The ‘Wheat Puzzle’ and Kartvelians route to the Caucasus

Abstract

Wheat (Triticum L.) originated in the Fertile Crescent approximately 10 kya BP and has since spread worldwide. The ‘Wheat Puzzle’ was termed the observation that wild predecessors of five Georgian endemic wheat subspecies are found in Fertile crescent quite far from the South Caucasus. Kartvelian peoples are the ethno-linguistic group of speakers of Kartvelian languages (Georgian, Megrel, Laz, Svan). Kartvelian language is one of the seven language families of Eurasiatic superfamily, that may have arisen from a common ancestor over 15 kya BP (Pagel et al. in Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 110:8471–8476, 2013). One of the possibility to explain ‘Wheat Puzzle’ is that speakers of Protokartvelian language could be separated from Protoeurasiatic language speakers after migration from Africa to the Arabian peninsula and later moved to the northern part of Mesopotamia where wheat was domesticated. Kartvelian speakers could migrate further to South Caucasus together with domesticated wheat subspecies.