The Demographic Development of the First Farmers in Anatolia

Abstract

SummaryThe archaeological documentation of the development of sedentary farming societies in Anatolia is not yet mirrored by a genetic understanding of the human populations involved, in contrast to the spread of farming in Europe [1, 2, 3]. Sedentary farming communities emerged in parts of the Fertile Crescent during the tenth millennium and early ninth millennium calibrated (cal) BC and had appeared in central Anatolia by 8300 cal BC [4]. Farming spread into west Anatolia by the early seventh millennium cal BC and quasi-synchronously into Europe, although the timing and process of this movement remain unclear. Using genome sequence data that we generated from nine central Anatolian Neolithic individuals, we studied the transition period from early Aceramic (Pre-Pottery) to the later Pottery Neolithic, when farming expanded west of the Fertile Crescent. We find that genetic diversity in the earliest farmers was conspicuously low, on a par with European foraging groups. With the advent of the Pottery Neolithic, genetic variation within societies reached levels later found in early European farmers. Our results confirm that the earliest Neolithic central Anatolians belonged to the same gene pool as the first Neolithic migrants spreading into Europe. Further, genetic affinities between later Anatolian farmers and fourth to third millennium BC Chalcolithic south Europeans suggest an additional wave of Anatolian migrants, after the initial Neolithic spread but before the Yamnaya-related migrations. We propose that the earliest farming societies demographically resembled foragers and that only after regional gene flow and rising heterogeneity did the farming population expansions into Europe occur.

Late Pleistocene human genome suggests a local origin for the first farmers of central Anatolia

“…Results 5 We extracted DNA from the ancient human remains and prepared it for next-generation sequencing 8,9 which resulted in human DNA yields lower than 2% (data table S1), comparable with low DNA preservation previously reported in the region 6,7 . To generate genome wide data, despite the low DNA yields we performed in-solution DNA enrichment targeting 1.24 million genome-wide single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) ('1240k capture') 10 , which resulted in 10 129,406 to 917,473 covered SNPs per individual.…”

“…We merged the newly reported ancient data and data reported by Mathieson et al 2017 18 with a dataset that has been described elsewhere 6 . This dataset includes 587 published ancient genomes 6,7,10,11,14,17,20,23,[31][32][33][34] and genomes from 2,706 individuals, representing world-wide 20 present-day populations 6, 35 that were genotyped on the Affymetrix Axiom TM Genome-Wide Human Origins 1 array 4 ('HO dataset') with a total of 597,573 SNP sites in the merged dataset.…”

Origin and spread of human mitochondrial DNA haplogroup U7

“…These have also been argued to have arrived into Europe during the early Neolithic from the Near East2596061, and display a clear northward frequency cline2362. According to aDNA evidence, Neolithic populations in Europe display a distinct mtDNA lineage make-up, argued to be derived from Near Eastern sources155051525556575863. This early colonisation was probably followed by a complex process of assimilation of autochthonous hunter-gatherer diversity, seen most clearly in the autosomes.…”

Paleogenomic Evidence for Multi-generational Mixing between Neolithic Farmers and Mesolithic Hunter-Gatherers in the Lower Danube Basin

“…We also realigned BAM files from [2], as described in the “Processing and alignment of NGS data” section above, and added these samples to our dataset. We also realigned BAM files from [5].…”