PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - M. Gallego-Llorente
AU  - S. Connell
AU  - E. R. Jones
AU  - D. C. Merrett
AU  - Y. Jeon
AU  - A. Eriksson
AU  - V. Siska
AU  - C. Gamba
AU  - C. Meiklejohn
AU  - R. Beyer
AU  - S. Jeon
AU  - Y. S. Cho
AU  - M. Hofreiter
AU  - J. Bhak
AU  - A. Manica
AU  - R. Pinhasi
TI  - The genetics of an early Neolithic pastoralist from the Zagros, Iran
AID  - 10.1101/059568
DP  - 2016 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 059568
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/06/18/059568.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/06/18/059568.full
AB  - The agricultural transition profoundly changed human societies. We sequenced and analysed the first genome (1.39×) of an early Neolithic woman from Ganj Dareh, in the Zagros Mountains of Iran, a site with early evidence for an economy based on goat herding,ca. 10,000 BP. We show that Western Iran was inhabited by a population genetically most similar to hunter-gatherers from the Caucasus, but distinct from the Neolithic Anatolian people who later brought food production into Europe. The inhabitants of Ganj Dareh made little direct genetic contribution to modern European populations, suggesting they were somewhat isolated from other populations in the region. Runs of homozygosity are of a similar length to those from Neolithic Anatolians, and shorter than those of Caucasus and Western Hunter-Gatherers, suggesting that the inhabitants of Ganj Dareh did not undergo the large population bottleneck suffered by their northern neighbours. While some degree of cultural diffusion between Anatolia, Western Iran and other neighbouring regions is possible, the genetic dissimilarity of early Anatolian farmers and the inhabitants of Ganj Dareh supports a model in which Neolithic societies in these areas were distinct.