The latest paper by our researchers delves into the history of sheep, one of the first domesticated animals in Neolithic West Eurasia. The zooarchaeological record suggests that domestication first took place in Southwest Asia, although much remains unresolved about the precise location(s) and timing(s) of earliest domestication, or the post-domestication history of sheep. In this paper our researchers present 24 new partial sheep paleogenomes, including a 13,000-year-old Epipaleolithic Central Anatolian wild sheep, as well as 14 domestic sheep from Neolithic Anatolia, two from Neolithic Iran, two from Neolithic Iberia, three from Neolithic France, and one each from Late Neolithic/Bronze Age Baltic and South Russia, in addition to five present-day Central Anatolian Mouflons and two present-day Cyprian Mouflons. They find that Neolithic European, as well as domestic sheep breeds, are genetically closer to the Anatolian Epipaleolithic sheep and the present-day Anatolian and Cyprian Mouflon than to the Iranian Mouflon. Their findings mark the dynamism of past domestic sheep populations in their potential for dispersal and admixture, sometimes being paralleled by their shepherds and in other cases not.
The study is authored by Damla Kaptan, Gözde Atağ, Kıvılcım Başak Vural, Pedro Morell Miranda, Ali Akbaba, Eren Yüncü, Aleksey Buluktaev, Mohammad Foad Abazari, Sevgi Yorulmaz, Duygu Deniz Kazancı, Ayça Küçükakdağ Doğu, Yasin Gökhan Çakan, Rana Özbal, Fokke Gerritsen, Bea De Cupere, Refik Duru, Gülsün Umurtak, Benjamin S Arbuckle, Douglas Baird, Özlem Çevik, Erhan Bıçakçı, Can Yumni Gündem, Evangelia Pişkin, Lamys Hachem, Kayra Canpolat, Zohre Fakhari, Maria Ochir-Goryaeva, Viktoria Kukanova, Hamid Reza Valipour, Javad Hoseinzadeh, Fatma Küçük Baloğlu, Anders Götherström, Eleftherios Hadjisterkotis, Thierry Grange, Eva-Maria Geigl, İnci Z. Togan, Torsten Günther, Mehmet Somel, and Füsun Özer.
