Neolithic Sheeps from France

Sheep was one of the first domesticated animals in Neolithic West Eurasia. The zooarchaeological record suggests that domestication first took place in Southwest Asia, although much remains unresolved about the precise location(s) and timing(s) of earliest domestication, or the post-domestication history of sheep. Here we present new 24 partial sheep paleogenomes, including one from late Palaeolithic/Late Glacial and 14 from Neolithic Anatolia, two from Neolithic Iran, two from Neolithic Iberia, three from Neolithic France, and one each from mid-Holocene Baltic and South Russia, in addition to five present-day Central Anatolian Mouflons and two present-day Cyprian Mouflons. We find that domestic sheep breeds are genetically closer to the Anatolian Epipaleolithic sheep, as well as the present-day Anatolian and Cyprian Mouflon than the Iranian Mouflon. This supports a Central Anatolian source for domestication, the first clear-cut evidence of a domestication process in SW Asia outside the Fertile Crescent, although we cannot rule out multiple domestication events also within the Neolithic Fertile Crescent. We further find evidence for multiple admixture and replacement events, including one that parallels the Yamnaya expansion in humans and a post-Bronze Age event that appears to have introduced Asia-related alleles across global sheep breeds. Our findings mark the dynamism of past domestic sheep populations in their potential for dispersal and admixture, sometimes being paralleled by their shepherds and in other cases not. These sequences are those from the three Neolithic sheep from France reported in this paper by Kaptan et al, in press in MBE.