By sequencing 727 ancient individuals from the Southern Arc (Anatolia and its neighbors in Southeastern Europe and West Asia) over 10,000 years, we contextualize its Chalcolithic period and Bronze Age (about 5000 to 1000 BCE), when extensive gene flow entangled it with the Eurasian steppe. Two streams of migration transmitted Caucasus and Anatolian/Levantine ancestry northward, and the Yamnaya pastoralists, formed on the steppe, then spread southward into the Balkans and across the Caucasus into Armenia, where they left numerous patrilineal descendants. Anatolia was transformed by intra–West Asian gene flow, with negligible impact of the later Yamnaya migrations. This contrasts with all other regions where Indo-European languages were spoken, suggesting that the homeland of the Indo-Anatolian language family was in West Asia, with only secondary dispersals of non-Anatolian Indo-Europeans from the steppe.

The burnt sacrifice of bare (defleshed) bones, described in Homer's Odyssey and well documented from Archaic and Classical Greece, is now clearly attested by burnt faunal remains from the ‘Palace of Nestor’ at Mycenaean Pylos. This evidance is of great importance for understanding both the historical role of sacrifice in Greek religion and the significance of fensting in Mycenaean palatial society.

We present the first ancient DNA data from the Pre-Pottery Neolithic of Mesopotamia (Southeastern Turkey and Northern Iraq), Cyprus, and the Northwestern Zagros, along with the first data from Neolithic Armenia. We show that these and neighboring populations were formed through admixture of pre-Neolithic sources related to Anatolian, Caucasus, and Levantine hunter-gatherers, forming a Neolithic continuum of ancestry mirroring the geography of West Asia. By analyzing Pre-Pottery and Pottery Neolithic populations of Anatolia, we show that the former were derived from admixture between Mesopotamian-related and local Epipaleolithic-related sources, but the latter experienced additional Levantine-related gene flow, thus documenting at least two pulses of migration from the Fertile Crescent heartland to the early farmers of Anatolia.

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A Wetlands Dynamic Water Budget Model was developed and applied to support a large field investigation of processes in the Black Swamp wetlands of the Cache River between Patterson and Cotton Plant, Arkansas. The model is called the Wetlands Dynamic Water Budget Model because it provides magnitudes for the water budget components, as well as water depths, discharges, and flow velocities throughout the modeled system. The development of the computer program is based on concepts and approaches of a number of programs in common use. It includes three dynamically-linked modules that include all the major components of a typical water budget, including precipitation, canopy interception, overland flow, channel flow, infiltration, evapotranspiration, and horizontal ground-water flow. The surface-wate,' module of the model was applied to the Cache River in Arkansas, and augmented a comprehensive hydrologic field study by filling data gaps that occurred due to gage problems and by providing long-term simulation data for broad areas of the wetland, particularly those far away from any measurement station. The results demonstrated that these wetlands are inundated primarily from the backwater produced at downstream constrictions, rather than from the forward-moving flood wave.