Most interesting video-conference on Luwians, Troy and the Sea Peoples

All archaeogenetics and no archaeology makes people go mad. So let's spice this a bit with this absolutely enticing video of a conference by Dr. Eberhard Zangger, which I have watched thrice already, twice tonight alone.

I love the general outline of the exposition even if I know some details, like the outline of Lower Troy are controversial. 

I also did pose the following questions as commentary to the video:

1. How can the professor be so sure that all ancient Western Anatolian nations were Luwian and not from other diverse ethnicities? How that they were the only ones in the last Sea Peoples' wave? Just the same we see some non-Greeks in the Greek side of the Trojan war, I would expect some non-Luwians in the Trojan side as well, assuming the Trojans were Luwians and not Tyrsenians or something else. 
2. What about the Phrygians who show up in Anatolia, West and East (Armenians) after the Bronze Age collapse, out of nothing (they seem to originate in an obscure Paeonian tribe, the Bryges)? Not a single mention of them: I guess they would blurr the nice "Luwian" homogeneity. 
3. What about the Greeks (Danaoi, Denesh) and their Pelasgian (Peleset, Philistine) neighbors and often allies (Achilles himself and his Myrmidons were that)? They seem also involved in that late Sea Peoples wave and there is coincidence of cultural Hellenization (and not Luwianization) of Cyprus precisely in that period of the late Sea Peoples' attacks against Syria, Egypt and whatever else. Let's not forget that the Egyptians speak of the foreign peoples making a COALITION in their "islands", and I would say that this coalition involved peoples from all the Aegean, and not just the Asian side of it (although very good point about Evans' racism and his horrible influence on Aegean studies). 

But please don't let my nit-pickiness wrong what I think is a great conference dealing with a topic that has been way too neglected and even purposely ignored. There is a lot of good stuff in the video.

By the way, this is the Wikipedia map of Luwian inscriptions (unsure of what exactly the German legend says, "early" and "late" maybe?, but it's definitely about Luwian inscriptions):

Credit: Hendrik Tammen (CC-license)

Neolithic DNA from Southern Anatolia

I know, I know: I'm decaying into a total procrastinator. I don't have any excuse other than I don't feel like blogging as of late: neither on anthropology nor on politics. I rather feel like learning new stuff and playing, rather than writing and I lack of the structured environment to force myself to do otherwise than what I feel like most of the time. Being of compulsive temperament only worsens things.

I also know that this is not the proper way to start an article. Yes, I know. Do I even care?

So getting to mention now some of the stuff that I have not discussed in these last months and is definitely worth posting about. First of all this key study on more easterly Anatolian early farmers than those seen so far.

Intriguingly they are notoriously similar to those sequenced farther West (see here), what seems to support the model of Anatolian origin of European Neolithic peoples, largely ancestral to modern Europeans. However even Western Anatolian early farmers show already some extra admixture with the Paleoeuropean "WHG" component relative to their Southern Anatolian precursors. So, as the authors suggest, admixture between immigrant farmers and native foragers was a gradual and continuous process beginning in Asia Minor itself.

Gülşah Merve Kılınç, Ayça Omrak, Füsun Özer et al., The Demographic Development of the First Farmers in Anatolia. Current Biology 2016. Open access → LINK [doi:10.1016/j.cub.2016.07.057]

Summary

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 [ 1–3 ]. 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 [ 4 ]. 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.

Autosomal DNA

Maybe the most informative graph is this one (fig. 2):

Genetic Structure and Diversity of Central Anatolian Neolithic Populations
(A) PCA on contemporary west Eurasian populations onto which a total of 85 ancient individuals are projected from this study and previous studies. See Table S1 for number of SNPs per individual. Neighboring modern populations and ancient Anatolian populations are shown encircled. Modern population names are in italics.
Etc. (not so interested here in B, C and D, legend too long, check in the original paper)
Click to expand

It is interesting that, in spite of the Anatolian origin of this ancient ancestral population, they do not tend so much to modern Anatolian Turks but rather to Levant populations like Cypriots (closest ones), Lebanese, Palestinians, etc.

This is probably because, even if early Neolithic peoples of the Levant were not quite like them (see here again) they had become almost like them before the Bronze Age because of regional admixture, which I understand was mostly (but not only) north-to-south flow.

Notice that the Boncuklu (Bon) people had very low genetic diversity and they seem to be a dead end rather than directly ancestral. Instead, the Tepecik-Çiftilik (Tep) population seems a good proxy for the ancestors of Neolithic peoples of Western Anatolia and Europe. 

When we think about South Anatolia Neolithic, we usually think first and foremost about the famous Çatalhöyük site. Well, this ancient settlement is in the area of Boncuklu (to the West, both are near Konya) rather than that of Tepecik-Çiftilik (to the East, near Niğde), so it is quite possible that it is another demographic dead end, related but not directly ancestral to mainline European Neolithic. 

Personally I still think they could well have migrated at least partly by boat, along the southern Turkish coast but, until new data comes, I may need to alter my hypothesis of the ultimate origin being in the Northern Levant (Syria, Lebanon, Cyprus even) rather than Anatolia. These people of Tepecik-Çiftilik were, if not direct ancestors at least very closely related to the actual source population, which may well have lived closer to the coast in any case.

Mitochondrial DNA

The newly sequenced South Anatolian farmers had some of the lineages that were later present in Hungary's and Germany's "Danubian Neolithic", notably the now rare N1a1a1, found in 4/9 samples in this study. Also present were K1a (3/9, incl. one K1a12a), U3 (1/9) and N1a1b (1/9).

