Researchers use genetics to reveal people mixed before cities rose

Genetic research shows the mix of ideas and material culture, with people intermingling, came before cities began to rise, which is the opposite of previous assumptions.

Researchers examined DNA from 110 skeletal remains from sites in present-day Turkey, Mediterranean coast countries like Jordan and Israel and present-day Azerbaijan and Aremenia, the Harvard Gazette reported. The remains ranged from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age, putting them at 3,000 to 7,500 years old.

Their research showed long-term genetic mixing and gradual population movements recorded in events 8,500 years ago and 4,000 years ago.

“Rather than this period being characterized by dramatic migrations or conquest, what we see is the slow mixing of different populations, the slow mixing of ideas and it’s percolating out of this melting pot that we see the rise of urbanism — the rise of cities,” Christina Warinner, assistant professor of anthropology at Harvard, told the Harvard Gazette.

Before connecting with other regions with the precursors to the Silk Road, linking Asia, Africa and Europe, people in Western Asia had systems of social organization and distinct traditions. The evolution from agriculture to pastoral communities to early state-level societies played out in this area.

The mix of populations began across Anatolia and the Southern Caucasus approximately 8,500 years ago, Harvard Gazette reported. Researchers used the resulting genetic information to understand mobility in the area as it became a genetic melting pot.

But not everything was that gradual. Genetic shifts show that approximately 4,000 years ago a mass migration brought an influx of new people into today’s southern Turkey and northern Syria, the Harvard Gazette reported. It corresponds with a time when Northern Mesopotamia suffered a severe drought. With no preserved genomes for those populations, researches can’t be sure this is where the migration began.

A woman’s corpse, found buried in a well, linked her to people who lived 4,000 years ago in Central Asia and not present-day Turkey.

“We can’t exactly know her story, but we can piece together a lot of information that suggests that either she or her ancestors were fairly recent migrants from Central Asia,” Warinner, who is also a group leader in the Department of Archaeogenetics at the Max Planck Institute, told the Harvard Gazette. “We don’t know the context in which they arrived in the Eastern Mediterranean, but this is a period of increasing connectivity in this part of the world.”

By studying genetics, scientists were able to show a mixing of populations much earlier than what pottery or tools indicated, she told the Harvard Gazette.