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New Vistas on the Distant Past

The Near Eastern Neolithic

The change from hunting and foraging to farming was one of mankind's great revolutions. The consequences of this fundamental change of lifestyle are with us still.

The Near East is one of the handful of heartlands from which farming spread. That has long been accepted. Yet our picture of the process has gradually changed. The civilizations of Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt captured the attention of archaeologists from the earliest days of antiquity-hunting. Their pyramids and temples could scarcely be missed. Their wealth of art and craft seduced the eye. Their writings, once deciphered, made their society comprehensible. We might leap to the conclusion that farming began in the marshy deltas of the rivers Tigris, Euphrates and Nile.

Nurtured by the hills

That is not so. The beginnings of farming were far humbler and leave less obvious traces. It has taken the techniques of modern archaeology to uncover the clues in seeds and bones. Now we have evidence of plant cultivation and stock-breeding over five millennia before the first civilizations. Melinda Zeder summed up the leap in understanding over the last decade. By the late 1990s a consensus had formed that animal domestication began around 10,000 to 9,500 years ago. Then scientists gained new tools: genetic analysis of animal bone and improved radiocarbon dating. Fascinating new findings have pushed that date back to 11,000 years ago. Zeder's map shows that the native sheep and goats of the Taurus and Zagros Mountains were the earliest domesticates, with pigs and cattle following. ^{1M. Zeder, Domestication and early agriculture in the Mediterranean Basin: Origins, diffusion, and impact, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, vol. 105 (2008), no. 33, pp.11597-11604.} A massive study of over 400,000 animal bones from the region has revised downward a shade the dates on Zeder's map, but confirms the general picture of earlier domestication in the hills around the heads of the Tigris and Euphrates than in the Levant. One important point that emerges from this welter of data is how cautious and conservative the first farmers were. They did not abandon hunting immediately that the idea occurred of rearing animals for meat. At first domesticated animals contributed only a small proportion of the total meat in their diet. By 8,500 BP (6,500 BC) that had risen to 40-45% within the heartland of the Neolithic. It was that increasingly confident new way of life that was exported to the Levant.^{2J. Conolly et al., Meta-analysis of zooarchaeological data from SW Asia and SE Europe provides insight into the origins and spread of animal husbandry, Journal of Archaeological Science, vol. 38, no. 3 (March 2011), pp. 485-754.} Arable farming too began on the hilly flanks of the Fertile Crescent. The first crop cultivation flourished on higher ground, where fields could be rain-fed, rather than needing irrigation.

Foragers before farmers

Before cultivation even began, abundant resources in the region where the Levant meets Anatolia, and down the Mediterranean edge of the Levant, encouraged hunting and foraging groups into a more settled lifestyle. They may have started by moving to and from their base camps seasonally. Eventually some lived in permanent settlements. The best-known of these sedentary foraging cultures is the Natufian (14,500 to 11,500 BP), in what is now Israel, Lebanon and Syria. The Natufian people built villages of round pit-houses on stone foundations. Similar villages grew up at the junction of the Taurus and Zagros foothills from about 12,000 BP. At Göbekli Tepe, in what is now Turkey, the world's first megalithic monument has been uncovered. Circles of pillars are adorned with elaborate animal reliefs. These are similar to those at a later monument in Nevali Çori, 30 kilometers to the north-west of Göbekli, suggesting a continuity of population from Mesolithic to Neolithic. Archaeologist Klaus Schmidt found that the most common bone remains at Göbekli Tepe are those of aurochs, an extinct species of ox. Aurochs were massive and terrifyingly strong. Just one required a communal effort to hunt. A hunting band capable of that feat would have to be large and well-organised, capable also of building such a monument. The density of population in the hilly flanks of the Fertile Crescent must have been far higher than average for hunter-gatherers. Population density seems to be one of the crucial triggers of technological change. Cognitive and cultural evolution was both required and fostered by large communities.^{3O. Bar-Yosef, The Natufian culture and the Early Neolithic: Social and economic trends in Southwestern Asia, chapter 10 in P. Bellwood and C. Renfrew (eds.), Examining the Farming/Language Dispersal Hypothesis (2002); B. Cunliffe, Europe Between the Oceans (2008), pp. 90-91; P. Bellwood, First Farmers: the origins of agricultural societies (2005), pp. 63; S. Scham, The World's First Temple, Archaeology, vol. 61, no. 6, (November/December 2008); G. Chandler, The Beginning of the End for Hunter-Gatherers, Saudi Aramco World, vol. 60, no. 2 (March/April 2009), pp. 2-9; T. Watkins, New light on Neolithic revolution in south-west Asia, Antiquity, vol. 84, no. 325 (September 2010), pp, 621-634.}

