Research has identified Northwest Turkey as a key region for the development of dairying in the seventh millennium BCE, yet little is known about how this practice began or evolved there. This ...research studies Barcın Höyük, a site located in Bursa's Yenişehir Valley, which ranges chronologically from 6600 BCE, when the first evidence of settled life appears in the Marmara Region, to 6000 BCE, when Neolithic habitation at the site ceases. Using pottery sherds diagnostic by vessel category and type, this paper aims at identifying which ones may have been primarily used to store, process, or consume dairy products. Organic residue analysis of selected samples helped address the process of adoption and intensification of milk processing in this region over time. The lipid residue data discussed in this paper derive from 143 isotopic results subsampled from 173 organic residues obtained from 805 Neolithic potsherds and suggest that bowls and four-lugged pots may have been preferred containers for processing milk. The discovery of abundant milk residues even among the earliest ceramics indicates that the pioneer farmers arrived in the region already with the knowhow of dairying and milk processing. In fact, these skills and the reliance on secondary products may have given them one of the necessary tools to successfully venture into the unfarmed lands of Northwest Anatolia in the first place.
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 6th 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.
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•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 3rd millennium BCE•One individual of likely Central Asian origin in 2nd millennium BCE Northern Levant
Reconstruction of genomic history of the Near East in a time transect spanning from the Neolithic through the globalization events of the Middle and Late Bronze Ages.
Recent excavations at the site of Barcın Höyük provide a detailed view of a settlement founded and inhabited during the early stages of the Neolithic of the Marmara Region of northwestern Anatolia. ...The occupation history of the site complements and extends further back in time the regional sequence as it had been established for the eastern Marmara Region on the basis of excavations at nearby Mentese, Aktopraklık and Ilıpınar, and Fikirtepe and Pendik in the Istanbul environs. The site of Barcın Höyük is therefore of critical importance for our understanding of the initial neolithisation of northwestern Anatolia. This paper summarizes some of the main findings of the Barcın Höyük excavations with regard to the Neolithic occupation phases.
Understanding exposure of pottery vessels to fire is an important question in the agenda of researchers studying how prehistoric pottery was used to prepare food and the reasons leading to its ...widespread adoption across the world. In the case lipid residues from cooking, making sense of the range of biochemical compounds synthesised by the application of significant amounts of heat (i.e > 100 °C) to lipid residues can reveal different use patterns in the repertoires of the earliest pottery productions. While knowledge about the thermal degradation of fats in archaeological pottery has been available since the mid-nineties, this paper presents and describes two previously unreported biomarkers detected during ongoing research on the earliest Mediterranean farming societies: the ketonic decarboxylation of saturated fatty acids and dicarboxylic acids resulting in very long chain oxo fatty acids, and, the cyclisation of monounsaturated fatty acids yielding ω-(2-alkylcyclopentyl)alkanoic acids. Therefore, combining experimentation with the analysis of several sets of Neolithic pottery, this paper aims at updating the available data on the range of known biomarkers for lipid thermal alteration by characterising said unreported compounds and facilitating their detection in further studies.
•Experiments demonstrate and validate the formation of several known and previously unreported lipid heating biomarkers.•A series of very long chain oxo fatty acids could point at heating in vessels with long use lives or after periods of unuse.•ω-(2-alkylcyclopentyl)alkanoic acids (ACPAAs) formed from monounsaturated fatty acids can improve the detection of heating in products with low amounts of polyunsaturated fats.•Studies from several Neolithic sites across the Mediterranean stress the ubiquity of these new heating biomarkers in archaeological pottery.
Dating to the sixth millennium BC, the Halaf Period of northern Mesopotamia has long been considered a time of intense interaction and communication. This claim is based on the remarkable similarity ...that Halaf Period ceramic styles and especially painted pottery motifs show even over great distances. Analyzed for this paper are a series of potsherds from the contemporaneous levels of the site of Tell Kurdu located in the Amuq Valley of southern Turkey. A range of techniques including X-ray diffraction, wet chemical analysis, scanning electron microscopy and microanalysis, and petrography have been used in order to assess the source materials and to infer evidence for imports. Results show that although painted ceramic motifs at Tell Kurdu are Halaf-like in their general style, they are locally made. Moreover, at least one unpainted sherd may indicate that the sixth millennium inhabitants of Tell Kurdu must also have been involved in an inter-regional trade network. The latter conclusion mirrors similar results by other researchers who have consistently shown that ceramics were regularly traded across northern Mesopotamia in the sixth millennium BC.
Abstract
Uniparentally-inherited markers on mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and the non-recombining regions of the Y chromosome (NRY), have been used for the past 30 years to investigate the history of ...humans from a maternal and paternal perspective. Researchers have preferred mtDNA due to its abundance in the cells, and comparatively high substitution rate. Conversely, the NRY is less susceptible to back mutations and saturation, and is potentially more informative than mtDNA owing to its longer sequence length. However, due to comparatively poor NRY coverage via shotgun sequencing, and the relatively low and biased representation of Y-chromosome variants on capture assays such as the 1240 k, ancient DNA studies often fail to utilize the unique perspective that the NRY can yield. Here we introduce a new DNA enrichment assay, coined YMCA (Y-mappable capture assay), that targets the "mappable" regions of the NRY. We show that compared to low-coverage shotgun sequencing and 1240 k capture, YMCA significantly improves the mean coverage and number of sites covered on the NRY, increasing the number of Y-haplogroup informative SNPs, and allowing for the identification of previously undiscovered variants. To illustrate the power of YMCA, we show that the analysis of ancient Y-chromosome lineages can help to resolve Y-chromosomal haplogroups. As a case study, we focus on H2, a haplogroup associated with a critical event in European human history: the Neolithic transition. By disentangling the evolutionary history of this haplogroup, we further elucidate the two separate paths by which early farmers expanded from Anatolia and the Near East to western Europe.
In extension of the recently established ‘Rapid Climate Change (RCC) Neolithisation Model’ (Clare 2013), in the present paper we demonstrate the existence of a remarkable coincidence between the ...exact (decadel-scale) entry and departure dates of the Neolithic into/from the Aegean (~6600/6050 calBC) with begin/end of RCC-conditions.
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