The genetic structure of the world’s first farmers

Basal Eurasians, my guess?
A group whose Y and mt DNA went extinct.
Todays Y and mtDNA is from a group of people that expanded from SW Asia into Eurasia 50 ka.
But 125 ka, there were already humans in Jebel Faya. They expanded too. 73 ka in Jwalapuram, India, 80 ka in southern China and 65 ka in Kakadu National Park, Australia.
After the 50 ka expansion from SW Asia, their Y and mtDNA went extinct.
But some of their autosomal survived. Their autosomal was Basal Eurasian.
And haplo G and H2 brought this autosomal back from India to SW Asia during LGM, when the Thar desert expanded.

Iran and the Levant had 2 very different agricultures.
The Levant farmers grew cereals.
The Iran herders had goat, sheep, pigs and cattle, and supplemented that with some pulses.
With PPNB, both blended in the Levant. Y-DNA T and mtDNA X had arrived in the Levant.

I think that's probably right, but I'd like to believe in Ironside's version. :) I do believe that it was women who first started experimenting with farming, the grains and pulses part if not the animal domestication, but maybe the animal domestication part too.

If you're the one who has to go foraging for miles, then have to bend over with a digging stick for hours, I think you'd be the one to remember where the good stands of these plants were, and later you might try to plant them closer to "home" and see if they'd take. With the goats and sheep and cows I don't know. I know in Italy the men usually took care of the transhumance part. Even when they were closer to home, it was usually the young boys who moved the goats and sheep around, making sure they didn't eat the grass down to the roots. They made cheese out in the mountain pastures during the summer too, while sleeping in little stone huts.

This is the first one that came up...it's from Croatia.
istria-croatia-a-kazun-kaun-a-traditional-dry-stone-circular-stone-F0AEKP.jpg

I don't know how they did it out there. They must have had to bring some rennet or a substitute, a cauldron of some sort; by the 19th century they were of copper. I have a dim memory of some shepherd boys coming through town with little cheeses in baskets lined with chestnut leaves. They had to make their own baskets too. Those days are over; thank God. Those boys were like slaves. In our area there wasn't enough pasture for cows, not like my father's area where there were more cows than people. Usually there was only one or two cows, a small herd at the most, and the women milked them and made butter and cheese.
 

Can someone explain why the Late Mesolithic/Early Neolithic economic revolutions seem (for now) to have virtually bypassed the Fertile Crescent/Mesopotamia? The Neolithic revolution surrounded it, but didn't people living in Mesopotamia take any part in those developments? We have Levant Neolithic near the Mediterranean, Anatolian Neolithic just some kilometers north of the high Tigris & Euphrates, in the highlands, and the Iranian Neolithic just east of the Mesopotamian plains. I find it so strange.
 
I think it's because of the terrain and the plant and animal life it could sustain or not sustain.

"The rivers usually are discussed in three parts: their upper, middle, and lower courses. The upper courses are restricted to the valleys and gorges of eastern Anatolia, through which the rivers descend from their sources, lying 6,000 to 10,000 feet (1,800 to 3,000 metres) above sea level."

"Their middle courses gradually approach each other, bounding a triangle of mainly barren limestone desert known as Al-Jazīrah (Arabic: “The Island”) in eastern Turkey, northern Iraq, and extreme northeastern Syria. There the rivers have cut deep and permanent beds in the rock, so that their courses have undergone only minor changes since prehistoric times. Along the northeastern edge of Al-Jazīrah, the Tigris drains the rain-fed heart of ancient Assyria, while along the southwestern limit the Euphrates crosses true desert."

The farming that developed was tied to wild grains and pulses and medium sized animals. They wouldn't have been found in that kind of landscape. They were found in the gentler, more northern landscapes.

Eventually, once they had learned about irrigation, they were able to settle the southern alluvial plain.

We don't have any ancient dna from there so I don't know what they would have been like.

Slide3.jpg




This is the range of wild cereals:

Fig-1-Map-of-the-Near-Eastern-early-Neolithic-sites-with-archaeobotanical-evidence-in.png


Fig-3-The-Fertile-Crescent%27%27-defined-in-terms-of-wild-progenitors-of-crops-selected.png


CLeP-_qUwAQ6PZy.png:large


P1B.jpg


radiocarbon_CONTEXT_database_map_P2A.png


radiocarbon_CONTEXT_database_map_P2B.png


P3A.png


middle-PPNB-coastal-route-Thessaly.jpg


radiocarbon_CONTEXT_database_map_P4B.png


You can see it starting to move southeast here:
radiocarbon_CONTEXT_database_map_P4A.png


It looks to me like it was moving into the Aegean and beyond before there was much going on in the alluvial plains.
radiocarbon_CONTEXT_database_map_P4B.png


If I had to guess I would say that a lot of the ancestry of those people came from Iran Neolithic like people moving down, and also some came from Anatolia itself.