First farmers

Among other food-sources, foragers made use of the stands of wild wheats and ryes that had sprung up along the edge of the zone roamed by wild sheep and goats. Then came the Big Freeze of the Younger Dryas around 12,700 years ago. The worsening climate may have driven sedentary foragers to cultivation.^{4D.R. Harris, Climatic change and the beginnings of agriculture: the case of the Younger Dryas, in L. J. Rothschild and A.M. Lister (eds.), Evolution on Planet Earth: The impact of the physical environment (2003), pp. 379-394.} The earliest tentative experiments in plant management date at least as far back as c. 12,000 BP, though crop domestication was not well established until c.10,500 BP (8,000 BC), when the climate was improving once more. Meanwhile both sheep and goats were domesticated in the hilly band stretching from the northern Zagros to southeastern Anatolia between c. 11,000 and 10,500 BP, and perhaps even earlier. The domestication of pigs and cattle followed. Farming began before the first Near Eastern pottery was made, so the earliest farming period is known as Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA). Populations grew rapidly at this time. Most PPNA hamlets and villages are three to eight times larger than the largest Natufian sites.^{5M. Savard, M. Nesbitt, and M.K. Jones, The role of wild grasses in subsistence and sedentism: new evidence from the northern Fertile Crescent, World Archaeology, vol.38, no.2 (2006), pp. 179-196; O. Bar-Yosef, The Natufian culture and the Early Neolithic: Social and economic trends in Southwestern Asia, chapter 10 in P. Bellwood and C. Renfrew (eds.), Examining the Farming/Language Dispersal Hypothesis (2002); M. Zeder, Domestication and early agriculture in the Mediterranean Basin: Origins, diffusion, and impact, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, vol. 105 (2008), no. 33, pp.11597-11604; P. Bellwood, First Farmers: The origin of agricultural societies (2005), pp. 59-60.}

In the Zagros mountains people had begun deserting their cave dwellings to create villages while still hunter-gatherers. Some of those villages, such as Zawi Chemi Shanidar and Nemrik, in what is now northern Iraq, bridge the change from foraging to farming.^{6R.L. Solecki and A.P. Agelarakis, The proto-neolithiccemetery in Shanidar Cave (2004); S.K. Kozowski, Nemrik: AnAceramik Village in Northern Iraq (2002).} In western Iran the pre-pottery Neolithic site at Sheikh-e-Abad in Kermanshah Province includes the remains of a house, and a ritual space decorated with horns of sheep and goats. It was founded by farmers c. 9,810 BC, making it one of the earliest Neolithic villages in Southwest Asia. ^{7R. Matthews et al., Investigating the Early Neolithic of western Iran: the Central Zagros Archaeological Project (CZAP), Antiquity, vol. 84, no. 323 (March 2010).}

Recent excavations have found that farming reached Cyprus by about 9,000 BC. That is some 500 years earlier than the date shown above on Zeder's map, and draws the island into the heartland of the Neolithic.^{8S. Manning et al., The earlier Neolithic in Cyprus: recognition and dating of a Pre-Pottery Neolithic A occupation, Antiquity, vol. 84, no. 325 (September 2010), pp. 693–706.} Its colonization tells us that sea-worthy craft could be built by this time.

