The genetic prehistory of the Greater Caucasus

Archaeogenetic studies have described the formation of Eurasian 'steppe ancestry' as a mixture of Eastern and Caucasus hunter-gatherers. However, it remains unclear when and where this ancestry arose and whether it was related to a horizon of cultural innovations in the 4th millennium BCE that subsequently facilitated the advance of pastoral societies likely linked to the dispersal of Indo-European languages. To address this, we generated genome-wide SNP data from 45 prehistoric individuals along a 3000-year temporal transect in the North Caucasus. We observe a genetic separation between the groups of the Caucasus and those of the adjacent steppe. The Caucasus groups are genetically similar to contemporaneous populations south of it, suggesting that - unlike today - the Caucasus acted as a bridge rather than an insurmountable barrier to human movement. The steppe groups from Yamnaya and subsequent pastoralist cultures show evidence for previously undetected Anatolian farmer-related ancestry from different contact zones, while Steppe Maykop individuals harbour additional Upper Palaeolithic Siberian and Native American related ancestry.

Download data

• Downloaded 10,560 times
• Download rankings, all-time:
  • Site-wide: 238 out of 100,306
  • In genomics: 47 out of 6,221
• Year to date:
  • Site-wide: 1,167 out of 100,306
• Since beginning of last month:
  • Site-wide: None out of 100,306

Altmetric data

Downloads over time

Distribution of downloads per paper, site-wide