So far as I know, the first agricultural settlers of the alluvial plain were from the Ubaid culture, which is dated to around 5900 BC. They had to know how to irrigate their crops before they could use the land, because the rivers cut through desert. I think it was like the Nile. I haven't read about this for a long time, so I had to refresh my memory. It lasted for a long time, until about 3800 BC, when the Uruk culture took over. I remember being surprised how relatively young most of the famous cultures of the actual southern Tigris and Euphrates were...

1200px-Map_Ubaid_culture-en.svg.png
 
the herding was a consequence of hunt management
17 ka each autumn epigravettian hunters (hunters like Satsurblia and Kotias Klde) came to the valleys below lake Sevan in Armenia to hunt the goats that came down from their summer pastures
but they only hunted adult male bucks, no youngsters and no female goats
that made sure the goats would never go extinxt around Lake Sevan

Sevan_Armenia_%D0%A1%D0%B5%D0%B2%D0%B0%D0%BD_%D0%90%D1%80%D0%BC%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B8%D1%8F.jpeg

Lake Sevan, Armenia, 1914 meter above sea level.

13 ka near Zawi Chemi, central Zagros Mts goat hunters did the same, and they probably gained the trust of the female flock, whom they protected against predators
they used the female goats as decoy to attrackt male bucks whom they would kill, but never the females and their youngsters
during youngest dryas Zawi Chemi area was abandonned, and these people moved south to Louristan and north to Upper Tigris, Hallan Cemi
Hallan Cemi was a permanent settlement and the hunters went from there on hunting expeditions lasting several days, they butchered and cut their prey on the killing site and brought only the prime meat parts back to their Hallan Cemi settlements
Hallan Cemi people collected pulses, but no cereals
they also domesticated the pig
they had some central 'ritual hut' with objects reminiscent to the Göbekli Tepe temple, 80 km east of Upper Euphrates
these were the people that domesticated the goats and later also sheep and cattle
it didn't happen overnight, it was a very long and gradual progress from selective hunting to herding

about Ubaid, their origin would be Samarra, near present Baghdad area
it is not a coincidence that Ubaid started after the 8.2 ka climate event, which must have been very challenging to the farmers in SW Asia, they had to find new techniques in order to survive
 
they are the prime example of HG who converted to farming
they converted quite late, but spread very fast in all directions
they had a talent for adapting to new lifestyles
 
Can someone explain why the Late Mesolithic/Early Neolithic economic revolutions seem (for now) to have virtually bypassed the Fertile Crescent/Mesopotamia? The Neolithic revolution surrounded it, but didn't people living in Mesopotamia take any part in those developments? We have Levant Neolithic near the Mediterranean, Anatolian Neolithic just some kilometers north of the high Tigris & Euphrates, in the highlands, and the Iranian Neolithic just east of the Mesopotamian plains. I find it so strange.

the hills were more interesting
they didn't need the Mesopotamian plain
that developped only after the 8.2 ka climate event, when the farmers were challenged and started trying irrigations
 
Basal Eurasians, my guess?
A group whose Y and mt DNA went extinct.
Todays Y and mtDNA is from a group of people that expanded from SW Asia into Eurasia 50 ka.
But 125 ka, there were already humans in Jebel Faya. They expanded too. 73 ka in Jwalapuram, India, 80 ka in southern China and 65 ka in Kakadu National Park, Australia.
After the 50 ka expansion from SW Asia, their Y and mtDNA went extinct.
But some of their autosomal survived. Their autosomal was Basal Eurasian.
And haplo G and H2 brought this autosomal back from India to SW Asia during LGM, when the Thar desert expanded.

Kuhlwilm et al had human admixture in Altaic Neanderthals and placed them basal to both Bushmen and Yoruba, which means they can't have been basal Eurasians:

We find that a population that diverged early from other modern humans in Africa contributed genetically to the ancestors of Neanderthals from the Altai Mountains roughly 100,000 years ago.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature16544

“The modern human sequences in the Altai Neanderthal appear to derive from a group of modern human ancestors from Africa that separated early from other humans, about the time present-day African populations diverged from one another, around 200,000 years ago.”
http://www.sci-news.com/othersciences/anthropology/neanderthals-mated-with-humans-3640.html

So maybe the earliest Jebel Faya was related to that, and maybe also to the Skhul and Qafzeh remains. Also, there were Neanderthals found in layers above the Skhul and Qafzeh so maybe the suggested lack of Neanderthal in Basal Eurasian is also evidence against this scenario. Although it certainly not impossible that groups never admixted but lived alongside each other.
 