The next stage is conventionally labelled the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB). By about 9,500–9,000 BP (7,500-7,000 BC) diverging economies had crystallised. There were farmer-herders living on domesticated crops and livestock; there were herders supplementing their diet by hunting, and there were nomadic foragers. With these divisions come the first hints of tribal society. Cultural clues, such as house design or types of tool, suggest a patchwork of societies. Farming had expanded into the Zagros foothills east of the Tigris and into southern Anatolia.^{9O. Bar-Yosef, The Natufian culture and the Early Neolithic: Social and economic trends in Southwestern Asia, chapter 10 in P. Bellwood and C. Renfrew (eds.), Examining the Farming/Language Dispersal Hypothesis (2002).}

There was movement even further afield. Farmers took Near Eastern wheat, barley, sheep and goats to the Indus Valley region, where they settled at Mehrgarh on the Bolan River around 7000 BC. Meanwhile farmers had set sail from Cyprus to Crete.^{10Coward, F., S. Shennan, S. Colledge, J. Conolly and M. Collard, The spread of Neolithic plant economies from the Near East to Northwest Europe: a phylogenetic analysis, Journal of Archaeological Science, vol. 35, no. 1 (2008), pp. 42-56.}It made sense to move east and west, following the latitudes where farming had begun, for the climate would be suitable for the crops and animals domesticated in the Near East. Not everywhere within those latitudes was suitable though. High altitudes make for a cooler climate and were avoided.^{11M.A. Patterson et al., Modelling the Neolithic transition in a heterogeneous environment, Journal of Archaeological Science, vol. 37, no. 11 (November 2010), pp. 2929-2937.} Water sources were essential.

In the Near Eastern farming belt, some settlements have been investigated, such as Çatalhöyük, begun around 9,400 BP (7,400 BC) and Çayönü, occupied between 9,400 and 8,800 BP (7,400-6,800 BC), both in Anatolia, and Abu Hureyra in Syria. In striking contrast to the round houses of the Natufian period, these settlements evolved into complexes of rectangles, built of sun-dried mud brick, plastered over. Çatalhöyük and Çayönü were conglomerates of buildings without streets. People moved around on the flat roofs, entering their houses by ladders leading down from holes in the roofs. Such a huddle would give protection from predators, but lacked the characteristics of a truly urban settlement, such as public buildings.^{12I. Hodder, Çatalhöyük: the Leopard’s Tale, Revealing the mysteries of Turkey’s ancient ‘town’ (2006); R. J. Braidwood et al., Beginnings of Village-Farming Communities in Southeastern Turkey, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 71, no. 2 (1974), pp. 568-572; B.F. Byrd, Public and private, domestic and corporate: The emergence of the southwest Asian village, American Antiquity, vol. 59, no.4 (1994), pp. 639-666.}

Crisis forces movement

The burgeoning farming communities seem to have over-exploited the land. Constant cultivation, over-grazing and felling trees for timber and fuel led to erosion and loss of fertility. The farmers could scarcely be blamed though for the climatic crisis that struck the region around 6200 BC. A far distant event - a huge North American post-glacial lake bursting into the Atlantic - shook the climate across the Northern Hemisphere. The result was hyper arid conditions in the southern Near East, with a cool and wet belt across Anatolia. Çatalhöyük was one of a number of sites abandoned around this time. As groups of farmers looked for new areas to settle, there was piecemeal migration from the hills onto the plains of the Tigris and Euphrates, the Mediterranean coast, and the banks of the Karkeh River in what is now southwest Iran.^{13J.-F. Berger and J. Guilaine, The 8200 cal BP abruptenvironmental change and the Neolithic transition: A Mediterranean perspective, Quaternary International, vol. 200, nos. 1-2 (1 May 2009), pp.31-49; B. Cunliffe, Europe Between the Oceans (2008), pp. 93-4.}

Another region which attracted farmers around 6000 BC was the southern Caucasus, where the Shulaveri-Shomu culture sprang up in what is now Georgia and the Armenian Plateau. Its early settlements used mud-brick, but to make inter-connected circular houses, unlike the right-angles of Çatalhöyük. Later houses in these mountain areas, where stone was readily available, were stone-built. So this culture is distinctive. Philip Kohl speculates that it represents small colonies from Northern Mesopotamia or elsewhere settling in the area for a few centuries and then returning to their homelands.^{14P.Kohl, The Making of Bronze Age Eurasia (2007), pp. 67-8.}

