Surprise: First Farmers of the Fertile Crescent Migrated to South Asia Not Europe Says New DNA Study

Professor Joachim Burger, his Mainz palaeogeneticist team, and international collaborators have pioneered palaeogenetic research of the Neolithization process in Europe over the last decade. In 2005, they presented the first ancient DNA study on prehistoric European farmers, and in 2009 and 2013 they analyzed their complex interactions with hunter-gatherers. Now they demonstrate that the idea of “ex oriente lux” is true in cultural but not in genetic terms.

Marjan Mashkour, an Iranian archaeozoologist who works at the CNRS in Paris and initiated the study with Burger and Fereidoun Biglari, a prehistoric archaeologist at the National Museum of Iran, added: “The Neolithic way of life originates in the Fertile Crescent, maybe also some Neolithic pioneers started moving from there. But the majority of ancient Iranians did not move west as some would have thought.”

However, they did move east, as the study shows. The research team found that the Iranian genomes represent the main ancestors of modern-day South Asians. Whilst sharing many segments of their genome with Afghani and Pakistani populations, the almost 10,000 year old genomes from the Iranian Zagros mountains were found to be most similar to modern-day Zoroastrians from Iran. “This religious group probably mixed less with later waves of people than others in the region and therefore preserved more of that ancient ancestry,” said Broushaki.