Barley Diversity Now and 6000 Years Ago

The cereal grass barley was domesticated about 10,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent and became a founder crop of Neolithic agriculture in Europe and Southwest Asia. Here, we report genome sequences of five 6,000-year-old barley grains that were excavated at a cave in the Judean Desert at Masada Fortress, Israel, close to the Dead Sea. Comparison to whole exome resequencing data from a diversity panel of modern accessions of wild and domesticated barley revealed the ancient barley to be most closely related to extant landraces from the Southern Levant and Egypt and genetically similar to wild barley from the Upper Jordan Valley. Our findings suggest genetic continuity of cultivated barley in the presence of gene flow between cultivated and sympatric wild populations since prehistoric times. We conclude that ancient genomes retrieved from desiccated archaeobotanical remains can inform research into the origin, early domestication and subsequent migration of crop species.