Our results demonstrate that genotype imputation is a valuable tool for maximizing information from low-coverage goat palaeogenomes.

This approach offers new opportunities to investigate the genetic impacts of early domestication and herd dispersal—directions we will be continuing to explore!

Identity-by-descent (IBD) patterns mirrored our ROH findings: Goats from early herding sites like Ganj Dareh exhibited less relatedness compared to goats from later in the dispersal process.

#Mobility #Domestication​

📊 Insights into early goat domestication:
Analyzing 36 previously published ancient goat genomes, we observed that runs-of-homozygosity (ROH) increased with distance from the Zagros Mountains during the Neolithic, suggesting effects from the initial dispersal of managed herds.

#Neolithic #Goats​

By imputing ancient downsampled genomes utilizing the VarGoats dataset (www.goatgenome.org/vargoats.html), we achieved high concordance at 0.5× coverage for common variants.

We found that during the Neolithic, pig management in Europe was highly variable. By integrating paleogenomics and zooarchaeology, we uncovered a commensal relationship between humans, pigs and wild boar at the Early Neolithic settlement of Swifterbant