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Understanding exposure of pottery vessels to fire is an important question in the agenda of researchers studying how prehistoric pottery was used to prepare food and the reasons leading to its widespread adoption across the world. In the case lipid residues from cooking, making sense of the range of biochemical compounds synthesised by the application of significant amounts of heat (i.e > 100 degree celsius) to lipid residues can reveal different use patterns in the repertoires of the earliest pottery productions. While knowledge about the thermal degradation of fats in archaeological pottery has been available since the mid-nineties, this paper presents and describes two previously unreported biomarkers detected during ongoing research on the earliest Mediterranean farming societies: the ketonic decarboxylation of saturated fatty acids and dicarboxylic acids resulting in very long chain oxo fatty acids, and, the cyclisation of monounsaturated fatty acids yielding omega-(2-alkylcyclopentyl)alkanoic acids. Therefore, combining experimentation with the analysis of several sets of Neolithic pottery, this paper aims at updating the available data on the range of known biomarkers for lipid thermal alteration by characterising said unreported compounds and facilitating their detection in further studies., Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK); European Commission (EC); European Union (EU); Horizon 2020; Marie Sk?odowska-Curie Actions; Co-Funded Brain Circulation2 Scheme; CoCirculation2; Anatolian Neolithic Studies of Unique Technologies for Food Preparation; AN_SÜT; Boğaziçi University Research Fund Grant

Uniparentally-inherited markers on mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and the non-recombining regions of the Y chromosome (NRY), have been used for the past 30 years to investigate the history of humans from a maternal and paternal perspective. Researchers have preferred mtDNA due to its abundance in the cells, and comparatively high substitution rate. Conversely, the NRY is less susceptible to back mutations and saturation, and is potentially more informative than mtDNA owing to its longer sequence length. However, due to comparatively poor NRY coverage via shotgun sequencing, and the relatively low and biased representation of Y-chromosome variants on capture assays such as the 1240 k, ancient DNA studies often fail to utilize the unique perspective that the NRY can yield. Here we introduce a new DNA enrichment assay, coined YMCA (Y-mappable capture assay), that targets the ""mappable"" regions of the NRY. We show that compared to low-coverage shotgun sequencing and 1240 k capture, YMCA significantly improves the mean coverage and number of sites covered on the NRY, increasing the number of Y-haplogroup informative SNPs, and allowing for the identification of previously undiscovered variants. To illustrate the power of YMCA, we show that the analysis of ancient Y-chromosome lineages can help to resolve Y-chromosomal haplogroups. As a case study, we focus on H2, a haplogroup associated with a critical event in European human history: the Neolithic transition. By disentangling the evolutionary history of this haplogroup, we further elucidate the two separate paths by which early farmers expanded from Anatolia and the Near East to western Europe.

Sheep were among the first domesticated animals, but their demographic history is little understood. Here we analyzed nuclear polymorphism and mitochondrial data (mtDNA) from ancient central and west Anatolian sheep dating from Epipaleolithic to late Neolithic, comparatively with modern-day breeds and central Asian Neolithic/Bronze Age sheep (OBI). Analyzing ancient nuclear data, we found that Anatolian Neolithic sheep (ANS) are genetically closest to present-day European breeds relative to Asian breeds, a conclusion supported by mtDNA haplogroup frequencies. In contrast, OBI showed higher genetic affinity to present-day Asian breeds. These results suggest that the east-west genetic structure observed in present-day breeds had already emerged by 6000 BCE, hinting at multiple sheep domestication episodes or early wild introgression in southwest Asia. Furthermore, we found that ANS are genetically distinct from all modern breeds. Our results suggest that European and Anatolian domestic sheep gene pools have been strongly remolded since the Neolithic., Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK) 1001; European Union (EU); Horizon 2020; European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant; NEOGENE

Uniparentally-inherited markers on mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and the non-recombining regions of the Y chromosome (NRY), have been used for the past 30 years to investigate the history of humans from a maternal and paternal perspective. Researchers have preferred mtDNA due to its abundance in the cells, and comparatively high substitution rate. Conversely, the NRY is less susceptible to back mutations and saturation, and is potentially more informative than mtDNA owing to its longer sequence length. However, due to comparatively poor NRY coverage via shotgun sequencing, and the relatively low and biased representation of Y-chromosome variants on capture assays such as the 1240 k, ancient DNA studies often fail to utilize the unique perspective that the NRY can yield. Here we introduce a new DNA enrichment assay, coined YMCA (Y-mappable capture assay), that targets the ""mappable"" regions of the NRY. We show that compared to low-coverage shotgun sequencing and 1240 k capture, YMCA significantly improves the mean coverage and number of sites covered on the NRY, increasing the number of Y-haplogroup informative SNPs, and allowing for the identification of previously undiscovered variants. To illustrate the power of YMCA, we show that the analysis of ancient Y-chromosome lineages can help to resolve Y-chromosomal haplogroups. As a case study, we focus on H2, a haplogroup associated with a critical event in European human history: the Neolithic transition. By disentangling the evolutionary history of this haplogroup, we further elucidate the two separate paths by which early farmers expanded from Anatolia and the Near East to western Europe., INTERACT Project; French (ANR) Research Foundation; German (DFG) Research Foundation; European Union (EU); Horizon 2020; European Research Council (ERC); Research and Innovation Program; Institute of Archaeology of the Czech Academy of Sciences; Projekt DEAL; Max Planck Society; Praemium Academiae of the Czech Academy of Sciences

Turkish Academy of Sciences (TÜBA)