A consortium of academic researchers from different universities in Turkey, together with another colleague from Austria and two from Sweden, discovered evidence of a mix of demography in Neolithic folks residing in Mesopotamia's Upper Tigris region using a DNA study. The group outlines how they retrieved specimens from the bones of persons buried at Ayönü Tepesi between 8500 and 7500 BCE in their research published in Science Advances.
Upper Mesopotamia was an area located in what is now Turkey & Iran in between Tigress and Euphrates rivers. Researchers think the region had a significant part in the Neolithic Revolution when individuals began to shift from hunter-gatherers to agricultural lifestyles. This was also a period of significant changes.
For many decades, historians have disagreed if the change in Mesopotamia was the result of the efforts of locals or if it was the result of a melting pot, with ideas arriving from many different areas. To answer this question, the researchers performed a genetic study on the DNA of 13 persons who lived and passed away during that time and were interred in a way that preserved part of human tissue-two adult males, six adult women, two young boys, and three female children.
The Blend in Genetic Research of Early Mesopotamian
The collaborative group discovered indications of mixed backgrounds by contrasting the samples to the genotypes of others from surrounding locations using multidimensional scaling.
Following a report from Phys, one exception was a single woman from the Caucasus/Zagros region. This indicated that individuals from far further north, and maybe other locations, had migrated into the region. The researchers also discovered that one of the kids, a toddler, had undergone purposeful skull contouring and cranial cauterization, the former of which may have been part of a medical operation.
The researchers believe that throughout the Neolithic period, the Upper Tigris region of Mesopotamia was a bustling crossroads with people coming and departing, bringing commodities and culture with them.
Early Mesopotamia Civilization
Agriculture has been well underway in various locations approximately 6000 to 8000 years ago, including Ancient Egypt, along the Nile River; ancient Indus Valley civilization; Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers; and Ancient China, between the Yellow and Yangtze rivers. This is because recurrent river floods created fertile soil along the banks of the rivers, and the waterways could also provide fresh water to water crops. It's no surprise that as agriculture enabled denser and denser populations and more specialized civilizations, some of the world's first civilizations emerged.
Recently, as Science Times reported, a ceiling eye in the sky has helped to rehydrate an ancient southern Mesopotamian city known as the Fertile Crescent's Venice. Establishing the early metropolis' aquatic character has important implications for how urban civilization originated around 5,000 years ago, as evidenced between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates, located in present-day Iraq.
The two following Lagash marsh archipelagos contain gated defenses that enclose precisely drawn-out city streets and districts with large furnaces, indicating that such pieces were built in stages and were possibly the first to be populated. Crop cultivation and other activities such as pottery making might have occurred there.
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