EVOSHEEP: the makeup of sheep breeds in the ancient Near East

The Competition of Fibres, 2020

The Neolithic Revolution in the Fertile Crescent and the origins of fibre technology 5 Ofer Bar-Yosef 3. Early wool of Mesopotamia, c. 7000-3000 BC. Between prestige and economy Catherine Breniquet 4. Continuity and discontinuity in Neolithic and Chalcolithic linen textile production in the southern Levant Orit Shamir and Antoinette Rast-Eicher 5. Fibres, fabrics and looms: a link between animal fibres and warp-weighted looms in the Iron Age Levant Thaddeus Nelson 6. An archaic, male-exclusive loom from Oman Janet Levy 7. The Topoi Research Group Textile Revolution: archaeological background and a multi-proxy approach Wolfram Schier 8. Fibres to fibres, thread to thread. Comparing diachronic changes in large spindle whorl samples Ana Grabundžija and Chiara Schoch 9. Finding the woolly sheep: meta-analyses of archaeozoological data from southwestern Asia and southeastern Europe

Peters et al. 2005, 96 and following.

We examine the possibility that expanding trans-Mediterranean trade during the Iron Age (ca. 1,000–350 BCE) has resulted in increased morphological variability among sheep from maritime sites in the southern Levant. Using geometric morphometric tools, we compared the variability in sheep astragal morphology in a port settlement on the Carmel coast (Tel Dor), a coastal settlement in the Akko valley (Tell Keisan), and an inland urban settlement in the Hula Valley (Tel Abel Beit Maacah). Our results suggest that the sheep astragali from the port settlement at Tel Dor occupy a significantly different part of shape space than the specimens examined from the two other sites. In addition, a source-sink dynamic is implied by the appearance of coastal morphotypes in the inland site, whereas unique inland morphotypes do not occur at the coastal site. This findings do not contradict the possibility of maritime importation and consequent overland spread of non-local sheep variants in the southe...

Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, 2019

From the very beginning sheep keepers (un-)consciously selected animals with traits amenable to life and reproduction in an anthropogenic environment. Over the millennia sheep lineages developed which were adapted to the diverse landscapes and climates currently inhabited by the species. With time, human selection also fostered desired traits, such as docility, higher average milk production, abundant fleece or excessive fat depots, amongst others. However, verifying their appearance in the archaeological record is quite difficult applying standard archaeozoological methods. Here we present a Geometric Morphometric (GMM) approach that can shed light on these developments. Our study compares astragali of three wild and five domestic sheep populations. They come from prehistoric contexts in SW Asia dating to the Early Neolithic, Middle Chalcolithic and Late Bronze Age as well as modern reference series housed in natural history collections. We observe that ancient and modern wild sheep share the same astragalar morphology. Moreover, domestic sheep from Middle Chalcolithic Central Anatolia still resemble closely their Neolithic SE Anatolian wild relatives. Modern sheep populations from the United Kingdom and NW Germany form a distinct cluster, whereas sheep populations from Late Bronze Age Syria and particularly modern Karakul sheep clearly position away from all of the aforementioned groups, underscoring their distinct morphology. We conclude that the phenotypes preserved in the astragalar size and shape are at the same time a reflection of the respective population's geography, chronology and genetics. 1.1. Methodological considerations To discern specific domestic traits in ancient livestock populations the archaeozoological toolbox offers several approaches. Amongst these, demographic profiling, osteometric comparison and taxonomic change figure most prominently. They have often been used in combination in order to identify for instance the early phases of caprine domestication (e.g., Peters et al., 1999, 2005; Zeder, 2005), to infer husbandry strategies and livestock economies (e.g., Payne, 1973) or to trace the initial exploitation of secondary products such as milk and