The Halaf Culture (6000-5300 BC) in Northern Mesopotamia is another example of the resurgence of round-plan houses after the climate crisis. Dutch, German and Italian excavators have uncovered more of its circular mud-brick dwellings in recent years. It has generally been assumed that the simplest one-room circular structures had a beehive-shaped roof of mud brick, like those of vernacular buildings in the same region today. So early exacavators called them tholoi in reference to Mycenean tombs of that shape. Yet flat or pitched roofs made of reeds are equally possible. Like earlier mud-brick houses, they were often plastered and white-washed with gypsum. These houses were long thought to be peculiar to the Halaf Culture, but round-plan houses also cropped up on Yarmukian sites of the southern Levant around the same period. Where had the idea come from? Peter Akkermans points out that there are a few round houses at earlier levels at Tell Sabi Abyad, but they suddenly became predominant after c. 6200 BC.^{15P. M.M.G. Akkermans, Late Neolithic architectural renewal: the emergence of round houses in the northern Levant, c. 6500–6000 BC, in: Diane Bolger and Louise Maguire (eds.), The Development of Pre-State Communities in the Ancient Near East (2010), pp. 22-28.}

This was part of a distinct cultural change which is particularly clear at Sabi Abyad. A new village was laid out beside the old one. There was a shift from simply keeping animals for meat towards using sheep and goats for milk and wool - steps towards the Secondary Products Revolution. Pigs gave way to cattle. The community included both mobile pastoralists and sedentary agriculturalists. Diversification could have been a survival strategy if crops were failing, and one can understand why warm textiles would be in demand in a cooler climate. Another clue to that is the proliferation of spindle whorls. Stamp seals appeared. There was a new form of cooking ware too. Most noticable to archaeologists, who tend to define cultures by their pottery, was the sudden arrival of painted pottery: vessels decorated with abstract, geometric designs.^{16P.M.M.G. Akkermans et al., Weathering climate change in the Near East: dating and Neolithic adaptations 8200 years ago, Antiquity, vol. 84, no. 325 (September 2010), Project Gallery; P. M. M. G. Akkermans, M. Verhoeven, An Image of Complexity: The Burnt Village at Late Neolithic Sabi Abyad, Syria, American Journal of Archaeology, vol. 99, no. 1 (January 1995), pp. 5-32.} Painted pottery spread widely across Northern Mesopotamia c. 6000 BC.^{17O. Nieuwenhuyse, The ‘painted pottery revolution’: emulation, ceramic innovation and the Early Halaf in northern Syria, in C. Dobiat and K. Leidorf (eds.), Méthodes d’approche des premières productions céramiques: étude de cas dans les Balkans et au Levant / Methoden zurUntersuchung der ersten Keramikproduktion Beispiele auf dem Balkan und derLevante, Internationale Archäologie, vol. 12 (2009), pp.81-91; S. Campbell, Rethinking Halaf chronologies, Paléorient, vol. 33. no 1, (2007), pp. 103-136.}

Reliable water sources would make the riverine plains more attractive to farmers and herders alike. From the material clues left behind, it seems that some herder-hunters spread into Mesopotamia from Northern Arabia, while farmers moved down from the northern and eastern hills. Yet as settlements crept southwards down the Tigris and Euphrates, they moved away from the zone of rain-fed crops. The earliest evidence of canal irrigation in Mesopotamia (c. 6,000 BC) is from Choga Mami, east of the Middle Tigris. This formed part of the highly-organized Samarra culture, named for the type-site of Tell es-Sawwan, near Samarra. Their culture in turn gave birth to the cities of Sumer, to judge by the Samarran pottery that appears at the earliest Sumerian settlements, along with the einkorn strain of wheat native to the north.^{18D.T. Potts, Mesopotamian civilization: the material foundations (1997), pp. 51-54; for a critical review of the long debate over the origins of the Sumerians, see A. Soitysiak, Physical anthropology and the Sumerian problem, Studies in Historical Anthropology, vol. 4 (2004[2006]), pp. 145-158.}