Kuhlwilm et al had human admixture in Altaic Neanderthals and placed them basal to both Bushmen and Yoruba, which means they can't have been basal Eurasians:


https://www.nature.com/articles/nature16544


http://www.sci-news.com/othersciences/anthropology/neanderthals-mated-with-humans-3640.html

So maybe the earliest Jebel Faya was related to that, and maybe also to the Skhul and Qafzeh remains. Also, there were Neanderthals found in layers above the Skhul and Qafzeh so maybe the suggested lack of Neanderthal in Basal Eurasian is also evidence against this scenario. Although it certainly not impossible that groups never admixted but lived alongside each other.

I would think the admixture happened between the Skhul and Qafzeh and the Neanderthals related to the ones in the layer on top of them.
 
I would think the admixture happened between the Skhul and Qafzeh and the Neanderthals related to the ones in the layer on top of them.

Hm.

Vindija and Mezmaiskaya don't have the admixture. One would expect Mezmaiskaya to have *more*. There is a presentation somewhere on the internet of Ofer Bar-Yoseph were he considered some lithic assemblages in Uzbek caves to be evidence of anatomical modern humans and I have read that some Neanderthal remains found at a Uzbek cave had some strikingly anatomical modern features.

https://anthropology.net/2008/05/26...m-uzbekistan-are-kinda-sorta-neandertal-like/

The Obi-Rakhmat remains are thought to be single child, aged 9-12 years old, represented by the specimen name OR-1. The morphology of OR-1 dentition suggest this kid was a Neandertal. The first molar exhibits a skewed occlusal surface, the premolars exhibit some Neandertal traits. The cranial fragments, such as the relatively thick parietal of OR-1 further suggest that it was a Neandertal. Some other cranial fragments, such as the presence of a foramen in the parietal are seen in at least 37% of modern human. Neandertals, such as Amud 1, Shanidar 1, Tabun 1, Skhul 4, 5, and 9 lack such a foramen.

Mind you, this all is speculation, so it doesn't really disprove what you said. But we need anatomical modern humans far more north and west for that admixture and signs of an expansion 125.000 years ago does fit the bill nicely.

There was an attempt by three groups to independently see if an old AMH admixture exists is humans, i.e. if the latest expansion picked up gene flow from an earlier expansion. Two of three found nothing, but a third found some 2% admixture in Papua's. That is interesting as it looks that both Denisovan *and* first wave humans admixture seemed to have survived only east of the Wallace line.

PS: Although, to support your side, the Aterian is said to have existed in North-Africa *and* Oman.
 
it is my understanding that Neanderthals were north of the Hindu Kush, in the corridor toward the Altaï Mts ca 87 ka
and modern humans arrived there ca 48 ka

if I recall well Ofer Bar-Yoseph noticed the Caucasus was a boundary for Neanderthals (discontunuity between the Georgia caves and Mezmaiskaya), but not for modern humans

unfortunatly I don't have a link

modern humans seem to have arrived at the Georgia caves ca 42 ka and in the Mezmaiskaya area 39 ka
 
Vindija turns out to have the same admixture signal now that it has been sequenced with better quality: "A high-coverage Neandertal genome from Vindija Cave in Croatia" http://science.sciencemag.org/content/358/6363/655.full
So probably Mezmaiskaya will have it too.

Yes you are right. Completely missed that. So the admixture indeed could have been picked up elsewhere. However, it must have been a while before the admixture of neanderthals in humans as this paper estimates the age of the Altai sample at 122 ky.
 
A weird result from Extended Data Table 2:

Admixture f3-statistics. We show the lowest Z-score of the statistic f3(Test; Reference1, Refrence2) for every ancient Test population with at least 2 individuals and every pair (Reference1, Refrence2) of ancient or present-day source populations. Z-scores lower than -3 are highlighted and indicate that the Test population is admixed from sources related to (but not identical to) the reference populations. Z-scores greater than -3 are consistent with the population either being admixed or not.

is this one f3(WHG; Switzerland_HG, Saudi) = -0.01562 , Z-score = -7.7

that means the WHG is admixed from sources related to Switzerland_HG and Saudi, but not be identical to them.

This is weird, we don't usually think of the WHG as a mixed population, because we often see them in ADMIXTURE as this solid bar that contributes to other populations, but they are, and in this paper it clearly shows that the EHG is one population that contributes to WHG.

