Paleolithic DNA from the Caucasus reveals core of West Eurasian ancestry

作者：Iosif Lazaridis, Anna Belfer‐Cohen, Swapan Mallick, Nick Patterson, Olivia Cheronet, Nadin Rohland, Guy Bar‐Oz, Ofer Bar‐Yosef, Nino Jakeli, Eliso Kvavadze, David Lordkipanidze, Zinovi Matzkevich, Tengiz Meshveliani, Brendan J. Culleton, Douglas J. Kennett, Ron Pinhasi, David Reich · 发表于：bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) · 年份：2018 · DOI：10.1101/423079 · 被引用次数：39 · 研究领域：Forensic and Genetic Research、Forensic Anthropology and Bioarchaeology Studies、Archaeology and ancient environmental studies

Abstract The earliest ancient DNA data of modern humans from Europe dates to ∼40 thousand years ago 1-4 , but that from the Caucasus and the Near East to only ∼14 thousand years ago 5,6 , from populations who lived long after the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) ∼26.5-19 thousand years ago 7 . To address this imbalance and to better understand the relationship of Europeans and Near Easterners, we report genome-wide data from two ∼26 thousand year old individuals from Dzudzuana Cave in Georgia in the Caucasus from around the beginning of the LGM. Surprisingly, the Dzudzuana population was more closely related to early agriculturalists from western Anatolia ∼8 thousand years ago 8 than to the hunter-gatherers of the Caucasus from the same region of western Georgia of ∼13-10 thousand years ago 5 . Most of the Dzudzuana population’s ancestry was deeply related to the post-glacial western European hunter-gatherers of the ‘Villabruna cluster’ 3 , but it also had ancestry from a lineage that had separated from the great majority of non-African populations before they separated from each other, proving that such ‘Basal Eurasians’ 6,9 were present in West Eurasia twice as early as previously recorded 5,6 . We document major population turnover in the Near East after the time of Dzudzuana, showing that the highly differentiated Holocene populations of the region 6 were formed by ‘Ancient North Eurasian’ 3,9,10 admixture into the Caucasus and Iran and North African 11,12 admixture into the Na...