Cities

Towns appeared in the Ubaid period (5300 to 4000 BC), such as that being uncovered at Tell Zeidan in Syria, located at the crossroads of two major trade routes in the Euphrates river valley. The first cities in the world appeared in Mesopotamia. Apart from their size, cities are distinguished by massive public buildings, bureaucratic records and legal codes. In northern Mesopotamia the beginnings of urban life can be seen in Nagar (now Tell Brak in northern Syria), which controlled one of the major roads leading from the Tigris Valley north to the metal sources in Anatolia and west to the Euphrates and the Mediterranean. By 3800 BC it had large buildings, extensive workshops and an estimated population of 20,000 people, not counting its suburbs.^{19J. Oates, Early Mesopotamian urbanism: a new view from the north, Antiquity, vol. 81, no. 313 (1 September 2007), pp. 585–600.}

The first substantial settlement in southern Mesopotamia was Eridu, around 3,700 BC. Powerful Uruk flourished about 3,500 BC. In Egypt Hierakonpolis achieved city status about the same time. In the Jordan Valley, Pella was a massive, walled city around 3,300 BC.^{20Jordan Times 31 May 2010.} Similar cities developed by 3,000 BC in Elam. The Elamite culture flourished to the east of Mesopotamia, on the Khuzestan Plain in what is now Iran. Susa grew from a village into the capital of Elam. In this period there were not only more settlements, but more varieties of them: cities, towns, villages and hamlets.

Agriculture on the alluvial plain created by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers required community effort. Rainfall was very limited and all crops needed irrigation. The reward was a food surplus from the rich soils, which could be used to support temples, leaders and the bureaucrats needed to run a complex administration. So the Uruk period saw the development of a more stratified society. Full-time specialist artisans emerged, such as potters and metal-workers. The fast potter's wheel aided the process of converting a part-time domestic craft into a trade. However the plains lacked timber or building stone and metal deposits. Surplus grain could be traded for copper and timber from Elam, where metallurgy was advanced, but also from further afield. Trade routes developed between the plains cities and the highlands as far as Anatolia, the Caucasus and perhaps Lebanon. Goods were imported by sea up the Persian Gulf from as far away as India. We know this partly because trade and administration generated records. Cylinder seals appeared at Uruk and Susa. Made of carved stone, they could be rolled across wet clay to make a distinctive mark, easy to recognise. The resulting clay tag could be attached to stored or traded goods to identify ownership.^{21H. Crawford, Sumer and the Sumerians (2004), pp. 11,16, 28.}

Stamp seals had been in use since the Late Neolithic in Iran and the piedmont of the Taurus-Zagros mountain arc, and were originally kept safe on a thong around the wrist.^{22P.M.M.G. Akkermans and M. Verhoeven, An image of complexity - the Burnt Village at Late Neolithic Sabi Abyad, Syria, American Journal of Archaeology, vol. 99, no. 1 (1995), pp. 5-32.} The cylinder seal was more convenient, pierced like a bead and used as a pendant. The seal was such a good idea that it spread to trade partners. Even more influential was the linked invention of cuneiform writing on clay. It was rooted in the ancient idea of conveying a message in pictures. As the system developed, the pictures became simplified - pictographs or characters - impressed in clay with a stylus that left a wedge-shaped mark. Cuneiform writing spread to other areas of the Near East along with the use of cylinder seals.

Languages and Y-DNA

Traders from afar would give the cities of Sumer a cosmopolitan air. We can imagine people from various quarters visiting and settling there. One immigrant group dominated - the speakers of Semitic. The earliest Sumerian records give us names both Sumerian and Semitic. Sumerian is a language with no known relatives. It was spoken by Sumerians at the time they developed writing. Semitic is one of the Afro-Asiatic family of languages and probably arose approximately 4,500 BC in the Near East. It includes Arabic, Amharic and Hebrew.^{23A. Kitchen et al, Bayesian phylogenetic analysis of Semitic languages identifies an Early Bronze Age origin of Semitic in the Near East, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, vol. 276, no. 1668 (August 2009), pp. 2703-2710; A. Y. Militarev, Once more about glottochronology and the comparative method: the Omotic-Afrasian case, Aspects of Comparative Linguistics, vol. 1 (2005), pp. 339-40.} The Semitic-speakers in Sumer may have initially been nomads on the fringes of the plain. As foraging societies melted away in the region, the division lay between the nomadic pastoralists and the settled farmers. Herders could be attracted into town for various reasons, ranging from hardship among poorer pastoralists to the wealthy looking for a stake in the running of city-states. By the time records start, Semitic names were associated with the region which became known as Akkad, around the city of Kish, ruled by a Semitic dynasty, and speaking the ancient Semitic language Akkadian. Semitic names gradually increased in Sumer over the next 500 years, while the use of the Sumerian language declined. By 1,800 BC Sumerian was a dead language.^{24H. Crawford, Sumer and the Sumerians (2004), pp. 20-21.} This is a clue to a pattern across the Near East. Probably many languages were spoken among the hunter-gatherers of this wide region, which were retained as they first took up agriculture, but as cultures expanded and consolidated, we would expect few languages to survive long enough to be written down and even fewer still to be spoken today. That fits the picture we see.