So it is time to dismiss the hypothesis that claimed N1a1a1 as a European aboriginal lineage: it came with the immigrant farmers and now there can be no doubt about it.

Neolithic DNA from Greece and NW Anatolia and their influence on Europe

This is a most interesting study that brings to us potentially key information on the expansion of European Neolithic and the formation of modern European peoples.

Zuzana Hofmanová, Susanne Kreutzer et al., Early farmers from across Europe directly descended from Neolithic Aegeans. PNAS 2016. Open access → LINK [doi:10.1073/pnas.1523951113]

Abstract

Farming and sedentism first appeared in southwestern Asia during the early Holocene and later spread to neighboring regions, including Europe, along multiple dispersal routes. Conspicuous uncertainties remain about the relative roles of migration, cultural diffusion, and admixture with local foragers in the early Neolithization of Europe. Here we present paleogenomic data for five Neolithic individuals from northern Greece and northwestern Turkey spanning the time and region of the earliest spread of farming into Europe. We use a novel approach to recalibrate raw reads and call genotypes from ancient DNA and observe striking genetic similarity both among Aegean early farmers and with those from across Europe. Our study demonstrates a direct genetic link between Mediterranean and Central European early farmers and those of Greece and Anatolia, extending the European Neolithic migratory chain all the way back to southwestern Asia.

Uniparental DNA

One of the most important findings is that the two Epipaleolithic samples from Theopetra yielded mtDNA K1c, being the first time in which haplogroup K has been detected in pre-Neolithic Europe. Sadly enough these two individuals could not be sequenced for full genome. 

The other five individuals are all Neolithic (three early, two late) and did provide much more information.

• Rev5 (c. 6300 BCE): mtDNA X2b
• Bar31 (c. 6300 BCE): mtDNA X2m, Y-DNA G2a2b
• Bar8 (c. 6100 BCE): mtDNA K1a2
• Pal7 (c. 4400 BCE): mtDNA J1c1
• Klei10 (c. 4100 BCE): mtDNA K1a2, Y-DNA G2a2a1b (same as Ötzi's)

I color coded their abbreviated names according to the usage in the study's many maps, for easier reference: green shades are for Greece (Western Macedonia), red shades for Turkey (Bursa district). It is also very convenient to get straight their real geography because many of the map-styled graphs are not precise at all about that:

Fig. 1.

North Aegean archaeological sites investigated in Turkey and Greece.

Autosomal DNA affinities

This is probably the most interesting part. There is a lot about it in the supplementary information appendix but I find that the really central issue is how they relate to each other (or not) and to other ancient and modern Europeans. I reorganized figs S21 and S22 to better visualize this:

Ancient samples compared to each other and other ancient samples ("inferred proportions of ancestry")

Ancient samples compared to modern Europeans ("inferred proportions of ancestry")

So what do we see here? First of all that the strongest contribution of known Aegean Neolithic peoples on mainline European Neolithic is from Bar31, which is from NW Anatolia, and not from Greece. Bar8 is a less important contributor but may have impacted particularly around the Alps (Stuttgart-LBK, modern North Italians).

This goes against most archaeology-based interpretations, which rather strongly suggest a Thessalian and West Macedonian origin of the Balcanic and, therefore, other European branches of the mainline Neolithic of Aegean roots, and do instead support some sort of cultural barrier near the European reaches of the Marmara Sea. Of course we lack exhaustive sampling of Greek Neolithic so far, so it might be still possible that other populations from Thessaly or Epirus could have been more important. However the lack of Anatolian-like influence on the Western Macedonian Neolithic until c. 4100 BCE, makes it quite unlikely.

So it seems that, once again, new archaeogenetic information forces us to rethink the interpretative theories based on other data.

However we do see a strong influence of Greek Neolithic and particularly the oldest sample, Rev5, in SW Europe, very especially among Basques, who seem to have only very minor Anatolian Neolithic ancestry, unlike everyone else relevant here. This impact is also apparent in Sardinia and to some extent North Italy (but overshadowed in these two cases by the one from Anatolia, particularly Bar31).

There are also similar analyses for other four ancient samples (Lochsbour, Stuttgart, Hungary Neolithic and Hungary Bronze) but they don't provide truly new information, so I'm skipping them here. As I said before, there's a hoard of analyses in the SI appendix, enjoy yourselves browsing through them and feel free to note in the comments anything you believe important.

A synthesis of the various "inferred proportions of ancestry" analyses is anyhow shown in fig. 3:

Fig. 3. (click to expand)

Inferred mixture coefficients when forming each modern (small pies) and ancient (large pies, enclosed by borders matching key at left) group as a mixture of the modern-day Yoruba from Africa and the ancient samples shown in the key at left.

The fractions may be misleading however, especially for the ancients. For example: Lochsbour (a total outlier among the ancients in this study) appears best correlated with Pal7 but in fig. S24 it is clear that does no correlate with any Neolithic sample at any significant level. But in general terms it can give a good idea of where does ancestry, particularly for modern samples, come from.

Note: elsewhere someone was being a crybaby about the Polish sample (may well be an error) or the Kalmyk sample (who are obviously most related to East Asians, not used here) but those are minor issues.

Of course there's a lot more to learn from the remains of the ancients. Let's keep up the good work.

Neolithic genomes from Northwestern Turkey

Or yet another ancient European DNA study, with some quirks and, critically, the first ancient farmer sample from the Eastern Mediterranean, specifically Northwestern Anatolia, near Yenişehir (Bursa province).

