000 years ago that pointed to long-term genetic mixing in the region and subtle population movements within the area, shedding light on a long-standing question.
"Within this geographic scope, you have a number of distinct populations, distinct ideological groups that are interacting quite a lot and it hasn't really been clear to what degree people are actually moving or if this is simply just a high contact area from trade," said Warinner, assistant professor of anthropology at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Sally Starling Seaver Assistant Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. "What we can see is that rather than this period being characterized by dramatic migrations or conquest, what we see is the slow mixing of different populations, the slow mixing of ideas, and it's percolating out of this melting pot that we see the rise of urbanism -- the rise of cities,"
Eirini Skourtanioti, Yilmaz S. Erdal, Marcella Frangipane, Francesca Balossi Restelli, K. Aslıhan Yener, Frances Pinnock, Paolo Matthiae, Rana Özbal, Ulf-Dietrich Schoop, Farhad Guliyev, Tufan Akhundov, Bertille Lyonnet, Emily L. Hammer, Selin E. Nugent, Marta Burri, Gunnar U. Neumann, Sandra Penske, Tara Ingman, Murat Akar, Rula Shafiq, Giulio Palumbi, Stefanie Eisenmann, Marta D’Andrea, Adam B. Rohrlach, Christina Warinner, Choongwon Jeong, Philipp W. Stockhammer, Wolfgang Haak, Johannes Krause. Genomic History of Neolithic to Bronze Age Anatolia, Northern Levant, and Southern Caucasus. Cell, 2020; 181 (5): 1158 DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2020.04.044
Highlights:
- Genome-wide analysis of 110 ancient individuals from the Near East
- Gene pools of Anatolia and Caucasus were biologically connected ∼6500 BCE
- Gene flow from neighboring populations in Northern Levant during 3 rdmillennium BCE
- One individual of likely Central Asian origin in 2 nd millennium BCE Northern Levant
Summary: Here, we report genome-wide data analyses from 110 ancient Near Eastern individuals spanning the Late Neolithic to Late Bronze Age, a period characterized by intense interregional interactions for the Near East. We find that 6 th millennium BCE populations of North/Central Anatolia and the Southern Caucasus shared mixed ancestry on a genetic cline that formed during the Neolithic between Western Anatolia and regions in today’s Southern Caucasus/Zagros. During the Late Chalcolithic and/or the Early Bronze Age, more than half of the Northern Levantine gene pool was replaced, while in the rest of Anatolia and the Southern Caucasus, we document genetic continuity with only transient gene flow. Additionally, we reveal a genetically distinct individual within the Late Bronze Age Northern Levant. Overall, our study uncovers multiple scales of population dynamics through time, from extensive admixture during the Neolithic period to long-distance mobility within the globalized societies of the Late Bronze Age.
Keywords: human population history, ancient DNA, Near East, Eastern Mediterranean, genome-wide data, admixture, genetic continuity, archaeogenetics, Ubaid, Uruk, and Kura-Araxes
