Abstract
Human history was transformed with the advent of agriculture in the Fertile Crescent with wheat as one of the founding crops. Although the Fertile Crescent is renowned as the center of wheat domestication, archaeological studies have shown the crucial involvement of Çatalhöyük in this process. This site first gained attention during the 1961–65 excavations due to the recovery of primitive hexaploid wheat. However, despite the seeds being well preserved, a detailed archaeobotanical description of the samples is missing. In this article, we report on the DNA isolation, amplification and sequencing of ancient DNA of charred wheat grains from Çatalhöyük and other Turkish archaeological sites and the comparison of these wheat grains with contemporary wheat species including T. monococcum, T. dicoccum, T. dicoccoides, T. durum and T. aestivum at HMW glutenin protein loci. These ancient samples represent the oldest wheat sample sequenced to date and the first ancient wheat sample from the Middle East. Remarkably, the sequence analysis of the short DNA fragments preserved in seeds that are approximately 8400 years old showed that the Çatalhöyük wheat stock contained hexaploid wheat, which is similar to contemporary hexaploid wheat species including both naked (T. aestivum) and hulled (T. spelta) wheat. This suggests an early transitory state of hexaploid wheat agriculture from the Fertile Crescent towards Europe spanning present-day Turkey.
Highlights
Even after several decades of research, wheat evolution and domestication remains a debate among ecologists, archaeologists and molecular breeders
We focused on the origin of wheat domestication under spatial and temporal dimensions using DNA analysis of Çatalhöyük stock and samples retrieved from other archaeological sites in Turkey
An increase in the amount of starting material was required as was the case for the Çatalhöyük62 samples, since 0.5 g of seeds did not reveal DNA; 1.5 g of seeds extracted with the same method did contain DNA, which was amplified by Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) (S2 Table)
Summary
Even after several decades of research, wheat evolution and domestication remains a debate among ecologists, archaeologists and molecular breeders. Archaeobotanical records have shown that the Fertile Crescent played a crucial role in the advent of agriculture since it was the center of wheat domestication. New studies continue to reveal different aspects of wheat progression and encouraging people to pay attention to this huge region [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10]. Çatalhöyük Wheat: A Genetic Record and 101T046. The authors thank United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) for providing a scholarship to HB for conducting second laboratory aDNA isolation at UMIST Biomolecular Sciences, Manchester, UK
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