The Demographic Development of the First Farmers in Anatolia

Abstract

The archaeological documentation of the develop-ment of sedentary farming societies in Anatolia isnot yet mirrored by a genetic understanding of thehuman populations involved, in contrast to thespread of farming in Europe [1–3]. Sedentary farmingcommunities emerged in parts of the Fertile Crescentduring the tenth millennium and early ninth millen-nium calibrated (cal) BC and had appeared in centralAnatolia by 8300 cal BC [4]. Farming spread intowest Anatolia by the early seventh millennium calBC and quasi-synchronously into Europe, althoughthe timing and process of this movement remain un-clear. Using genome sequence data that we gener-ated from nine central Anatolian Neolithic individuals,we studied the transition period from early Aceramic(Pre-Pottery) to the later Pottery Neolithic, whenfarming expanded west of the Fertile Crescent. Wefind that genetic diversity in the earliest farmerswas conspicuously low, on a par with Europeanforaging groups. With the advent of the PotteryNeolithic, genetic variation within societies reachedlevels later found in early European farmers. Our re-sults confirm that the earliest Neolithic central Anato-lians belonged to the same gene pool as the firstNeolithic migrants spreading into Europe. Further,genetic affinities between later Anatolian farmersand fourth to third millennium BC Chalcolithic southEuropeans suggest an additional wave of Anatolianmigrants, after the initial Neolithic spread but beforethe Yamnaya-related migrations. We propose thatthe earliest farming societies demographicallyresembled foragers and that only after regionalgene flow and rising heterogeneity did the farmingpopulation expansions into Europe occur.