The Near East has so often been a battleground and witnessed so many migrations that it would be foolish to expect present populations to be a genetic mirror of the Neolithic. Yet there is some pattern in the distribution of Y-DNA chromosome haplogroups. The region overall is strong in haplogroups E1b1b, J1 and J2 and also has significant amounts of G2a and R1b. This includes the Caucasus and Armenian Plateau, which are particularly interesting, as they show little sign of population prior to the Neolithic, when farmers settled there. Also languages have survived in the Caucasus from different language families than those which dominate the Near East today.

The Caucasus is a patchwork of many languages in various language families, isolated from each other by the mountainous terrain. There is a striking correspondence between gene and language trees in the North Caucasus. Within each of four language groups there a particular haplogroup is predominant, presumably due a small group of individuals arriving in each pocket of farmable land, followed by genetic drift over the millennia, with some haplogroups dying out and others increasing. In the small isolated population of the Kubachi, haplogroup J1*-M267 has become virtually fixed. Their language forms part of the Dagestan family, in which J1* predominates. Although this also occurs in the neighbouring Nahk language group, the dominant haplogroup there is J2ab4*-M67. Among the Shapsugs of the North West Caucasus G2a3b1- P303 strongly dominates and is also appears among the other members of their language group. G2a1a-P18 seems to have a long history in the Caucasus, being spread across the region and forming many branches. G2a1a predominates among the Ossets, who speak an Indo-European language of the Iranian branch. However this language arrived late in the Caucasus. It can be traced to the settlement at Klin Yar by Sarmatian men in the Late Iron Age, followed by elite families of Alans in the early Middle Ages. Although the language of the Alans survived, their Y-DNA genetic signature appears relatively weak, suggesting that they blended with local people of Neolithic origin. The strongest signal of their arrival is that 15.7% of Digorian Ossetian men carry R1b1a2-M269. ^{25O. Balanovsky et al., Parallel Evolution of Genes and Languages in the Caucasus Region, Molecular Biology and Evolution, advance access 13 May 13, 2011; H. Härke and A.B. Belinskij, Klin-Jar: Ritual und Gesellschaft in einem langzeitbelegten Gräberfeld im Nordkaukasus, TÜVA-Mitteilungen (Tübinger Verein zur Förderung der ur- und frühgeschichtlichen Archäologie), vol. 12, (2011), pp. 37-49.}

Another Indo-European language - Armenian - arrived a few centuries earlier south of the Caucasus. Among Armenians the haplotypes of individuals belonging to the R1b1a2*-M269 and R1b1a2a*-L23 lineages are similar to those of East European descent, consistent with the Armenian language coming from the Eastern Balkans via Anatolia in the 6th century BC, as deduced from linguistics and an account by Herodotus. The R1b lineages make up about a third of the total, and the rest are largely haplogroups that we can guess arrived in the Neolithic, notably J-M304, but also G2a-P15 and J1-M267. The sprinkling of I2*- M428, I2a2a-M223, J2b1, J2b2 and E1b1b1a2-V13 could have arrived along with the R1b lineages, since all appear in the Balkans. However low levels of any halpogroup in a population need not be linked to major migrations, and could have arrived with trade or imperial administrators. Armenia formed part of the Macedonian and Roman Empires.^{26K. J. Herrera et al., Neolithic patrilineal signals indicate that the Armenian plateau was repopulated by agriculturalists, European Journal of Human Genetics, advance online 16 November 2011; Herodotus, Histories, 7.73.} The Armenians entered a territory which had previously been known as the Kingdom of Urartu. Its long lost language was recorded in inscriptions, so we know that it was related to Hurrian, which appears in Northern Mesopotamia from the end of the third millennium BC and had vanished by 1000 BC.^{27G. Wilhelm, Hurrian (chap. 4) and Urartian (chap. 5) in R.D. Woodard (ed.), The Ancient Languages of Asia Minor (2008), pp. 95-137.}

