(ORDO NEWS) — Paleogenetics studied the DNA of representatives of the Shulaveri-Shomu culture, whose remains were found in a large collective burial of the beginning of the 6th millennium BC.
As a result of this work, they found that the Neolithic population living in the west of modern Azerbaijan was a mixed population from two or three sources.
The remains of two teenagers buried in an embrace deserve special attention of scientists. An analysis of their genotypes testifies in favor of the fact that they were siblings.
A group of scientists from Azerbaijan, Great Britain and France, led by Celine Bon from the National Center for Scientific Research of France, decided to clarify the origin of the Shulaveri-Shomu culture.
To do this, they turned to the materials excavated in Mentesh-Tepe, one of the oldest settlements of this culture, located in the west of Azerbaijan.
Archaeologists have discovered here a very unusual collective burial of the beginning of the 6th millennium BC, including the remains of about 30 people.
Probably, victims of an epidemic, famine or other dramatic event were buried in this grave (there are no signs of violent death on the remains).
Of these people, the most attention of these people is attracted by two teenagers who were buried in an embrace with each other, which is rare for such an antiquity.
For paleogenetic research, scientists took samples from 23 temporal bones, but the preservation of DNA in most of them turned out to be very poor. With low coverage (from 0.1 to 0.3 times), they were able to read the genomes of three people (individuals 7, 23 and 26) using 1240 thousand informative single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), as well as establish the sex of four more people – two men and two women.
For further analysis, the researchers combined the findings with 3,529 previously published ancient genomes.
Using the ADMIXTURE program, bioinformaticians determined that the ancestry of three men from Mentesh Tepe can be modeled from three ancestral components associated with the Neolithic population of Iran (30 percent), the population of the Levant of the pre-Pottery Neolithic (15 percent), and early farmers and pastoralists from Anatolia or Europe ( 55 percent).
The genotypes of these people turned out to be close to other previously published inhabitants of the South Caucasus of the Neolithic and Chalcolithic eras.
They are also similar to populations from Anatolia of the Chalcolithic and Bronze Ages, for example, to the inhabitants of the ancient settlement of Arslantepe.
Further research made it possible to clarify the initial conclusion about the origin of the Mentesh-Tepe population.
So, using the qpAdm program, scientists modeled it from just two sources: the Neolithic inhabitants of the Tell-Kurdu settlement (southeast of Anatolia) and the Neolithic inhabitants of Iran.
The DATES program indicates that the mixing of the two groups occurred about 15 ± 5 generations before their lives, that is, around 6300 BC.
At the same time, the origin of the Mentesh-Tepe population can also be represented from three ancestral components: the Mesolithic Caucasian hunter-gatherers (or the Neolithic inhabitants of Iran genetically close to them), the early farmers of Anatolia, and the Neolithic population of Northeast Mesopotamia.
Scientists also decided to look into the family ties of people from Mentesh-Tepe.
In four individuals (one genome has been published previously), they identified three mitochondrial haplogroups: U7, K1 and U1a1, and the two cuddling teenagers turned out to be representatives of the same maternal line.
Moreover, they were carriers of the same Y-chromosomal haplogroup – J2b. Further tests showed that the two men were first-degree relatives. Taking into account their age at death, their shared mitochondrial haplogroup, and the archaeological context, the researchers concluded that they were siblings.
It was not possible to identify other family ties in this group, although scientists noted the genetic homogeneity of the Mentesh-Tepe population.
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