Browsing by Author "Reich, David"

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The Genetic History of the Southern Arc: a Bridge Between West Asia and Europe
(Amer Assoc Advancement Science, 2022) Lazaridis, Iosif; Alpaslan-Roodenberg, Songul; Acar, Ayse; Acikkol, Aysen; Davtyan, Ruben; Agelarakis, Anagnostis; Reich, David
By sequencing 727 ancient individuals from the Southern Arc (Anatolia and its neighbors in Southeastern Europe and West Asia) over 10,000 years, we contextualize its Chalcolithic period and Bronze Age (about 5000 to 1000 BCE), when extensive gene flow entangled it with the Eurasian steppe. Two streams of migration transmitted Caucasus and Anatolian/Levantine ancestry northward, and the Yamnaya pastoralists, formed on the steppe, then spread southward into the Balkans and across the Caucasus into Armenia, where they left numerous patrilineal descendants. Anatolia was transformed by intra-West Asian gene flow, with negligible impact of the later Yamnaya migrations. This contrasts with all other regions where Indo-European languages were spoken, suggesting that the homeland of the IndoAnatolian language family was in West Asia, with only secondary dispersals of non-Anatolian IndoEuropeans from the steppe.
A Genetic Probe Into the Ancient and Medieval History of Southern Europe and West Asia
(Amer Assoc Advancement Science, 2022) Lazaridis, Iosif; Alpaslan-Roodenberg, Songul; Acar, Ayse; Acikko, Aysen; Agelarakis, Anagnostis; Aghikyan, Levon; Reich, David
Literary and archaeological sources have preserved a rich history of Southern Europe and West Asia since the Bronze Age that can be complemented by genetics. Mycenaean period elites in Greece did not differ from the general population and included both people with some steppe ancestry and others, like the Griffin Warrior, without it. Similarly, people in the central area of the Urartian Kingdom around Lake Van lacked the steppe ancestry characteristic of the kingdom's northern provinces. Anatolia exhibited extraordinary continuity down to the Roman and Byzantine periods, with its people serving as the demographic core of much of the Roman Empire, including the city of Rome itself. During medieval times, migrations associated with Slavic and Turkic speakers profoundly affected the region.