And Saudis, if this f3 test is just picking the whatever amount of EHG Saudis have (via CHG), why didn't they use the EHG or a European population or Mal'ta ?

Villabruna cluster is different from other European HG populations in having an affinity to Near Easterners

asgjb6.png


So what are Saudis?

from the ADMIXTURE analysis of the Ancient Egyptian paper, we see Saudis composed of three populations:

50% Natufian
30% CHG
15% Anatolia_N

and I would add 5% East African HG. of course, these proportions may not be perfectly accurate.

the first three have Basal and we know the WHG don't have that, CHG contains EHG, so maybe it was picking that signal? and certainly not the East African.

In the supplementary section of WHG, we see that all Ancient West Eurasians, like Natufians and Levant_N, share more mutations with WHG that Switzerland_HG(I'm presuming this is Bichon) doesn't have, shouldn't this mean that some ghost population contributed ancestry to both WHG and Natufians but not Bichon? f4(Switzerland_HG, WHG; A, Chimp). when A=Levant_N, Natufian, Anatolia_N and other populations.

So here is my guess, UHG contributed some ancestry to WHG and is causing this affinity to Near Easterners, UHG is the theoretical non-Basal part of Natufians.

an interesting post on another site http://bellbeakerblogger.blogspot.com/2016/05/villabruna-hunter-gatherer-r1b-qiaomei.html

So the first interesting thing is that Villabruna man's body proportions are intermediate between modern Europeans and Africans. In fact, he generally clusters with North Africans on several skeletal metrics, although facially he is Caucasian. This doesn't mean he is <North African> and it doesn't mean mixed, but it does suggest some meaningfully deep ancestry in a sufficiently warm climate, possibly the Southern Near East(?).

Genetically, he and his cluster represent a shift towards the Near East from earlier Europeans, and really from the earlier 'true' Gravettians in Eastern Europe. When looking at his physical proportions, Vercellotti et al (2008) seemed to suggest that his long-limbed features were a relict of early AMH or possibly some sort of new response to a warming climate. It now seems migration offers the most plausible explanation for his body type in light of DNA. To be clear though, his cluster extends all over Western Europe even though his unique lineage is so far only seen in Italy.
 
look could haplogroup CT be source of Basal Eurasians+their Mtdna. half of Natufian ydna was CT+T+H so yes they could be the source of basal eurasians. IMO Natufians were like modern egyptians half eurasians+ africans until arrival of J2, J1, G made the levant region more caucasoid looking like today in late neolithic, early bronze period.
 
Yes you are right. Completely missed that. So the admixture indeed could have been picked up elsewhere. However, it must have been a while before the admixture of neanderthals in humans as this paper estimates the age of the Altai sample at 122 ky.


In some ways the fact modern human DNA found in Altai (and I guess Vindija too, didn't know about that one) pre-dating even Basal Eurasian just makes things even more interesting. If the humans that admixed into these Neanderthals 130,000+ years ago were basal to San and Yoruba, diverging over 200,000 years ago, that just goes to show how deeply rooted modern humans were and are in Eurasia going back hundreds of thousands of years. People talk about Out of Africa a lot, and that's perfectly fine, but I think Eurasia is going to be just as important for understanding homo sapiens evolution in the last several hundred thousand years, with deeply rooted populations establishing themselves there and not just mixing with other Eurasian hominids like Neanderthals, but more than likely interacting with African populations too.
 
look could haplogroup CT be source of Basal Eurasians+their Mtdna. half of Natufian ydna was CT+T+H so yes they could be the source of basal eurasians. IMO Natufians were like modern egyptians half eurasians+ africans until arrival of J2, J1, G made the levant region more caucasoid looking like today in late neolithic, early bronze period.

Where did you see modern Egyptians are half Africans (it depends what "african" signifies for you? "north-african"?) - They are very more on the 'caucasoid' side, and since long time ago! And do keep in mind that since a long time paleo- and mesolithic people of North-Africa were rather on the 'caucasoid' side, roughly said.
 
Where did you see modern Egyptians are half Africans (it depends what "african" signifies for you? "north-african"?) - They are very more on the 'caucasoid' side, and since long time ago! And do keep in mind that since a long time paleo- and mesolithic people of North-Africa were rather on the 'caucasoid' side, roughly said.

oh yes I meant n.african, but if today you mix half hg E+ half eurasian hg then why you get people with very dark complexions then why since ancient times n.africans were on caucasoid side in your view?how they don't look like ethiopians for example? Sudanese has more eurasian hg than say morocco(85% E) so please explain why sudanese don't look like algerians?
 

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