Prehistoric Caucasus

The Caucasus region, on the gateway between Southwest Asia, Europe and Central Asia, plays a pivotal role in the peopling of Eurasia, possibly as early as during the Homo erectus expansion to Eurasia, in the Upper Paleolithic peopling of Europe, and again in the re-peopling Mesolithic Europe following the Last Glacial Maximum, and in the expansion associated with the Neolithic Revolution.

Lower to Middle Paleolithic

Dmanisi skull 5, found in Dmanisi, Georgia, is among the earliest Homo erectus fossils, dated to 1.8 Ma.

  • Azykh Cave has remnants of the pre-Acheulean, estimated at 0.7 Ma.
Further information: Neanderthals in Southwest Asia

Upper Paleolithic to Epipaleolithic
  • Dzudzuana cave (30 ka)
  • Satsurblia cave (24 ka)
  • Damjili Cave
  • Dash Salakhly (20 ka)

Neolithic to Iron Age

Neolithic:

Bronze Age:

The South Caucasus gradually enters the historical period following the Bronze Age collapse, see history of the Caucasus#Early_history

Genetic history
Further information: Peoples of the Caucasus and Y-DNA haplogroups in populations of the Caucasus
Further information: Genetic history of Europe and Genetic history of the Near East

Language groups in the Caucasus have been found to have a close correlation to genetic ancestry.[1]

A genetic study in 2015 by Fu et al. of many modern European populations, identified a previously unidentified lineage, which was dubbed Caucasian Hunter-Gatherer (CHG).[2][3] The study detected a split between CHG and so-called "Western European Hunter-Gatherer" (WHG) lineages, about 45,000 years ago, the presumed time of the original peopling of Europe. CHG separated from the "Early Anatolian Farmers" (EAF) lineage later, at 25,000 years ago, during the Last Glacial Maximum. (CHG was extrapolated from, among other sources, the genomes of two fossils from western Georgia – one about 13,300 years old (Late Upper Paleolithic) and the other 9,700 years (Mesolithic), which were compared to the 13,700 year-old Bichon man genome (found in Switzerland).[2])

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See also

References
  1. O.Balanovsky et al., "Parallel Evolution of Genes and Languages in the Caucasus Region", Mol Biol Evol00 (2011), doi:10.1093/molbev/msr126.
  2. Fu, Qiaomei; Posth, Cosimo (May 2, 2016). "The genetic history of Ice Age Europe". Nature. doi:10.1038/nature17993.
  3. Dutchen, Stephanie (May 2, 2016). "History on Ice". Harvard Medical School. Retrieved 11 May 2016.
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