2019

Küchelmann, Hans Christian (2019): Archaeozoological analysis of domestic sheep in the area between South-West Asia and South-East Europe (7th-2nd millennium BC), online-database, Edition Topoi, Berlin Abstract Within the research group „The Textile Revolution“, part of the Topoi-Project in Berlin, the archaeozoological sub-project was devoted to the process of the major economic shift in sheep husbandry that involved the change of the exploitation focus of sheep from meat and milk towards fibre production and the transformation of sheep with a hairy coat to those with a woolly fleece. Central to the research was the development of a database into which the results of a comprehensive literature research in archaeozoological publications and unpublished raw data of sites in Southeast Europe and Southwest Asia spanning a time frame from 7000 BC to 1500 BC have been recorded. The data have been collected from 548 publications published between 1952 and 2015. The present state of the database (29.7.2019) published here combines data of 401 settlement sites from 18 countries, 296 of which are located in SE-Europe and 105 in SW-Asia. The database at present includes archaeozoological data of over 2,1 million identified mammal bones including 66.717 bones identified as Ovis aries. The osteometrical part of the collection contains more than 14.000 measurement data of sheep bones.

Sheep was among the first domesticated animals, but its demographic history is little understood. Here we present combined analyses of mitochondrial and nuclear polymorphism data from ancient central and west Anatolian sheep dating to the Late Glacial and early Holocene. We observe loss of mitochondrial haplotype diversity around 7500 BCE during the early Neolithic, consistent with a domestication-related bottleneck. Post-7000 BCE, mitochondrial haplogroup diversity increases, compatible with admixture from other domestication centres and/or from wild populations. Analysing archaeogenomic data, we further find that Anatolian Neolithic sheep (ANS) are genetically closest to present-day European breeds, and especially those from central and north Europe. Our results indicate that Asian contribution to south European breeds in the post-Neolithic era, possibly during the Bronze Age, may explain this pattern.

Although the economic importance of sheep husbandry in the Middle Ages, especially during the development of the major cloth industries, and the speculation of animals for wool, is recognized, until now the evolution of sheep forms on the French mainland have not been the subject of major investigations. The purpose of our study, therefore, was to assess the morphological diversity of sheep across eleven centuries, and attempt to reconstruct the zootechnical practices used in husbandry and their effectiveness from the zooarchaeological remains. In addition, a database was created, with the help of numerous specialists, grouping 16,353 measured bones corresponding to 59,801 distributed measurements from the 9th to the 19th centuries in France. Our purpose was to describe the shape of animals bred for wool (through size or dimensions) across a wide territory using bone remains and the help of common methods and tool, such as shoulder height, the slenderness index, and the log size index. The work carried out within the framework of this study should be reproducible for any type of zooarchaeological study. The results reveal an evolution in sheep diversity and morphologies according to three stages, from the end of the Late Middle Ages to the industrial era. The first phase corresponds to fairly homogeneous sheep herds from the 9th–10th and the 12th–13th centuries, with a low diversity of forms: small and stunted. We then witness an important development in morphological variety from the 13th–14th centuries, in all dimensions, from the smallest to the largest. Many of the various forms emerged without impacting sheep dimensions in depth; overall, the herds remained composed of smaller individuals. Finally, from the 12th–13th and the 18th–19th centuries, there is a loss of diversity in sheep forms to the benefit of herds primarily consisting of larger di-mensioned individuals. This zootechnical evolution can be compared to the effect of merinisation operating at the end of the modern period.

Journal of Near Eastern Studies 79(2), 2020

Scientific Reports

The arrival of Neolithic culture in North Africa, especially domestic animals has been essentially documented from archaeological records. As the data relative to sheep are scarce, we studied the genetic relationship between Moroccan sheep breeds and Mediterranean ones using the sequencing of 628 bp of the mitochondrial DNA control region in 193 Moroccan individuals, belonging to six breeds, and 652 sequences from other breeds in Europe and Middle East. Through Network analysis and an original phylogenetically derived method, the connection proportions of each Moroccan breed to foreign ones were estimated, highlighting the strong links between Moroccan and Iberian breeds. The first founders of Moroccan sheep population were issued at 79% from Iberia and 21% from a territory between Middle East and Africa. Their calculated expansion times were respectively 7,100 and 8,600 years B.P. This suggests that Neolithization was introduced by a double influence, from Iberia and from another route, maybe Oriental or Sub-Saharan. The consequence of the environmental changes encountered by founders from Iberia was tested using different neutrality tests. There are significant selection signatures at the level of Moroccan and European breeds settled in elevated altitudes, and an erosion of nucleotide diversity in Moroccan breeds living in arid areas.