The study, conducted by an international team of researchers led by scientists from Hacettepe University and ODTÜ, revealed the history of domestic sheep by analyzing ancient genomes from Turkey, Iran, Russia, Sweden, France and Spain, and showed that sheep were most likely domesticated in Anatolia.
The article on the subject includes the following information:
From Anatolia, of course!
An international team of researchers uncovered the history of domestic sheep generating and analyzing ancient genomes from Turkey, Iran, Russia, Sweden, France, and Spain, showing that the species was likely domesticated in Anatolia.
Sheep is a key species for many human populations, providing meat, milk, wool, hide, and fat. It is known to have been domesticated in the Middle East, but details about its history are little understood.
The new paper, published today in Molecular Biology and Evolution, includes a genome from a 13,000-year-old sheep from Anatolia. This was a time much before sheep were domesticated.
This wild Anatolian sheep, from the site of Pınarbaşı, Karaman, was genetically the closest wild sister to all known domesticated sheep. “This suggests that domestic sheep were derived from Anatolian wild stock, in line with archaeological evidence”, says senior author Füsun Özer, an evolutionary geneticist from Hacettepe University, Ankara.
Still, the researchers also suggest that there might have been a second domestication event in Iran.
The team further analyzed ancient sheep genomes from Turkey, Iran, Russia, Sweden, France, and Spain, between 9000 and 4000 years ago. “The results confirmed that the first sheep in Europe were brought there by farmers of Anatolian origin around 7,000 years ago. At the same time, sheep were also brought to Asia via Iran”, says co-senior author Eva-Maria Geigl from CNRS, Paris.
Interestingly, European sheep later became more Asian-like, the researchers found. Baltic sheep from 4,000 years ago were a mixture of eastern and western sheep. “This was also a very dynamic time for human populations with several documented migrations across Eurasia. These humans probably brought their sheep with them and mixed them with the local stocks”, adds co-senior author Torsten Günther from Uppsala University.
“Our research on the domestication history of sheep in Turkey began about 15 years ago” says Inci Zehra Togan, one of the senior authors of the study. “Back then, the wet lab methods and computational analyses were not sufficient to help us understand the journey of sheep”.
Lead author Damla Kaptan, who worked at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara during the study, notes that they had extra difficulty finding bones that had preserved sufficient DNA. "We experimented with over 200 samples but could only get 18 of them to work", Kaptan says. "Low DNA preservation might be due to the bones being cooked."
The work was led by ancient DNA researchers in Ankara, Uppsala, and Paris, and included 38 geneticists and archaeologists working in Turkey, Sweden, France, Russia, Iran, Cyprus, UK, Belgium, and Canada. The research was funded by the European Research Council grant "NEOGENE" run by co-senior author Mehmet Somel and Horizon 2020 TWINNING project “NEOMATRIX”.
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