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.

Available online xxxKeywords: Climate and society Southwest Asia Neolithic 8.2 ka event 9.2 ka event Resilience a b s t r a c t Climate change is often cited as a major factor in social change. The so-called 8.2 ka event was one of the most pronounced and abrupt Holocene cold and arid events. The 9.2 ka event was similar, albeit of a smaller magnitude. Both events affected the Northern Hemisphere climate and caused cooling and aridification in Southwest Asia. Yet, the impacts of the 8.2 and 9.2 ka events on early farming communities in this region are not well understood. Current hypotheses for an effect of the 8.2 ka event vary from large-scale site abandonment and migration (including the Neolithisation of Europe) to continuation of occupation and local adaptation, while impacts of the 9.2 ka have not previously been systematically studied. In this paper, we present a thorough assessment of available, quality-checked radiocarbon ( 14 C) dates for sites from Southwest Asia covering the time interval between 9500 and 7500 cal BP, which we interpret in combination with archaeological evidence. In this way, the synchronicity between changes observed in the archaeological record and the rapid climate events is tested. It is shown that there is no evidence for a simultaneous and widespread collapse, large-scale site abandonment, or migration at the time of the events. However, there are indications for local adaptation. We conclude that early farming communities were resilient to the abrupt, severe climate changes at 9250 and 8200 cal BP.

Archaeological evidence indicates that pig domestication had begun by ∼10,500 y before the present (BP) in the Near East, and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) suggests that pigs arrived in Europe alongside farmers ∼8,500 y BP. A few thousand years after the introduction of Near Eastern pigs into Europe, however, their characteristic mtDNA signature disappeared and was replaced by haplotypes associated with European wild boars. This turnover could be accounted for by substantial gene flow from local European wild boars, although it is also possible that European wild boars were domesticated independently without any genetic contribution from the Near East. To test these hypotheses, we obtained mtDNA sequences from 2,099 modern and ancient pig samples and 63 nuclear ancient genomes from Near Eastern and European pigs. Our analyses revealed that European domestic pigs dating from 7,100 to 6,000 y BP possessed both Near Eastern and European nuclear ancestry, while later pigs possessed no more than 4% Near Eastern ancestry, indicating that gene flow from European wild boars resulted in a near-complete disappearance of Near East ancestry. In addition, we demonstrate that a variant at a locus encoding black coat color likely originated in the Near East and persisted in European pigs. Altogether, our results indicate that while pigs were not independently domesticated in Europe, the vast majority of human-mediated selection over the past 5,000 y focused on the genomic fraction derived from the European wild boars, and not on the fraction that was selected by early Neolithic farmers over the first 2,500 y of the domestication process.

Droughts have had large impacts on past and present societies. High‐resolution paleoclimate data are essential to place recent droughts in a meaningful historical context and to predict regional future changes with greater accuracy. Such records, however, are very scarce in the Middle East in general, and the Fertile Crescent in particular. Here we present a 2400 year long speleothem‐based multiproxy record from Gejkar Cave in northern Iraq. Oxygen and carbon isotopes and magnesium are faithful recorders of effective moisture. The new Gejkar record not only shows that droughts in 1998–2000 and 2007–2010, which have been argued to be a contributing factor to Syrian civil war, were extreme compared to the current mean climate, but they were also superimposed on a long‐term aridification trend that already started around or before 950 C.E. (Common Era). This long‐term trend is not captured by tree ring records and climate models, emphasizing the importance of using various paleoclimate proxy data to evaluate and improve climate models and to correctly inform policy makers about future hydroclimatic changes in this drought‐prone region.

For more than a century, archaeologists have frequently been drawn to understand the human past in broadly evolutionary terms, applying Darwinian thinking to the development of human societies. The unilinear models of human development that often result typically regard the state as the culmination of human progress, the end-point of a journey through intervening stages of bands, tribes and chiefdoms. Neo-evolutionary thinking was especially prevalent from the 1940s onwards, in the work of Julian Steward and others writing on the origins of the state. In the volume reviewed, Norman Yoffee challenges the former dominance of the neo-evolutionary approach, arguing that over the past half century it has stifled rather than stimulated our understanding of early state development.Yoffee contests the idea that states develop through a series of programmatic stages from less complex kinds of society. Instead, he stresses the diversity of the archaic state, drawing heavily on his specialist knowledge (drawn from texts as well as archaeology) of early Mesopotamia. Here we see city-state societies in which heterarchies play a role alongside hierarchies, and in which the varieties of lived experience varied considerably from place to place, even though all may at some level be considered to have been part of a shared Mesopotamian civilization.Yoffee's book is not, however, concerned solely with Mesopotamia; far from it, he draws comparative evidence from Egypt, South and East Asia and Central and South America to demonstrate the diversity and fluidity of the entities he is describing. Few of them conform to models that might be drawn from ethnography, and each state may in many ways be considered unique. Yet in a broader perspective, all states arise through a widespread pattern of change that has taken place in human society since the end of the Pleistocene in which individuals and groups have competed for control of resources.Yoffee concludes that ‘The central myth about the study of the earliest states ... is that there was something that could be called the archaic state, and that all of the earliest states were simply variations on this model’. The methodological alternative is to consider each society (of whatever type) as individual and unique, and constantly in a state of flux. In this review feature we invite a series of archaeologists specializing in the study of early states to address this and other issues raised by this important book. We begin, however, with an opening statement from the author himself.