Iain Mathieson et al. Eight thousand years of natural selection in Europe. BioRxiv (pre-pub), 2015. Freely accessible → LINK [doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/016477]

Abstract

The arrival of farming in Europe around 8,500 years ago necessitated adaptation to new environments, pathogens, diets, and social organizations. While indirect evidence of adaptation can be detected in patterns of genetic variation in present-day people, ancient DNA makes it possible to witness selection directly by analyzing samples from populations before, during and after adaptation events. Here we report the first genome-wide scan for selection using ancient DNA, capitalizing on the largest genome-wide dataset yet assembled: 230 West Eurasians dating to between 6500 and 1000 BCE, including 163 with newly reported data. The new samples include the first genome-wide data from the Anatolian Neolithic culture, who we show were members of the population that was the source of Europe's first farmers, and whose genetic material we extracted by focusing on the DNA-rich petrous bone. We identify genome-wide significant signatures of selection at loci associated with diet, pigmentation and immunity, and two independent episodes of selection on height.

As you can see from the title and the abstract, much of the study is focused on more or less debatable selection signatures. Interesting, of course, but not what my greatest interest, less so as I perceive that there is missing data that may be crucial for the understanding of some of such selection, notably the mainstream European LCT 13910-T allele.

How can you do an analysis of selection on this allele while ignoring the first known carriers of it: Chalcolithic (proto-)Basques and Swedes (Gökhem particularly)?

Luckily there are other highlights...

Northwestern Anatolian ancient genetics

The new ancient Neolithic samples come from two sites: Menteşe Höyük (n=5) and Barcın Höyük (n=21), both located in the Yenişehir plain, southeast of Istanbul across the Marmara Sea. The archaeological context of the samples, as well as that of many other European ones, resequenced for this study with new technology, is discussed in the Supplementary Information section.

These ancient Northwest Anatolian farmers have shown to be very similar to early European farmers. The authors estimate that these were only some 10% admixed with Paleoeuropeans, relative to the Anatolian samples, although later individuals from the West did of course had further Paleoeuropean admixture.

I must emphasize the adjective "Northwestern" because Anatolia Peninsula is a large territory where the Neolithic had differential implementation in time and cultures. Critically we cannot be certain that there is any identity between these Western Anatolian first farmers and those from South-Central Anatolia, for example those of the world-famous Çatal Höyük village. This is because the Neolithic of South-Central Anatolia is much older and there are archaeological indications that suggest that the settlement of Western Anatolia and Greece took place via coastal migration. The origin of this coastal migration probably involved Cyprus, which in turn was more directly related to the Neolithic of the Levant (PPNB) than to that of South-Central Anatolia. Some genetic data also seem to suggest that the precursors of early European farmers were from the Levant, rather than from further North. But of course the full resolution of this mystery will have to await for ancient DNA from the relevant regions, something that may be aided by the recent technological breakthroughs but that will also require peace, so geneticists and archaeologists can do their field work (there are of course many other much more excruciating reasons to hope for peace and normalization in West Asia, naturally, don't get me wrong).

In any case we finally have a reference genome for what can be termed the Aegean Neolithic and it seems it was even closer to European derivatives. We cannot anyhow discard that there was some backflow from Greece or other parts of the Balcans to Western Anatolia because there was indeed some interaction across the Aegean. However a much more clear cut cultural divide has been argued to exist between the cultures of the Marmara Sea and those of inland Thrace, so, if there was any such backflow, it probably happened before the expansion of Thessalian Neolithic northwards.

Principal Component Analysis

This is the Principal Component Analysis provided by this study (fig. 1B). The modern samples are in gray with no labeling whatsoever but I guess most readers will approximately identify them easily, as the basic layout has been repeated in so many recent aDNA studies:

Figure 1: Population relationships of samples. (...) B: Principal component analysis of 777 modern West Eurasian samples (grey), with 221 ancient samples projected onto the first two principal component axes and labeled by culture. Abbreviations: [E/M/L]N Early/Middle/Late Neolithic, LBK Linearbandkeramik, [E/W]HG Eastern/Western hunter-gatherer, [E]BA [Early] Bronze Age, IA Iron Age.

As in Olalde 2015 or Haak 2015, or even Lazaridis 2014, WHGs appear located rather "towards the South", unlike in some other PCAs, particularly Europe-only ones. I do find this to be interesting and potentially informative, at least while we await for Atlantic European ancient nuclear DNA.

Therefore, you'll forgive me for the redundancy of reusing the above image a couple of times in order to make a couple of points.

The thesis that most of these studies are pushing for is a simplistic triangular scenario for the formation of modern Europeans with a formula that can be described as {x.EEF+y.WHG+z.Kurgan}. I don't deny that this is quite approximative but I am also quite certain that it is missing important clues. In fact, the triangular thesis seems to fail to explain most Northern European genetic makeup, while the origins of Basques also remain somewhat unexplained by it. Let's see:

Annotations on the PCA: triangular thesis fails, extra HG (EHG?) is needed.

It would seem quite apparent that the triangular thesis (described on the PCA by a slashed line) fails to explain most of Western and Northern European genetic makeup, which is clearly much more deviated towards Paleoeuropean hunter-gatherers than it allows.

Just including on the equation Eastern European hunter-gatherers (dotted line) would be enough to solve most of the problem, although it does of course arises other questions about how and when this extra Paleoeuropean blood was incorporated.

