Is it known who were the first developers of agriculture in the Fertile Crescent?

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Agriculture appeared first in the Fertile Crescent, around 12,000 years ago.

From reading in this forum, I realize that the current European population has little to do with the people living in Europe 12,000 years ago: we are a mixture of ANE, WHG and EEF. And this mixture happened relatively recently, at least with ANE.

So, my question is: is it known who these people at the Fertile Crescent were? I assume, with analogy to Europe, that those people do not exist anymore, at least in "pure" terms. But is it known who they were? Which characteristics did they have?
 
And these levantines and anatolians are like today's levantines and anatolians?
 
The short answer is that we know who they were, and if you're talking about the population in Anatolia which then made its way to Europe, with the exception of the Sardinians, no modern population overlaps with them. There were other farmers whose ancestry many Europeans carry, and that's the Zagros people who were instrumental in animal domestication, and the Levantine farmers who first domesticated grain.

Today's Levantines and Turks are different, since the Near East has seen a lot of change as well in the succeeding millenia.

I would start reading some of the seminal papers on this issue:

Lazaridis et al: "The genetic structure of the first farmers"
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/059311v1

In fact, you might find this whole thread helpful
https://www.eupedia.com/forum/threads/34850-Important-papers-for-newbies-to-Population-Genetics
 
And these levantines and anatolians are like today's levantines and anatolians?

nature19310-sf1.jpg2fdrZf8.jpg

As you can see, there are indeed differences from modern populations in the same geographic ranges.
 

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