Out-of-Anatolia: Cultural and genetic interactions during the Neolithic expansion in the Aegean

Abstract

West Anatolia has been a crucial yet elusive element in the Neolithic expansion from the Fertile Crescent to Europe. In this work, we describe the changing genetic and cultural landscapes of early Holocene West Anatolia using 30 new paleogenomes. We show that Neolithization in West Anatolia was a multifaceted process, characterized by the assimilation of Neolithic practices by local foragers, the influx of eastern populations, and their admixture, with their descendants subsequently establishing Neolithic Southeast Europe. We then coanalyzed genetic and cultural similarities across early Holocene Anatolian and Aegean Neolithic villages using 58 material culture elements. Cultural distances among villages correlate with their spatial distances but not with their genetic distances after controlling for geography. This suggests that cultural change was often decoupled from genetically visible mobility.