Transcaucasia comprises a key region for understanding the history of both the hybrid zone between house mouse lineages and the dispersal of the Neolithic way of life outside its Near Eastern cradle. The opportunity to document the colonization history of both men and mice in Transcaucasia was made possible by the discovery of mouse remains accumulated in pits from a 6000‐year‐old farming village in the Nakhchivan (Autonomous Republic of Nakhchivan, Azerbaijan). The present study investigated their taxonomy and most likely dispersal path through the identification of the Mus lineage to which they might belong using a geometric morphometric approach of dental traits distances between archaeological and modern populations of the different Mus lineages of South‐West Asia. We demonstrate that the mouse remains trapped in the deep storage pits of the dwelling belong to the Mus musculus domesticus from the Near East, with dental shapes similar to current populations in Northern Syria. These results strongly suggest that the domesticus lineage was dispersed into Transcaucasia from the upper Euphrates valley by Neolithic migration, some time between the 7th and 5th millennium BC, providing substantial evidence to back up the scenario featuring near‐eastern stimuli in the emergence of agriculture in the South Caucasus. The domesticus mitochondrial DNA signature of the current house mouse in the same location 5000 years later, as well as their turnover towards a subspecies musculus/castaneus phenotype, suggests that early domesticus colonizers hybridized with a later musculus (and maybe castaneus) dispersal originating from south of the Caspian Sea and/or Northern Caucasia. © 2013 The Linnean Society of London

Following the discovery of ceramic assemblages related to “ Chaff-Faced Ware” (CFW) in Transcaucasia, this article questions the origins of this ware production, which is often implicitly associated with Upper Mesopotamia and Northern Syria. After a thorough comparison of CFW assemblages attested from the Caucasus down to the Fertile Crescent, it is argued that the presence of CFW over this wide territory does not result, counter to a frequent opinion, from the migrations of Mesopotamian groups into Transcaucasia : rather, it developed from a local evolution dating back at least to 4500 BC. The territory spanned by CFW thus constitutes some kind of oikoumene, whose centre of gravity is probably located in the Highlands, between the Euphrates and the Kura Basins, but not in the Fertile Crescent. This analysis opens new perspectives, as the study of the processes at work in the development of the first urban societies of the Fertile Crescent should now be focussed on this oikoumene as a whole, and not only on Northern Syro-Mesopotamia, in order to understand this fundamental evolution in all its complexity.

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