Çayönü and the Preservation of Early Neolithic Farmer Ancestry

 

Çayönü and the Preservation of Early Neolithic Farmer Ancestry

Çayönü is an early Neolithic site located northeast of Portasar / Göbekli Tepe.

In Lazaridis et al. (2024), ancient DNA from Çayönü was used to model the Neolithic farmers of Armenia. These models should be considered preliminary, since we still lack hunter-gatherer DNA from historic Armenia. Nevertheless, they provide a useful indication of what we might expect.

I wanted to examine where the ancestry of these Çayönü early farmers is best preserved today. For this purpose, I selected 16 ancestral components and used them to model modern populations around the world.

Unsurprisingly, ancestry related to Çayönü farmers is best preserved among modern populations originating from Mesopotamia and historic Armenia.

For comparison:

• Natufian ancestry from the neighboring Levant is best preserved today among populations in Yemen and Saudi Arabia.

• Anatolian Neolithic farmer ancestry is best preserved in Sardinia and southern Europe.

It should be noted that this method produces different results than a simple distance comparison between Çayönü samples and modern populations. A direct distance analysis would show large genetic distances because this ancestry has been diluted over time. Moreover, because Çayönü farmers are genetically close to Anatolian and Levantine Neolithic populations, individuals from those regions would appear artificially prioritized.

The method used here attempts to remove that shared ancestry in order to identify where the specific Çayönü-related component has had the greatest long-term impact.

The results are shown in the first chart, sorted from highest to lowest.

In my next post, I will apply the same method to EHG ancestry.