The ancient Near East is the most important place in the history of the region. Ancient Greeks, Troy, and large swaths of the Roman Empire were all found there. A lot of us work on it because it is central. It is a key driver of innovation and change.
One of the most powerful tools for unraveling the past is ancient DNA, which degrades quickly in hot climates.
More than 700 people who lived and died in the region over the course of 10,000 years have their genes presented in three papers. The studies look at the history of the Near East through a genetic lens and explore the ancestry of the people who first domesticated plants and animals.
The Southern Arc includes burials stretching from Croatia to modern day Iran. Wolfgang Haak is a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology who was not part of the team. It is bringing it all together in a larger narrative.
The narrative is not easy to understand. Over the course of four years, the geneticists, led by David Reich and Iosif Lazaridis of Harvard University, gathered thousands of skeletons and collected and analyzed thousands of strands of genetic material. They were able to identify even short bits of DNA using new and old data.
The earliest days of farming are known as the Neolithic. In what is today's Turkey, farming began. The people who domesticated sheep and goats about 10,000 years ago weren't just descendants of earlier hunter-gatherers, according to a new study. Anatolia absorbed at least two separate migrations during the last 10,000 years. The other came from the Eastern Mediterranean coast. They were mixed with the descendants of earlier hunter-gatherers. The populations coalesced into a single genetic signature by about 6000 years ago.
The hunter-gatherers from the Caucasus entered the region about 6000 years ago. The fourth group ofnomads from the north of the Black Sea arrived about 5000 years ago and did not fundamentally change the genetic picture. The majority of the people of the Southern Arc are from Turkey. There is a layer of sauce added after 3000 B.C.E..
This scenario supports the idea that agriculture arose in a network of people in this area. Barbara Horejs, scientific director of the Austrian Archaeological Institute, was not part of the team.
The team's conclusion about the origins of a different cultural shift is being questioned by others. The root of nearly every language in Europe is the same as the one in India. For years, researchers have traced it back to the Bronze Age, when it was ridden both east and west.
Linguists thought that the Yamnaya had left both genes and language in Anatolia, as well as Europe. The new analysis doesn't find any Yamnaya ancestry among ancient Anatolian people. The team suggests that the two people share the same ancestors in a population of hunter-gatherers in the east of Anatolia. The most likely place for people to have spoken the Anatolian-Indo- European root language is that area. The author of all three papers says that the component is a unifying type of ancestry.
Guus Kroonen is a linguist at the university. He says that the early people of the Caucasus would have been familiar with farming, but the deep layers of Europe have no words for it. The speakers were not very familiar with agriculture. The linguistic and genetic evidence don't match
It is possible that the root tongue was a hunter-gatherer language. The Caucasus is a good place to look for evidence of Proto-Indo-Anatolians.
Some of the previous ancient DNA work was critiqued. Archaeologists complain that previous research attributed almost everything to the migration recorded in DNA. Some migrations into Anatolia may not have been relevant to those living at the time. David Anthony is not a co-author but has worked with the team. It's really good.
After moving into the region north of Greece, they were buried in elite tombs, suggesting a link between ancestry and social status. New data shows that the impact of the Yamnaya descendants on Greek social structure was not significant during the Mycenaean period.
The beauty of this is it’s bringing it all together in a bigger narrative.
A man who died in 1450 B.C.E. near Pylos, Greece, was buried in a spectacular way. Dozens of both elite and humbler graves were found in Greece. The lack of correlation between social status and ancestry is unsurprising, according to the University of Cincinnati archaeologist who helped dig the tomb.
In Imperial Rome, the papers acknowledge the differences in identity. As the empire coalesced, the ancestry of people in and around the city of Rome shifted from Europe to the east.
The team zeroed in on the source of those newcomers after obtaining dozens of additional Roman-era genomes. The researchers agree that people with "Anatolian" DNA moving to the Italian peninsula probably saw themselves as slaves of Rome rather than as part of a distinct "Anatolian" ethnic group. Many of the new faces in Rome were referred to as "Greeks" by the contemporary chroniclers.
The papers claim to have an influence on ancestry. Archaeologists can't tell us anything about how people shaped their life worlds. He suggests that the Yamnaya spread by moving directly from place to place instead of through a complex mingling of their descendants with local populations over centuries or more. History with mobility and migration is old-fashioned.
In covering 10,000 years with 700 samples, the studies leave a lot of questions unanswered.
Horejs thinks that this injection of DNA data will shape research in the future. She says that the new data must be used to rethink archaeological models.
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