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Anomalous blue-eyed people came to Israel 6,500 years ago from Iran, DNA shows
More: https://www.timesofisrael.com/anomal...ran-dna-shows/Blue-eyed, fair-skinned settlers inhabited the Levant some 6,500 years ago, according to an international interdisciplinary team of scientists. An article released Monday in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Communications solves the mystery of how Chalcolithic culture got to the Galilee: via population migration.
When they mapped the genomes of bones from 22 of the 600 individual skeletons discovered in a massive necropolis near Peki’in in the north of the country, the scientists found a genetic mix quite unlike that of previous and successive settlers of the region.
The findings address the decades-long arguments over the origins of this distinctive Late Chalcolithic culture, the artifacts of which “have few stylistic links to the earlier or later material cultures of the region,” write the authors.
The highly artistic, bubble-in-time relics have “led to extensive debate about the origins of the people who made this material culture.” Did it come about by local populations adopting and implementing practices found in existent cultures in the north, or through migration?
Decorated burial Jar from the Chalcolithic period excavated at Peki’in cave (Mariana Salzberger, courtesy of the Israel Antiquities Authority)
In the article, “Ancient DNA from Chalcolithic Israel reveals the role of population mixture in cultural transformation,” the scientists concluded that the homogeneous community found in the cave could source ~57% of its ancestry from groups related to those of the local Levant Neolithic, ~26% from groups related to those of the Anatolian Neolithic, and ~17% from groups related to those of the Iran Chalcolithic.
The study was led by Tel Aviv University researchers Dr. Hila May and Prof. Israel Hershkovitz of the Department of Anatomy and Anthropology, Dan David Center for Human Evolution and Biohistory Research; Dr. Dina Shalem of the Institute for Galilean Archaeology at Kinneret College and the Israel Antiquities Authority, who was one of the original archaeologists who excavated the cave in 1995; and Harvard University’s Éadaoin Harney and Prof. David Reich.
“The genetic analysis provided an answer to the central question we set out to address,” said Harvard’s Reich. “It showed that the Peki’in people had substantial ancestry from northerners – similar to those living in Iran and Turkey – that was not present in earlier Levantine farmers.”
Archaeologist Shalem said the natural stalactite cave, 17 meters long and 5-8 meters wide, is unique both for the number of those buried in it and the “outstanding motifs” — geometrical and anthropomorphic designs — depicted on the ossuaries and jars holding the skeletal remains.
“Some of the findings in the cave are typical to the region, but others suggest cultural exchange with remote regions. The study resolves a long debate about the origin of the unique culture of the Chalcolithic people,” said Shalem. “Did the cultural change in the region follow waves of migration; the infiltration of ideas due to trade relations and/or cultural exchange; or local invention? We now know that the answer is migration.”
Added Harvard’s Harney, who led the statistical analysis for the study: “We also find that the Peqi’in population experienced abrupt demographic change 6,000 years ago.”
The Chalcolithic era, also dubbed the Copper Age, follows the Stone Age and precedes the Bronze Age. There are already several DNA analyses for Bronze Age settlement in the Levant, including last summer’s publication of research from Bronze Age burials that shows that 93 percent of the ancestry of modern Lebanese ancestry comes from the Canaanites. Now, the new Peki’in genome mapping fills in a void of 3,000 years of DNA analysis.
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Originally Posted by Norse
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