Publications by authors named "Peter Zidarov"
The origins and prehistory of domestic sheep () are incompletely understood; to address this, we generated data from 118 ancient genomes spanning 12,000 years sampled from across Eurasia. Genomes from Central Türkiye ~8000 BCE are genetically proximal to the domestic origins of sheep but do not fully explain the ancestry of later populations, suggesting a mosaic of wild ancestries. Genomic signatures indicate selection by ancient herders for pigmentation patterns, hornedness, and growth rate.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFArticle Synopsis
- The Pre-Pottery Neolithic site of Aşıklı Höyük, occupied roughly 10,300 to 9,300 years ago in Central Anatolia, is associated with the early domestication of sheep, transitioning from residential stabling to open pasturing over time.
- Genetic analysis of 629 mitochondrial genomes revealed unexpected high genetic diversity during occupation, contradicting the earlier assumption of a domestication bottleneck.
- A significant demographic bottleneck was instead identified later in the Neolithic, leading to the dominance of a specific mitochondrial haplogroup in southwestern Anatolia that influenced sheep populations in Europe and today’s global sheep diversity.