Cayonu is an early Neolithic site situated in northeast of the Portasar/Gobekli tepe.

 Cayonu is an early Neolithic site situated in northeast of the Portasar/Gobekli tepe.

In Lazaridis 2024 ancient DNA from Cayonu was used for modeling Neolithic farmers of Armenia.Those models should be viewed as preliminary given that we don't have hunter gatherer DNA from historic Armenia. But they give a hint of what can be expected.

I wanted to see where is best preserved the ancestry of those Cayonu first farmers. So I choose 16 ancestral components and used them to model world populations. Without much surprise Cayonu related ancestry is best preserved in modern populations derived from Mesopotamia and historic Armenia.

Just for comparison. The Natufian ancestry from neighbouring Levant is best preserved in Yemen and Saudi Arabia.While Anatolian farmers in Sardinia and south Europe.

Notice that this method gives a different result from what would I get if I simply had compared the Cayonu farmers distance to moderns. First the distance would be high showing that their ancestry was diluted over time. But given the genetic proximity of Cayonu to Anatolian and Levantine farmers the people from the aforementioned regions would get priority. With this method I exclude that shared ancestry to see where exactly Cayonu really left impact.

The result is in the first chart. Sorted from high to low.

My next post will be about EHG using the same method