Three new studies present DNA from more than 700 individuals who lived and died in the Near East over more than 10,000 years—surveying the history of the region through a genetic lens.
Few places have shaped Eurasian history as much as the ancient Near East. Agriculture and some of the world’s first civilizations were born there, and the region was home to ancient Greeks, Troy, and large swaths of the Roman Empire. “It’s absolutely central, and a lot of us work on it for precisely that reason,” says German Archaeological Institute archaeologist Svend Hansen. “It’s always been a bridge of cultures and a key driver of innovation and change.
The massive data set includes DNA from burials stretching from Croatia to modern-day Iran, in a region the authors call the Southern Arc. “The sample size is phenomenal, and fascinating,” says Wolfgang Haak, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology who was not part of the team. “The beauty of this is it’s bringing it all together in a bigger narrative.”
Another genetic contribution came from the east about 6500 years ago, as hunter-gatherers from the Caucasus entered the region. Then about 5000 years ago, a fourth group—nomads from the steppes north of the Black Sea, known as the Yamnaya—arrived, adding to the genetic picture but not fundamentally redrawing it. “The people of the Southern Arc are mostly coming from Levantine, Anatolian, and Caucasus components,” Lazaridis says. “The Yamnaya are like a layer of sauce, added after 3000 B.C.E.
Because of similarities between Indo-European and Anatolian languages such as ancient Hittite, linguists had guessed the Yamnaya had left both genes and language in Anatolia, as well as Europe. But the new analysis finds no Yamnaya ancestry among ancient Anatolians. The team suggests they and the Yamnaya instead, including the Caucasus Mountains.
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