The origins and prehistory of domestic sheep ( Ovis aries ) are incompletely understood; to address this, we generated data from 118 ancient genomes spanning 12,000 years sampled from across Eurasia. Genomes from Central Türkiye ~8000 BCE are genetically proximal to the domestic origins of sheep but do not fully explain the ancestry of later populations, suggesting a mosaic of wild ancestries. Genomic signatures indicate selection by ancient herders for pigmentation patterns, hornedness, and growth rate. Although the first European sheep flocks derive from Türkiye, in a notable parallel with ancient human genome discoveries, we detected a major influx of Western steppe–related ancestry in the Bronze Age.

Inundated archaeological sites dating from the Middle Palaeolithic to the Pottery Neolithic periods have been exposed off the Mediterranean coast of Israel, mainly the northern Carmel coast. The bulk of the sites represents in situ Neolithic settlements dating from the tenth to the seventh millennia BP, including the Pre-Pottery Neolithic site of Atlit-Yam and the Pottery Neolithic sites of Kfar Samir, Kfar Galim, Tel Hreiz and Neve-Yam. These are some of the best-preserved underwater settlements in the world with excellent preservation of human and animal remains, plant materials used as food and animal fodder, basketry, wood used in building construction and for making bowls and a wide range of flint, bone and ground-stone artefacts. The sites include rectangular stone dwellings, the earliest known stone-built water wells in the world, megalithic structures of probable ritual significance, numerous human burials, many in stone-lined graves or cists, and reveal details of village layout including a separation between domestic and graveyard areas. The human remains provide pathological evidence for the earliest known case of tuberculosis and for malarial infection. These settlements are the earliest known examples of the typical Mediterranean fishing village, with a subsistence economy based on crop cultivation, domestic animals, some hunting of wild animals, a significant emphasis on marine fishing and the earliest known evidence for the production of olive oil. This combination of resources contributed to the establishment of year-round sedentary, Mediterranean fishing villages. These features owe their preservation and discovery to the location of the settlements on the shoreline. Rising sea level eventually forced their abandonment and sealed the remains in anaerobic conditions under a protective cover of marine sand, until recent disturbance by storms and sand-mining exposed parts of the submerged ancient land surface to archaeological discovery.

Pyrotechnology is a key element of hominin evolution. The identification of fire in early hominin sites relies primarily on an initial visual assessment of artifacts’ physical alterations, resulting in potential underestimation of the prevalence of fire in the archaeological record. Here, we used a suite of spectroscopic techniques to counter the absence of visual signatures for fire and demonstrate the presence of burnt fauna and lithics at the Lower Paleolithic (LP) open-air site of Evron Quarry (Israel), dated between 1.0 and 0.8 Mya and roughly contemporaneous to Gesher Benot Ya’aqov where early pyrotechnology has been documented. We propose reexamining finds from other LP sites lacking visual clues of pyrotechnology to yield a renewed perspective on the origin, evolution, and spatiotemporal dispersal of the relationship between early hominin behavior and fire use.

Background: Studies of mammalian sexual dimorphism have traditionally involved the measurement of selected dimensions of particular skeletal elements and use of single data-analysis procedures. Consequently, such studies have been limited by a variety of both practical and conceptual constraints. To compare and contrast what might be gained from a more exploratory, multifactorial approach to the quantitative assessment of form-variation, images of a small sample of modern Israeli gray wolf (Canis lupus) crania were analyzed via elliptical Fourier analysis of cranial outlines, a Naïve Bayes machine-learning approach to the analysis of these same outline data, and a deep-learning analysis of whole images in which all aspects of these cranial morphologies were represented. The statistical significance and stability of each discriminant result were tested using bootstrap and jackknife procedures.Results: Our results reveal no evidence for statistically significant sexual size dimorphism, but significant sex-mediated shape dimorphism. These are consistent with the findings of prior wolf sexual dimorphism studies and extend these studies by identifying new aspects of dimorphic variation. Additionally, our results suggest that shape-based sexual dimorphism in theC. lupuscranial complex may be more widespread morphologically than had been appreciated by previous researchers.Conclusion: Our results suggest that size and shape dimorphism can be detected in small samples and may be dissociated in mammalian morphologies. This result is particularly noteworthy in that it implies there may be a need to refine allometric hypothesis tests that seek to account for phenotypic sexual dimorphism. The methods we employed in this investigation are fully generalizable and can be applied to a wide range of biological materials and could facilitate the rapid evaluation of a diverse array of morphological/phenomic hypotheses.