By sequencing 727 ancient individuals from the Southern Arc (Anatolia and its neighbors in Southeastern Europe and West Asia) over 10,000 years, we contextualize its Chalcolithic period and Bronze Age (about 5000 to 1000 BCE), when extensive gene flow entangled it with the Eurasian steppe. Two streams of migration transmitted Caucasus and Anatolian/Levantine ancestry northward, and the Yamnaya pastoralists, formed on the steppe, then spread southward into the Balkans and across the Caucasus into Armenia, where they left numerous patrilineal descendants. Anatolia was transformed by intra–West Asian gene flow, with negligible impact of the later Yamnaya migrations. This contrasts with all other regions where Indo-European languages were spoken, suggesting that the homeland of the Indo-Anatolian language family was in West Asia, with only secondary dispersals of non-Anatolian Indo-Europeans from the steppe.

ObjectivesThe current paper explores the effectiveness of entheseal changes as skeletal activity markers by testing the correlation between such changes and cross-sectional geometric (CSG) properties while controlling for the effect of age and body size. Materials and MethodsThe originality of the paper lies in capturing entheseal changes in a continuous quantitative manner using 3D microscopy. Roughness and bone resorption were recorded on zone 1 and 2 of three humeral entheses (subscapularis, supraspinatus, infraspinatus) in a documented sample of 29 male skeletons. ResultsOur analysis found that merely 5.91% of the partial correlations between entheseal changes and CSG properties were statistically significant. In addition, two unexpected patterns were identified, namely a higher number of significant correlations on the left side entheses compared to the right side ones and a higher number of correlations between minimum roughness and CSG properties compared to mean and maximum roughness. DiscussionThese patterns are the inverse of what we would expect if activity had exerted an important effect on entheseal change expression. Therefore, they support the lack of association between entheseal changes and habitual activity, even though various factors potentially affecting the above results are discussed.

We present the first ancient DNA data from the Pre-Pottery Neolithic of Mesopotamia (Southeastern Turkey and Northern Iraq), Cyprus, and the Northwestern Zagros, along with the first data from Neolithic Armenia. We show that these and neighboring populations were formed through admixture of pre-Neolithic sources related to Anatolian, Caucasus, and Levantine hunter-gatherers, forming a Neolithic continuum of ancestry mirroring the geography of West Asia. By analyzing Pre-Pottery and Pottery Neolithic populations of Anatolia, we show that the former were derived from admixture between Mesopotamian-related and local Epipaleolithic-related sources, but the latter experienced additional Levantine-related gene flow, thus documenting at least two pulses of migration from the Fertile Crescent heartland to the early farmers of Anatolia.

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Pair‐matching of bilateral elements is a major component of resolving commingled remains both in forensic and bioarchaeological contexts. This study presents a new method of osteometric pair‐matching of the lower limbs which relies on 3D digital models of the femur and tibia bones. The proposed method, which is accompanied by a freely available open‐source implementation, automatically computes a number of osteometric variables including cross‐sectional geometric properties from an assemblage of left and right bone antimeres and calculates probabilistically the appropriate matching pairs as well as single elements, whose bones antimere is not present in the given assemblage. The method has been extensively tested on a skeletal sample comprising 396 femurs and 422 tibias from the Athens collection. Our results in testing commingled assemblages with no disparity show that the method’s sensitivity is 1 for sorting femurs and 0.997 for sorting tibias, whereas in assemblages with moderate disparity the sensitivity is 0.999 and 0.992 respectively. Our results further indicate that sensitivity is unaffected by the size of the commingled assemblage although the percentage of identified true matching pairs drops as the number of commingled elements increases. This means that all identified antimeres matched to an individual are still very accurately sorted despite not every individual being identified in very large assemblages. The proposed method can facilitate the sorting process of commingled remains both accurately and efficiently, while leaving a very small percentage of unsorted elements that may require further techniques for further individualization.