This solution would still leave Basques outside of it. It requires instead of a Western hunter-gatherer extra admixture on top of a simple Neolithic cluster basis:

Annotations on the PCA: Basques can be explained (?) as simple {Neo-European + WHG admixture}

Of course that the actual sources of Paleoeuropean admixture can be more complex, as suggested by some studies, like Günther & Valdiosera 2015, who claimed Scandinavian HG admixture not just in Gökhem farmers but also in Ötzi ("Iceman" in the above graph). These did not use EHG samples but in any case, if correct, it is a pre-Kurgan admixture from the Northeast of the subcontinent.

A key excerpt from the Supplementary Information 2 section that someone (Simon, I think) used to argue for steppe ancestry in Basques in a discussion at Eurogenes blog:

The Iberian Chalcolithic population lacks steppe ancestry, but Late Neolithic central and northern Europeans have substantial such ancestry (Extended Data Fig. 3E) suggesting that the spread of ANE/steppe ancestry did not occur simultaneously across Europe. All presentday Europeans have less steppe ancestry than the Corded Ware5, suggesting that this ancestry was diluted as the earliest descendants of the steppe migrants admixed with local populations. However, the statistic f4(Basque, Iberia_Chalcolithic; Yamnaya_Samara,Chimp)=0.00168 is significantly positive (Z=8.1), as is the statistic f4(Spanish, Iberia_Chalcolithic; Yamnaya_Samara, Chimp)=0.00092 (Z=4.6). This indicates that steppe ancestry occurs in present-day southwestern European populations, and that even the Basques cannot be considered as mixtures of early farmers and hunter-gatherers without it4.

What does this say in fact? It says nothing about Western Hunter-Gatherers, only that Basques appear as more Yamna-like than the Iberian Chalcolithic sample. I see no reason why this cannot be caused by simple extra WHG admixture, although it can also imply other Paleoeuropean such as SHG or EHG inflow. What I do see from other studies (and again for all I can discern in this one) is that Basques do lack any clear Yamna signature and notably their Caucasus or Northern West Asian component (always present where Kurgan admixture is unmistakable and therefore a clear indicator of it) is effectively zero (some individuals may have tiny non-zero such component, all very normal).

Admixture analysis with two and three source populations

The authors find that, while many populations can be modeled as product of simple two-way admixture, many need a three-way model, notably from the late Chalcolithic onwards:

Extended Data Figure 2: Early isolation and later admixture between farmers and steppe populations. A [actually B]: Mainland European populations later than 3000 BCE are better modeled with steppe ancestry as a 3rd ancestral population. B [actually A]: Later (post-Poltavka) steppe populations are better modeled with Anatolian Neolithic as a 3rd ancestral population. C: Estimated mixture proportions of mainland European populations without steppe ancestry. D: Estimated mixture proportions of Eurasian steppe populations without Anatolian Neolithic ancestry. E: Estimated mixture proportions of later populations with both steppe and Anatolian Neolithic ancestry. [F is below]

However this varies, because notably the Iberian Chalcolithic sample can still be modeled as a two-way admixture, what is in conformity with the consideration that the increase in the complexity took place not in any single event but rather first in Central and Eastern Europe and only later further West. This is in full conformity with the Kurgan model of Indoeuropean expansion, although it may require some refinement here and there.

For example it is becoming quite obvious that there was not only a westward movement of Eastern European populations but also a subsequent eastward backflow of the resulting admixed Central European ones. This is discussed in the supplementary materials, from page 43 onwards.

Extended Data Figure 2: (...) F: ADMIXTURE plot at k=17 showing population differences over time and space.
(click to expand)

To this I must add my conviction that the triangular model is not enough to actually explain modern European genetics and that greater Paleoeuropean genetic input in Northern and Western Europe is required as well. The great challenge in this regard is to sample Atlantic (and Baltic) Europe properly and extract whatever consequences that ancient genomes from these areas may provide. 

Naturally there is also some other research to be done in West Asia, where a good deal of the European (and also West Asian, naturally) ancestors lived once upon a time. That is the other major challenge. In this sense this study must be commended for its breakthrough in sampling ancient Northwestern Anatolians, which is a step in the right direction.

There are other blank zones to be researched as well in Southern Europe (Italy, Balcans) that may well provide complementary information.

Alleged selection

The authors claim to have found evidence for selection in twelve different alleles. I remain mildly skeptic because it is hard to judge if this was all selection or founder effect was involved as well. 

Some of the alleged targets of selection are:

Lactase persistance: rs4988235, also known as 13910-T, already mentioned above. The authors mention that the allele’s earliest appearance in our data is in a central European Bell Beaker sample (individual I0112) that lived between approximately 2300 and 2200 BCE. Older signals from the Chalcolithic Basque Country (fixated in a subpopulation) and Sweden are totally ignored. Of course it is a draft so far but it is clear that key information, widely available, is being ignored.

A light skin allele known as rs16891982 (in the gene SLC45A2). This allele was low in the studied ancient populations (but again might have been higher in the blank under-researched areas, I can't say). Unlike it, the derived allele of gene SLC24A5, was fixated in Neolithic NW Anatolians, as well as derived European ancient populations, being a clear case of founder effect (although it may have also helped with adaption to the low vitamin D diet caused by transition to agriculture). There are other pigmentation genes that may have been selected in complex interaction, as they seem to be partly correlated with latitude and are hard to explain based on ancient populations alone.

An important datum here is that: unlike closely related western hunter-gatherers, the Motala samples have predominantly derived pigmentation alleles at SLC45A2 and SLC24A5. So... is there another source of these light skin alleles (there are others and much is unknown anyhow) that is not from Neolithic farmers?

