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Study of bones from massive Galilee necropolis helps fill 3,000-year gap in knowledge of ancient Levant settlers
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?
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.
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?
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.