The Iranians have far more J2 than J1, whereas the opposite is true for Egyptians and Kuwaitis, while Jordanians have roughly twice as much J1 as J2.^{28Mirvat El-Sibai et al.,Geographical Structure of the Y-chromosomal Genetic Landscape of the Levant: Acoastal-inland contrast, Annals of Human Genetics, vol. 73, no. 6 (November 2009), pp. 568-81.} This confirms previous deductions that J1 is strongly present in Semitic language-speakers. Jacques Chiaroni, Roy King and Peter Underhill looked deeper. They compared the distribution of rainfall with the distribution of Y-chromosome haplogroups, and concluded that J2 were the agricultural innovators who followed the rainfall, while J1 remained largely with their flocks.^{29R. King and P.A. Underhill, Congruent distribution of Neolithic painted pottery and ceramic figurines with Y-chromosome lineages, Antiquity 76 (2002), pp. 704-714; J. Chiaroni, R.J. King and Peter A. Underhill, Correlation of annual precipitation with human Y-chromosome diversity and the emergence of Neolithic agricultural and pastoral economies in the Fertile Crescent, Antiquity, vol. 82 (2008), no. 316, pp. 281–289.}

Though the greatest density of J1 today centres on the southern Levant, Jacques Chiaroni, Roy King and their colleagues found that the highest haplotype diversity of the major sub-clade J1c3 (formerly J1e) was in the Zagros/Taurus mountain region, the cradle of the Neolithic. High diversity provides a clue to origin. They consider that people carrying haplogroup J1c3 spread Semitic languages across the region.^{30J. Chiaroni et al, The emergence of Y-chromosome haplogroup J1e among Arabic-speaking populations, European Journal of Human Genetics, vol. 18 (2010), pp. 348–353. Note that they use Zhivotovsky evolutionary rate for calculation of dates. This gives estimates roughly three times too old.} By contrast J2 appears to be correlated with a very old Middle Eastern language, nicknamed the Banana language from its syllabic duplication, which appears in some personal names used in Sumerian texts, such as Inanna, goddess of love. Roy King notes that although Iran has some of the highest levels of J2 in the world, the greatest genetic diversity within the haplogroup is found today in South Eastern Anatolia, Northwestern Iraq and among Palestinians living in coastal Israel. Using STR mutation rates calculated by Zhivotovsky, he theorises an expansion of J2 between 19,000 and 25,000 BCE.^{31R. King, Neolithic Migrations in the Near East and the Aegean: Linguistic and Genetic Correlates, chapter 8 in P. Peregrine (ed.), Ancient Human Migrations: A Multidisciplinary Approach (2009).} But these mutation rates are widely felt to deliver estimates three times too old. In which case, the expansion of J2 would fall between roughly 6,000 and 8,000 BC, with the growing Neolithic population.

Adapting genetically

The change of lifestyle wrought by farming had profound implications. By the process of natural selection, Man began to adapt to a new diet. Kevin Laland and colleagues collated the data known so far. They found 27 genes that have been subject to recent selection directly related to the change in diet, such as those governing the metabolism of carbohydrates and alcohol, as well as jaw muscle fibres and tooth-enamel thickness. They also collated a further 30 genes that provide some resistance to disease or pathogens promoted by farming practices or spreading easily in the crowded conditions of urban life.^{32K.N. Laland, F.J.Odling-Smee and S. Myles, How culture has shaped the human genome: Bringing genetics and the human sciences together, Nature Reviews Genetics, vol. 11 (2010), pp. 137–148, especially table 2.}

Dairy farming brought its own selective pressure, favouring mutations which de-activated the usual switch in mammals to non-metabolism of lactose in adults.

Notes

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