Another selection target is in the TLR1-TLR6-TLR10 gene cluster, which seems related to resistance to mycobacteria such as those causing leprosy, tuberculosis, etc. Regarding this complex cluster, I rather quote:

The strongest signal is at rs2269424 near the genes PPT2 and EGFL8 but there are at least six other apparently independent signals in the MHC (Extended Data Fig. 3); and the entire region is significantly more associated than the genome-wide average (residual inflation of 2.07 in the region on chromosome 6 between 29-34 Mb after genome-wide genomic control correction). This could be the result of multiple sweeps, balancing selection, or background selection in this gene-rich region.

The EDAR gene, related to tooth morphology (remember Pippi?) and hair thickness, as well denser sweat and mammary glands, in East Asians is also listed. Curiously enough, half of the Motala individuals (Epipaleolithic Sweden), carried the derived allele of rs3827760. Modern Scandinavians often have this derived allele, although the authors believe that it is because of more recent admixture:

The EDAR derived allele is largely absent in present-day Europe except in Scandinavia, plausibly due to Siberian movements into the region millennia after the date of the Motala samples.

Uh, really? How can you be so sure? I am very skeptic here again and would rather suspect a more complex pattern of partial Paleolithic (or at least Epipaleolithic) continuity, which may indeed have been brought from East Asia with the proto-Uralic migrations (or whatever). 

Another trait for which the authors claim selection is what they call "genetic height", i.e. height not measured from the actual individuals but from alleles that are believed to influence it. They argue for selection for lower height in Neolithic and Chalcolithic Iberia and for greater height in the Steppe instead, both being corrected to greater height in modern populations. Without objective measures to control for the assumed "genetic height", among other reasons, I find the whole story a bit hard to believe but who knows?

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Revising the Aegean Neolithic genesis

Marnie's blog points today to a very interesting review of the Early Neolithic Aegean. It is from a few years ago and hence totally oblivious to the archaeogenetic information that we are now familiar with. It is however surprisingly consistent with it.

Agathe Reingruber. Early Neolithic settlement patterns and exchange networks in the Aegean. Documenta Prehistorica XXXVIII, 2011. Freely accessible PDF → LINK [doi:10.4312/dp.38.23]

ABSTRACT – The Neolithisation process is one of the major issues under debate in Aegean archaeology, since the description of the basal layers of Thessalian tell-settlements some fifty years ago. The pottery, figurines or stamps seemed to be of Anatolian origin, and were presumably brought to the region by colonists. The direct linking of the so-called ‘Neolithic Package’ with groups of people leaving Central Anatolia after the collapse of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B resulted in the colonisation model of the Aegean. This view is not supported by results obtained from natural sciences such as archaeobotany, radiocarbon analyses, and neutron activation on obsidian. When theories of social networks are brought into the discussion, the picture that emerges becomes much more differentiated and complex.

Fig. 9. First appearance of Neolithic sites in the Aegean.

The overall picture that the author defends, which needs of course not to be the last word but is indeed interesting and well argued, is that of a relatively gradual transition from Epipaleolithic to Neolithic via maritime influxes, which obviously imply partial colonization but quite apparently assimilation of at least some of the pre-existent hunter-gatherer peoples in Greece (no evidence so far of Epipaleolithic or Mesolithic in West Anatolia).

The oldest sites are in the Southern Aegean, with Crete and the Lake District, and date to the first half of the 7th millennium. They are followed by the Central Aegean sites in Thessaly and Western Anatolia, while the youngest sites were founded at the end of the 7th millennium in the Northern Aegean (Fig. 9). Astonishingly, in the Argolid, where there was a strong Mesolithic presence, long-lasting settlements appear comparatively late, around 6000 BC. The islands, as well as Crete, were (re)inhabited continuously only after 5500 BC.

After a detailed examination of both the material culture and 14C dates, the model of a wave of colonisation sweeping over the Aegean as a whole must be rejected: that is, sites appear there at different stages in different landscapes.

The author then argues that only Knossos (Crete), Argissa and Sesklo (Thessaly), Ulucak (West Anatolia) and Bademagacı (Lakes Region of SW Anatolia) remain as well dated Early Neolithic I sites in the whole region. Addint that: "interestingly, the sites in the Lake District are older the closer they lay to the sea", possibly supporting a coastal migration model. 

Therefore, the modelled 14C dates do not support the idea of direct colonisation from Central Anatolia, but testify to a marine-oriented population living in this area in the transition to the EN I.

Reingruber argues for Aegean networks originally dating to the Epipaleolithic (aka Mesolithic) and at least partial continuity from those pre-Neolithic peoples, something that would seem supported by the most up-to-date ancient genetic data, which suggests around 50% Paleo-European ancestry, possibly from the Balcans, in the "purest" early european farmers (EEF) such as samples from LBK or Starcevo, even before additional admixture happened towards the West.

With this concept of regional and supra-regional networks based on the mobility of prehistoric people I do not argue in favour an exclusively autochthonous Neolithisation model. The input of the Anatolian/Near Eastern way of life in the Aegean is obvious. Many of the products and also the items used in symbolic activities were of Anatolian origin. Nevertheless, as has been shown, the Aegean ‘Bauplan’ displayed other priorities, the material culture differing from region to region. What I wish to stress is interaction based on face-to-face contact, on integration and social competence. Also a precise examination of the 14C dates argue against a demic movement ignited by a catastrophe at the end of the PPNB (compare also Thissen 2010.278).

Worth very much a full read anyhow. I just can provide here a glimpse after all.

