On the trail of N eolithic mice and men towards T ranscaucasia: zooarchaeological clues from N akhchivan ( A zerbaijan)

Transcaucasia comprises a key region for understanding the history of both the hybrid zone between house mouse lineages and the dispersal of the N eolithic way of life outside its N ear E astern cradle. The opportunity to document the colonization history of both men and mice in T ranscaucasia was made possible by the discovery of mouse remains accumulated in pits from a 6000‐year‐old farming village in the N akhchivan ( A utonomous R epublic of N akhchivan, A zerbaijan). The present study investigated their taxonomy and most likely dispersal path through the identification of the M us lineage to which they might belong using a geometric morphometric approach of dental traits distances between archaeological and modern populations of the different M us lineages of South‐ W est A sia. We demonstrate that the mouse remains trapped in the deep storage pits of the dwelling belong to the M us musculus domesticus from the N ear E ast, with dental shapes similar to current populations in N orthern S yria. These results strongly suggest that the domesticus lineage was dispersed into Transcaucasia from the upper Euphrates valley by N eolithic migration, some time between the 7th and 5th millennium BC , providing substantial evidence to back up the scenario featuring near‐eastern stimuli in the emergence of agriculture in the S outh C aucasus. The domesticus mitochondrial DNA signature of the current house mouse in the same location 5000 years later, as well as their turnover towards a subspecies musculus/castaneus phenotype, suggests that early domesticus colonizers hybridized with a later musculus (and maybe castaneus ) dispersal originating from south of the Caspian Sea and/or Northern Caucasia. © 2013 The Linnean Society of London