Bronze Age woman from Terqa was mtDNA K

Just a quick heads up (via Dienekes) on this aDNA finding, which being an isolated individual from a late period doesn't seem too informative. Terqa was an important Mesopotamian city (in modern NE Syria), north of the better known and also important city of Mari. The area was already Semitic by this time (2650-2450 BCE) and would be conquered by nearby Akkad in the centuries to come.

The burial in a two chambered structure with stone domes (probably tholos-like false domes, no evidence for true domes before Etruscans) included to human skeletons, a sheep skeleton (probably a sacrifice) and luxury goods. One of the skeletons belonged to an extremely strong and large man aged 45-50, showing sighns of healed injuries, the other is from a woman aged 40-44 (his wife, I presume) from which the aDNA was succesfully extracted (haplogroup K apparent from HVR 1 haplotype).

Ref.: J. Tomczyk et al. Anthropological analysis of the osteological material from an ancient tomb (Early Bronze Age) from the middle Euphrates valley, Terqa (Syria). International Journal of Osteoarchaeology, 2010. (Paywall).

Cereals gathered as early as 23,000 BP in Syria

Also found at Science Daily, based on research by the University of Warwick (lead: R. Allabin).

The origins of Mesolithic (properly speaking: the transition between hunter-gathering and agriculture and animal husbandry) have been pushed back by many milennia to c. 23,000 BP, before the last glacial maximum. At least that seems true for Syria, where people started gathering cereals at such early date, at the site of Ohalo II, what implies a very long Mesolithic of some 12,000 years.

The research by Allabin et al. focuses on modelling the actual evoluton of domesticated crops, questioning the single origin paradigm.