Oldest Cappadocian Neolithic site changed swiftly from hunting to herding

Reconstructed home entrance
(credit: Kvaekstad)

Aşıklı Höyük (Aksaray province) is the oldest known Cappadocian Neolithic site, located to the Northeast of the famous Çatalhöyük.

The site was inhabited since c. 9000 BCE, having a diet based on varied wild meat sources. But c. 8200 BCE the meat became almost exclusively that of sheep and goats, whose remains increased around this date from less than 50% (presumably wild) to around 90% of all meat sources, indicating that the community had become dependent on them, almost certainly because of transition to herding.

Not just that, young male sheep and goats make up the bulk of those remains, indicating the typical lamb culling proper of agricultural economies. Also analysis of the archaeo-dung indicates that the animals were kept captive in the settlement itself.

Altogether, these findings suggest the people in this area shifted from hunting to herding in just a few centuries.

Importantly, everything suggests that there was no immigration to the area: just a local change of economic paradigm. The homes were built just in exactly the same fashion as the previous ones, using their remains as foundations (typical of "tells", artificial hills formed by this long term continuity in habitation).

It is unclear from the source if they were involved in farming yet but it seems apparent that it was sedentarism what caused the economic change.

I find notable and needed to be mentioned that the life expectancy of men and women in Aşıklı Höyük was extremely unequal, with the latter dying often in their early 20s and showing signs of hard work, while the former generally survived to their 50s. Class inequality have also been proposed, considering the relative lack of burials compared to expected population size - however this last is controversial.

Sources: Live Science, Wikipedia.

Constructors invade major archaeological site in Istanbul with heavy machinery

Archaeologists working in one of the most important archaeological sites of Europe, Yenikapı (Istanbul, Turkey), an emergency dig that has been extended for years as it became obvious that it is a treasure of archaeological evidence spanning many ages, saw their work interrupted and damaged by an impromptu invasion of heavy machinery. The site is meant to be one of the major nodes in the ambitious Marmaray subway project but is under archaeological research since 2004. 

Archaeologists working at the site have released a written statement to attract public attention to the incident. “An excavation has been carried out in Yenikapı as part of the Marmaray Subway Project for eight years as ordered by the Fourth Regional Board of Protection of Cultural and Natural Assets. The importance of the contributions that this excavation has made to the cultural life of İstanbul is already well known by the public. This excavation has been defined by world authorities as one of the most important excavations made during the century. The ongoing excavation activities do not block the construction of the Marmaray project because the work is being conducting at a place that is planned to be a parking lot. This excavation is the site of the Port of Theodosius, which dates back to the fourth century. The site is also in a residential area dating back to the Neolithic Age. On May 11, 2013, bulldozers went onto the site and started to destroy these historically important remnants. This is a crime under the current Constitution's Article 63 concerning the conservation of historical, cultural and natural wealth, and this is against international agreements signed by Turkey,” they said.

Source: Today's Zaman.

Alert: 12,000 years old major site in Kurdistan threatened by mega-dam

Only one is needed, and the 12,000 years-old village Hasakyef fulfills nine of the ten possible reasons to be declared World Heritage Site by UNESCO. Yet the Turkish colonial authorities are not interested in seeing this village recognized in any way and therefore the site remains mostly forgotten. 

Ankara wants to build there one of the most important reservoirs of the Turkish state and another interested party is the Austrian company VA TECH, subsidiary of the German multinational Siemens AG, which would get the bulk of the construction deal. 

It is not just a problem of resettlement, of opposition by the locals, who actually don't even feel represented by the Turkish state at all (they are all Kurds and feel oppressed in a colonial way in fact), it is not just a problem of water robbery to other states like Iraq, it is a problem of a major heritage site of Humankind, dating to the Neolithic (Kurdistan was probably the major boiling cauldron of innovation in the early Neolithic, even more important than the Levant surely) and transiting through all ages until present day, being destroyed by the imposition of a colonial government and the lack of interest of the World. 

While the dam has been planned for decades, this time it seems very serious. Conservation laws have been sidelined and 3000 people are already working in the preliminary part of this destructive work.

Source: Paleorama[es].

Early Neolithic burials found near Istanbul

Pendik, a suburb of Istanbul on the Asian coast of the Bosporus, has produced a Neolithic settlement dating to c. 8500 years ago, including houses, burials and various tools (spoons, needles, axes). 

One of the Pendik burials

Source: Press TV.

Bronze Age settlement under the streets of Ankara

While it is well known that Ankara was once the Easternmost Celtic capital (Ancyra, capital of Galatia) not much is known of the previous period, specially not before the Iron Age, when it became an important Phrygian town founded by the mythical King Midas.

While some layers of the Bronze Age (Hittite influence) were dug in the mid 20th century, no such research has taken place since 1960. The new research at Çayyolu mound has found a diverse array of objects from this era (between 5000 and 3000 years ago) like pottery, hair ties, animal figurines and beads, that will in due time serve to better understand the proto-history of the area. 

The researchers hope to reach to Chalcolithic layers, never before researched in the Turkish capital. 

Source: Hürriyet Daily News (h/t Pileta).

From the Net: 'Evidence of Massacre in Bronze Age Turkey' (Past Horizons)

Determining social relationships between populations in the past can be difficult. Trade can be inferred from evidence such as pottery with foreign designs, or non-local foods. Warfare can be determined from the presence of mass graves or cemeteries of adult males displaying trauma, or weaponry showing signs of frequent use. However, trauma is not always a sign of conflict with external populations. It can also reflect the normal struggles of daily life or even interpersonal violence within the community.

