Ancient DNA maps ‘dawn of farming’

Europe’s first farming populations descend mostly from farmers in the Anatolian peninsula, in what is now Turkey. And the ancient Anatolian farmers descended from repeated mixing between distinct hunter-gather groups from Europe and the Middle East. A pair of ancient-DNA studies — including one of the largest assemblages of ancient human genomes yet published — reveal finer details of the dawn of farming, thanks to ‘high coverage’, or high-quality, genomes — a rarity in ancient-genomics work.