{"id":13050,"date":"2025-01-31T07:01:17","date_gmt":"2025-01-31T06:01:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/snsb.de\/schafe-und-menschen\/"},"modified":"2025-01-31T07:07:40","modified_gmt":"2025-01-31T06:07:40","slug":"sheep-and-humans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/snsb.de\/en\/sheep-and-humans\/","title":{"rendered":"Ancient DNA analyses bring to life the 11,000-year intertwined genomic history of sheep and humans"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Staatssammlung f\u00fcr Pal\u00e4oanatomie, Munich, 31st January 2025
The rise of pastoralist peoples in the Eurasian steppes and their westward spread some 5,000 years ago may have been fuelled by sheep herding and exploiting their milkBy 8,000 years ago the team found evidence that farmers were deliberately selecting their flocks \u2013 for example, for the genes coding for coat colour<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

heep have been intertwined with human livelihoods for over 11,000 years. As well as meat, their domestication led to humans being nourished by their protein-rich milk and clothed by warm, water-resistant fabrics made from their wool.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, an international and interdisciplinary team of researchers led by geneticists from Trinity College Dublin and zooarchaeologists from LMU Munich and the Bavarian State Collections of Natural History (SNSB) has deciphered the prehistoric cultural trajectory of this species by analysing 118 genomes recovered from archaeological bones dating across 12 millennia and stretching from Mongolia to Ireland.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The earliest sheep-herding village in the sample, A\u015f\u0131kl\u0131 H\u00f6y\u00fck in central T\u00fcrkiye, has genomes that seem ancestral to later populations in the wider region, confirming an origin in captures of wild mouflon over 11,000 years ago in the western part of the northern Fertile Crescent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By 8,000 years ago, in the earliest European sheep populations, the team found evidence that farmers were deliberately selecting their flocks \u2013 in particular for the genes coding for coat colour. Along with a similar signal in goats, this is the earliest evidence for human moulding of another animal\u2019s biology and shows that early herders, like today\u2019s farmers, were interested in the beautiful and unusual in their animals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Specifically, the main gene the team found evidence of selection near was one known as \u201cKIT\u201d, which is associated with white coat colour in a range of livestock.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Also by that time, the earliest domestic sheep genomes from Europe and further east in Iran and Central Asia had diverged from each other. However, this separation did not last as people translocated sheep from eastern populations to the west. First, in parallel with human cultural influences spreading out from the early cities of Mesopotamia we see sheep genomes moving west within the Fertile Crescent around 7,000 years ago. Second, the rise of pastoralist peoples in the Eurasian steppes and their westward spread some 5,000 years ago profoundly transformed ancestral European human populations and their culture. This process changed the makeup of human populations, for example, altering the ancestry of British peoples by around 90%, and introduced the Indo-European language ancestor of the tongues spoken across the continent today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From the dataset used in this study it now seems that this massive migration was fuelled by sheep herding and exploitation of lifetime products, including milk and probably cheese, as it is around the same time that sheep ancestries are also changed. Consequently, by the Bronze Age, herds had about half their ancestry from a source in the Eurasian steppe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dr Kevin Daly, Ad Astra Assistant Professor at UCD School of Agriculture and Food Science and an Adjunct Assistant Professor in Trinity\u2019s School of Genetics and Microbiology, is the first author on the research article that has just been published in leading international journal Science. He said: \u201cOne of our most striking discoveries was a major prehistoric sheep migration from the Eurasian steppes into Europe during the Bronze Age. This parallels what we know about human migrations during the same period, suggesting that when people moved, they brought their flocks with them.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dan Bradley, leader of the research and Professor of Population Genetics in Trinity\u2019s School of Genetics and Microbiology, said: \u201cThis research demonstrates how the relationship between humans and sheep has evolved over millennia. From the early days of domestication through to the development of wool as a crucial textile resource, sheep have played a vital role in human cultural and economic development.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Joris Peters, co-corresponding author, Professor of Paleoanatomy, Domestication Research and the History of Veterinary Medicine at LMU Munich and Director of the State Collection for Paleoanatomy Munich (SNSB-SPM)<\/a>, said: \u201cOur study, while convincingly reconciling morphological and genomic evidence of the geographic origin of domestic sheep, clearly illustrates that further transdisciplinary research is needed to clarify the patterns of dispersal and selection of the many landraces occurring today in Eurasia and Africa.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Publication:<\/strong>
Kevin G. Daly et al. Ancient genomics and the origin, dispersal, and development of domestic sheep Science387,492-497(2025).DOI: 10.1126\/science.adn2094
https:\/\/www.science.org\/doi\/10.1126\/science.adn2094<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Contact:<\/strong>
Prof. Dr. Dr. Joris Peters
LMU M\u00fcnchen \/ Staatssammlung f\u00fcr Pal\u00e4oanatomie M\u00fcnchen (SNSB-SPM)
E-Mail: peters@snsb.de<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n
\"Schaf\"<\/a>
Scottish Blackface from Applecross, Scotland – a common sheep breed of the British Isles. This breed is represented in the panel of modern reference genomes. (Photo: J. Peters, LMU\/SNSB)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Schaf\"<\/a>
Scottish Blackface from Applecross, Scotland – a common sheep breed of the British Isles. This breed is represented in the panel of modern reference genomes. (Photo: J. Peters, LMU\/SNSB)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Schafe\"<\/a>
Sheep in arid landscape, southeastern Morocco (Photo: J. Peters, LMU\/SNSB)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Schafe\"<\/a>
Sheep in arid landscape, southeastern Morocco (Photo: J. Peters, LMU\/SNSB)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Schafe\"<\/a>
6Today’s descendants of the first domestic sheep of Central Anatolia.\u00a0 (Photo: N. P\u00f6llath, SNSB)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Schafe\"<\/a>
6Today’s descendants of the first domestic sheep of Central Anatolia.\u00a0 (Photo: N. P\u00f6llath, SNSB)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Staatssammlung f\u00fcr Pal\u00e4oanatomie, Munich, 31st January 2025 The rise of pastoralist peoples in the Eurasian steppes and their westward spread some 5,000 years ago may have been fuelled by sheep herding and exploiting their milkBy 8,000 years ago the team found evidence that farmers were deliberately selecting their flocks \u2013 for example, for the genes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":13027,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13050","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-press-releases"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/snsb.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13050","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/snsb.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/snsb.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/snsb.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/snsb.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13050"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/snsb.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13050\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13052,"href":"https:\/\/snsb.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13050\/revisions\/13052"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/snsb.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13027"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/snsb.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13050"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/snsb.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13050"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/snsb.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13050"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}