Skeletal collections with trauma found from the Neolithic period in Anatolia suggest that injury was caused by daily activities and lifestyle, rather than systematic violence. However, shortly after this period there is an increase in trauma associated with violence that may suggest an increase in stress within and between populations in this area. In order to examine this conclusion, a new article by Erdal (2012) looked at the skeletal remains of a potential massacre site from the Early Bronze Age in Turkey.

... full story at Past Horizons.

Çatalhöyük: people buried together probably not related

As you probably know, Çatalhöyük (near Konya, Turkey) is one of the most emblematic sties of Middle Neolithic. 

As genetic research was fruitless (bone contamination, degradation), a study of dental morphology was done in order to estimate if people buried together were related, because close relatives should have close dental morphology. The result was negative for all but (maybe) one tomb, strongly suggesting that the Çatalhöyük community did not give any importance to relatedness at least for funerary rituals and related beliefs. 

Source: Live Science (found via Unreported Heritage). 

Origin of Neolithic crops

There is a new and quite interesting paper the reviews the domestication of the key Neolithic crops:

Ehud Weiss and Daniel Zohary, The Neolithic Southwest Asian Founder Crops,Their Biology and Archaeobotany. JSTOR, 2011. Open Access.

Worth a good read but I'll mention here the most relevant conclusions:

 

Cereals:

Wheat

Einkorn wheat (Triticum monococcum) is native as wild from Anatolia or the Zagros area, most probably it was domesticated in modern Kurdistan (aka SE Turkey), in Çayönü or Cafer Höyük. Frome there it spread, along with PPNB to Syria and Palestine.

Emmer and Durum wheat (Triticum turgidum) is native from the Levant and the Zagros but not Anatolia peninsula. It was also domesticated (most probably) in the early PPNB of Kurdistan (Çayönü), spreading soon after the Damascus basin of Syria, where the Emmer variant may have been selected for (Tell Aswad). Cypriot evidence is declared unconvincing by the authors but not totally rejected.

Barley (Hordeum vulgare) is a sturdier cereal even if also less valued than wheat. In its wild form it has a similar principal distribution as T. turgidum (Levant and Zagros but not Anatolia), although it also scatters through the Iranian plateau. The earliest clear domesticated variants are from Syria (Tell Aswad) and Cyprus, but soon also expanded to Southern Kurdistan (Jarmo), Iraq (Ali Kosh) and Palestine (Jericho).

Pulses:

Bitter vecht (Vicia ervilia): it is not really studied in this paper. It has an ample wild origin area and was maybe domesticated in Anatolia or Levant.

Lentil (Lens culinaris): the wild variant is scattered through much of West Asia but it is relatively rare with preference for stony and disturbed soils. It appears along with early cereals in wild form but the first clearly domesticated case is from Yiftah’el, North Palestine (aka Israel), within a middle PPNB context.

Pea (Pisum sativum): there are two wild forms, one scattered through the Mediterranean and the other more specific of West Asia. This one (P. humile) is the one proposed here to be the main ancestor of cultivated peas (but with weak support). The earliest finds are from Syria, Kurdistan and Palestine but the first large amounts are from Southern Anatolia: Çatalhöyük and Erbaba. The discerning of wild and domesticated type is no easy in this case but the available evidence seems to support Çatalhöyük or nearby areas for the domestication of this pulse in the middle or late PPNB.

Chickpea soup Castilian style

Chickpea (Cicer arietinum): ever wanted to know what Cicero means? It mens chickpea indeed. Anecdotes apart, the wild chickpea is almost exclusive of the Northern Kurdistan (SE Turkey). Naturally the first consumption findings are also from that area (Çayönü, Tell Abu Hureyra, Aşıklı Höyük - all from early PPNB). It is however impossible to tell from sure if theyw were already domesticated of wild. Contemporary remains from Jerciho however must be domesticated (as the wild form is not found in the region).

Other early crops:

Flax flowers

Flax (Linum usitatissimum): flax can be used for fibers (surely at the origin of textile crafts) and for oil. Wild flax is widespread across the Mediterranean basin and even as far North as South England or Crimea.

Genetic data indicates that the first agricultural use of flax was not fiber but oil, even if flax fibers were already used before Neolithic (30 Ka. ago in Georgia). The earliest finds come from Çanönü and Tell Aswad. However the earliest reasonably safe case of a domesticated variant is from Jericho, just a few centuries later. Some time later (9th millennium BP) the first known fiber clothes are known (Nahal Hemar cave, Palestine), however this kind of evidence is highly subject to climatic conditions (extreme dryness here).

Discussion notes:

PPNA people did not make pottery but stone vessels (source)

It is interesting that no evidence of early domestication is found for PPNA. Does this suggest that this culture of Palestine and Syria was maybe not Neolithic after all? The main attribute of this culture of the Levant is their granaries but what did they store in them if all the crops were domesticated further North or in a later date? Only barley and maybe peas are from the Levant first according to this paper but from PPNB dates anyhow. So, are we missing something or were PPNA "farmers" actually mere large-scale semisedentary gatherers, i.e. Mesolithic instead of truly Neolithic? Your call.

 

On the other hand it is also interesting that nearly all early domesticates seem to be from the area of Kurdistan, which in my understanding, illuminates the mystery of Göbekli Tepe, which looks like the spiritual center of early Neolithic or at least the consolidated Neolithic of PPNB (notice that while the early village is from PPNA, the enclosure is from PPNB dates).

