The Demographic Development of the First Farmers in Anatolia

The archaeological documentation of the development of sedentary farming societies in Anatolia is not yet mirrored by a genetic understanding of the human populations involved, in contrast to the spread of farming in Europe 1Bramanti B. Thomas M.G. Haak W. Unterlaender M. Jores P. Tambets K. Antanaitis-Jacobs I. Haidle M.N. Jankauskas R. Kind C.-J. et al.Genetic discontinuity between local hunter-gatherers and central Europe’s first farmers.Science. 2009; 326: 137-140Crossref PubMed Scopus (363) Google Scholar, 2Skoglund P. Malmström H. Raghavan M. Storå J. Hall P. Willerslev E. Gilbert M.T.P. Götherström A. Jakobsson M. Origins and genetic legacy of Neolithic farmers and hunter-gatherers in Europe.Science. 2012; 336: 466-469Crossref PubMed Scopus (381) Google Scholar, 3Lazaridis I. Patterson N. Mittnik A. Renaud G. Mallick S. Kirsanow K. Sudmant P.H. Schraiber J.G. Castellano S. Lipson M. et al.Ancient human genomes suggest three ancestral populations for present-day Europeans.Nature. 2014; 513: 409-413Crossref PubMed Scopus (750) Google Scholar. Sedentary farming communities emerged in parts of the Fertile Crescent during the tenth millennium and early ninth millennium calibrated (cal) BC and had appeared in central Anatolia by 8300 cal BC 4Baird D. The Late Epipaleolithic, Neolithic, and Chalcolithic of the Anatolian Plateau, 13,000–4000 BC.in: Potts D. A Companion to the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East. Wiley-Blackwell, 2012: 431-466Crossref Scopus (40) Google Scholar. Farming spread into west Anatolia by the early seventh millennium cal BC and quasi-synchronously into Europe, although the timing and process of this movement remain unclear. Using genome sequence data that we generated from nine central Anatolian Neolithic individuals, we studied the transition period from early Aceramic (Pre-Pottery) to the later Pottery Neolithic, when farming expanded west of the Fertile Crescent. We find that genetic diversity in the earliest farmers was conspicuously low, on a par with European foraging groups. With the advent of the Pottery Neolithic, genetic variation within societies reached levels later found in early European farmers. Our results confirm that the earliest Neolithic central Anatolians belonged to the same gene pool as the first Neolithic migrants spreading into Europe. Further, genetic affinities between later Anatolian farmers and fourth to third millennium BC Chalcolithic south Europeans suggest an additional wave of Anatolian migrants, after the initial Neolithic spread but before the Yamnaya-related migrations. We propose that the earliest farming societies demographically resembled foragers and that only after regional gene flow and rising heterogeneity did the farming population expansions into Europe occur.