Researchers have long considered the Bronze Age in the eastern Mediterranean to be the "first international age," especially the period 1600-1200 BC when powerful empires from Anatolia and Mesopotamia established large networks of subordinate client Kingdoms in the Near East. These empires traded and fought with each other. Ancient texts reveal rich economic and social networks that allowed for the movement of peoples and goods.An inter-disciplinary team of archaeologists and geneticists conducted a new study that examined the movement of people during this period at a single center in present-day southeastern Turkey. It was called Alalakh, and it was published in PLOS ONE. The results show that most of the people buried at Alalakh were born in the area and descend from local residents.The goal of the team was to determine if high levels of interregional connectivity, as evidenced by architecture, texts and artifacts discovered at the site over 20 years of excavations sponsored by Hatay Mustafa Kemal University and the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism, could be found among the city's buried population.They performed strontium- and oxygen-isotope analyses of tooth enamel to determine if an individual was born in Alalakh or if they moved there after becoming adults. However, genetic data can be used to identify a person's most recent ancestors.An isotope analysis revealed several individuals that were not local. Their DNA revealed that their ancestry was not local to Alalakh or the surrounding regions. Stefanie Eisenmann, co-lead author of the study, stated that there are two possible explanations for their findings. She is a scientist at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. "Either these people are return-migrants or short-distance migrants from this region, or they could be grandparents or parents who originally came from Alalakh."One sample, an adult female, did not belong to the local gene pool. Instead, she had ancestry most closely matching groups in Central Asia. Her isotopic signatures indicated that she was from a local family. We expected that the isotope analysis would show that the person had immigrated to Alalakh. However, her genetic data was so distinct from that of the rest of the population. So we were shocked to discover that she was probably a native to Alalakh. Tara Ingman, a Ko University researcher, said that it could have been her grandparents or parents who made the move.Although there were many types of mobility, such as return migration, long-distance and short-distance migration, no complete foreigners were found in the data. The majority of people were born in Alalakh, and their ancestors also came from this region.This can be explained in many ways. It's possible that there were far fewer long-distance migrants living at Alalakh than previously believed. We may not have found their graves yet. Murat Akar, the director of excavations, suggested that perhaps most people who came from faraway were not buried at Alalakh or in a way that we can't trace."