Göbekli Tepe - I always see a plow here - call me crazy if you wish

Provenzal genetic data... and weird speculations

The following paper offers some information on the genetics of Provenzals and some specific populations of Turkey (Foça, Izmir) which is compared with older studies (on Turkey and Greece) to reach quite unfathomable conclusions:

Roy J. King et al., The coming of the Greeks to Provence and Corsica: Y-chromosome models of archaic Greek colonization of the western Mediterranean. BMC Evolutionary Biology, 2011. Open access.

I'm split on this paper: on one side it does provide some interesting data and makes some common sense claims (like Provence having been little affected by Neolithic expansion direct colonization) but then you stumble upon absurd ideas, such as Cardium Pottery stemming somehow from "Anatolia":

Using putative Neolithic Anatolian lineages: J2a-dys445=6, G2a-M406 and J2a1b1-M92 the data predict a 0% Neolithic contribution to Provence from Anatolia.

There is absolutely no reason to be looking at Anatolia: the Neolithic wave that arrived to Provence did not originate in Anatolia but in the Western Balcans. It is very possible that Anatolia was the ultimate origin of Greek Neolithic and this was in turn at the origin of Cardium Pottery Neolithic somehow, but the real origin of the Neolithic wave that arrived to Provence must not be looked for in any case in Western Anatolia - that is a total nonsense.

We know way too little as of yet to explain the exact process of cultural transference from West Asia (Anatolia specially) to the Balcans (Thessaly in particular) and from Thessaly to the Adriatic, where the cultural elements are so distinct anyhow. There is no particular reason to expect any arrival directly from Anatolia into Italy or SW Europe in the Neolithic. Any such migration would have been dampened in two filters: one in Greece and another one in the Adriatic Balcans.

From my ongoing (and slow) work of summarizing  European Neolithic in maps:

Here you can see in brown the first area of Cardium Pottery Neolithic: Dalmatia, Montenegro, Coastal Albania, most of Bosnia, Italy (in a second moment)... It has a precedent in Otzaki (Thessaly) and a derived influence in Biblos (Lebanon) but by no means can it be linked to "West Anatolia" of all possible places.

Universities and grants should require that any geneticist doing historical population genetics hire a prehistorian for assessment, sincerely.

Still there is a very interesting amount of data that is of interest, summarized (as I said before) in figure 2 specially. This is an extensive table that I cannot reproduce here with enough resolution without some previous work. So for reason of its relevance and novelty I'll focus on the Y-DNA data of Provence (n=51, only attested lineages shown):

• E1b1b1b1a2 (V13): 4%
• E1b1b1b1c (M123): 2%
• G(xG2a3a) (M201): 8%
• I1 (M253): 2%
• I2(xI2a2,I2b) (M438): 4%
• J1 (M497): 2%
• J2a4h1a (DYS445=6): 8%
• J2a4b(J2a4b1) (M67): 2%
• R1a1a (M198): 10%
• R1b1b2 (M269): 59%

Up 26 to 30% (depending on how you evaluate I2*) of the genetic pool is "Eastern Mediterranean" in Provence. E1b1b1b1a2 (V13) is probably from Albania or other Adriatic areas (see Battaglia 2009). That can also be argued to be the case for all the other "transmediterranean" lineages, which agrees well with a Neolithic origin of all them. However it is not impossible that these Neolithic arrived in batches and with intermediate stops in Italy for example or, why not, in Phocaea in some cases. 

But the research falls very short from demonstrating what they claim to demonstrate. If they have demonstrated something at all they have failed to explain it properly. So the only interest of this paper is the raw data, which adds to other such data to be integrated into a careful and comprehensive exploration of all (and not just some) data with proper prehistoric assessment. 

It is in any case important to understand that under the Neolithic colonization hypothesis, E1b1b1a2 should not be expected to originate neither in Anatolia nor in Greece but in Albania, Montenegro and Dalmatia. And, if anything, in Greece rather than Anatolia. Attributing European Neolithic directly to Anatolia or West Asia in general is not an acceptable assumption but a wacko fetish that should be discarded altogether.

More violent deaths at Turkish Neolithic necropolis

I mentioned in October the finding of what seems to be a whole family murdered at the Neolithic necropolis of Aktopraklık, near Bursa, Turkey. They are not the only ones at that burial site whith violent deaths.

The skeleton of a man in his 30s with an arrowhead in its lower spine has been found in the intriguing Neolithic cemetery, dated to c. 8500 years ago, at the beginning of Neolithic in the Balkans and when most of Europe was still a continent of hunter-gatherers.

He was buried in fetal position

Source: Sunday's Zaman (via Stone Pages News)

Likely murdered family 8500 years ago in NW Turkey

An intriguing and disturbing finding has been reported in Turkey: five people (two adults and three young children) were found in a shared grave with their hands tied on their backs.

The macabre burial is thought to date to some 8500 years ago (Neolithic/Chalcolithic) and is located in the burial mound of Akçalar, in the province of Bursa, south of the Marmara Sea. The children are thought to be some 3-5 years old in preliminary examination, two of them were found between the adults legs and the third one was hogtied (ankles also tied).

It is natural to think on first sight that we are before the murder of a whole family but researchers warn that it is too early to confirm this. They also doubt between using the terms murder or human sacrifice.

They also make brief mention of the context of the site (town?) of Aktopraklık, which also dates to 8500 years ago, though some nearby settlements are older. 

Sources: Hürriyet Daily News, Stone Pages - Archaeo News.

Possibly related post: Leherensuge - Neolithic seal found near Izmir, Turkey