RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 The genetics of an early Neolithic pastoralist from the Zagros, Iran
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 059568
DO 10.1101/059568
A1 M. Gallego-Llorente
A1 S. Connell
A1 E. R. Jones
A1 D. C. Merrett
A1 Y. Jeon
A1 A. Eriksson
A1 V. Siska
A1 C. Gamba
A1 C. Meiklejohn
A1 R. Beyer
A1 S. Jeon
A1 Y. S. Cho
A1 M. Hofreiter
A1 J. Bhak
A1 A. Manica
A1 R. Pinhasi
YR 2016
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/06/18/059568.abstract
AB The agricultural transition profoundly changed human societies. We sequenced and analysed the first genome (1.39×) of an early Neolithic woman from Ganj Dareh, in the Zagros Mountains of Iran, a site with early evidence for an economy based on goat herding,ca. 10,000 BP. We show that Western Iran was inhabited by a population genetically most similar to hunter-gatherers from the Caucasus, but distinct from the Neolithic Anatolian people who later brought food production into Europe. The inhabitants of Ganj Dareh made little direct genetic contribution to modern European populations, suggesting they were somewhat isolated from other populations in the region. Runs of homozygosity are of a similar length to those from Neolithic Anatolians, and shorter than those of Caucasus and Western Hunter-Gatherers, suggesting that the inhabitants of Ganj Dareh did not undergo the large population bottleneck suffered by their northern neighbours. While some degree of cultural diffusion between Anatolia, Western Iran and other neighbouring regions is possible, the genetic dissimilarity of early Anatolian farmers and the inhabitants of Ganj Dareh supports a model in which Neolithic societies in these areas were distinct.