The genomic origins of the world`s first farmers

The precise genetic origins of the first Neolithic farming populations in Europe and Southwest Asia, as well as the processes and the timing of their differentiation, remain largely unknown. Based on demogenomic modeling of high-quality ancient genomes, we show that the early farmers of Anatolia and Europe emerged from a multiphase mixing of a Southwest Asian population with a strongly bottlenecked Western hunter-gatherer population after the Last Glacial Maximum. Moreover, the population branch leading to the first farmers of Europe and Anatolia is characterized by a 2,500-year period of extreme genetic drift during its westward range expansion. This modeling elucidates the demographic processes at the root of the Neolithic transition and leads to a spatially explicit model of the population history of Southwest Asia and Europe during the late Pleistocene and early Holocene.