Exhibit · the connected worlds
The ancestry that links Elam and the Indus was herding goats in the Zagros before farming reached either.
Ask whether Elam and the Indus are linked by ancient DNA and the usual answer is that no Elamite has been sequenced. That is out of date. Neo-Elamite genomes from Khuzestan were published in 2025. And the link does not need them — it was already visible in a city on the eastern Iranian plateau where Proto-Elamite tablets and Indus-descended people lie in the same ground. This page sets out the ancestry, the site, the dates, and the part still missing.
What "Iranian farmer" ancestry actually is.
Ganj Dareh, and a misnomer
The component usually called "Iranian farmer-related" is anchored on a single site: Ganj Dareh, in the high Zagros of Kermanshah at 1,400 metres, occupied around 10,000–9,700 years ago. The first genome from there — a woman, GD13a — was most similar to hunter-gatherers from the Caucasus, and distinct from the Anatolian farmers who later carried agriculture into Europe. Her population had not gone through the bottleneck her northern neighbours had.
Ganj Dareh is the earliest known site of goat management, from about 8200 BCE — goat genomes from the site are already genetically distinct from wild goats and ancestral to all later domestic ones. Cereal cultivation is not what defined the place. "Iranian farmer" is a label from the European Neolithic story, applied to a population that was doing something else.
The honest name is the one the field increasingly uses: CIHG — Caucasus and Iranian Hunter-Gatherers — a highland population of the Zagros and Caucasus, herding goats a thousand years before wheat reached Mehrgarh, and separated from the Fertile Crescent farmers by both genetics and mountains.
The site where they meet.
Shahr-i Sokhta, 3100–2000 BCE
What the genomes at Shahr-i Sokhta show
| Group | Date | Ancestry |
|---|---|---|
| Shahr-i Sokhta BA1 the local plateau population | 3100–2600 BCE | Up to 65% Ganj Dareh-related (CIHG), no Anatolian farmer ancestry at all — and, in the paper's proximal model, roughly 20% ancestry from the Indus-derived group beside them. |
| Shahr-i Sokhta BA2 the Indus-descended burials | 3300–2000 BCE | The Indus Periphery profile: CIHG-related plus AASI, no steppe. About half of all individuals sampled at the site. These, with three from Gonur in Turkmenistan, are the eleven outliers from which the Indus population was first reconstructed — before Rakhigarhi confirmed it. |
In a Proto-Elamite city, half the sampled dead are Indus people and the local population carries a fifth of its ancestry from them. This is not trade contact leaving no trace. It is people from the Indus living, marrying and dying on the eastern edge of the Elamite world for centuries.
And underneath both groups is the same base: CIHG. The Elamite-side population and the Indus-side population are two branches of one plateau ancestry, one of which had also absorbed AASI on its way east. The genetic link between Elam and the Indus is not a hypothesis waiting for a sample. It is the shared substrate of everyone buried at the meeting point.
The Elamite genomes.
Jubaji, Khuzestan — and what they can and cannot yet say
The 2025 Iranian plateau study includes Neo-Elamite individuals from the Jubaji burial tomb in Khuzestan, dated 1100–539 BCE. That is the Elamite heartland — Susiana — in the Elamite period, sequenced. The claim that no Elamite has been sequenced is no longer true.
What the study shows across the plateau as a whole: the Ganj Dareh-related ancestry forms the predominant base of every Chalcolithic and Bronze Age genome from Iran and South-Central Asia, with Anatolian farmer ancestry entering later and mainly in the northwest. Three thousand years of continuity on the northern plateau from the Copper Age to the Sassanids.
The Jubaji individuals are Neo-Elamite, first millennium BCE — two thousand years after the Shahr-i Sokhta burials, and after Elam had absorbed centuries of exchange with Mesopotamia and the arrival of Iranian speakers. They tell us what Elam was at the end. No genome exists from Susa in the Proto-Elamite or Old Elamite periods, when the network reached the Indus.
And the one comparison that would close the question — Jubaji against the Indus Periphery individuals directly — is not reported in the 2025 paper, whose focus is northern Iran. The samples exist. The analysis has not been run.
Sumer and Mesopotamia.
the honest boundary
No genome has been recovered from a Sumerian burial. The Mesopotamian alluvium is waterlogged; the bones do not survive. Sumerian remains a language isolate and Sumerian ancestry is unknown. Any line drawn from L1-M22 or CIHG through Ur is drawn on a blank.
What can be said is indirect: Elam and Sumer were neighbours in constant contact and conflict from 3000 BCE; Elamite and Sumerian are both isolates; and the Meluhha trade documented in Mesopotamian records ran through the same Gulf and plateau routes on which Indus people are found buried. The Indus reached Mesopotamia. Whether Mesopotamians reached the Indus in any demographic sense, the record cannot yet say.
When farming began, on each side.
and why it does not settle who was first
sort by region and date
| Place | Date | What |
|---|---|---|
| Zagros — Ganj Dareh, Tepe Abdul Hosein | c. 8200 BCE | Goat management. The oldest livestock genomes reported. Herding, not cereal farming. |
| Zagros / Susiana foothills — Ali Kosh, Chogha Golan | c. 9800–7000 BCE | Wild cereal exploitation moving toward cultivation; the Deh Luran plain, later Elam's hinterland. |
| Mehrgarh, Baluchistan | c. 7000 BCE | Wheat, barley, and zebu cattle — domesticated locally from the Indian aurochs, independently of the West Asian taurine line. |
Two regions, two chronologies, one shared ancestry component. The comparison only works if the dates can be lined up.
The Zagros is earlier for herding and cereals. Mehrgarh is roughly a millennium behind — and then does something the Zagros never did: domesticates its own cattle. Zebu are not descended from West Asian cattle. That is an independent domestication event on South Asian ground, with South Asian animals.
So the picture is neither "farming came from Iran" nor "farming is Indian." Wheat and barley very likely arrived along the plateau; the cattle were made here. And the population that brought the one and found the other — CIHG-related, by then mixing with AASI — was doing so a thousand years before the L1 lineages arrived, and three thousand before anyone built a city. The nationalist contest over who farmed first is a contest the evidence doesn't contain.
The male lineages, cross-referenced.
what travels with CIHG, and what doesn't
| Lineage | Association | Where it sits today |
|---|---|---|
| L1-M22 | Origin ~20,600 years ago in West Asia; the South Asian branches descend from non-Neolithic CIHG-related groups, oldest carriers in Turkmenistan (6,600 BP) and Armenia (6,100 BP), arriving in South Asia 8,000–6,000 years ago. | Balochistan, Sindh, Dravidian-speaking farmers, the Caucasus. The plateau lineage. |
| J2-M172 | West Asian, Neolithic-associated; the Fertile Crescent farmer lineage proper. | Moderate across Iran and India; rises with Anatolian-related ancestry. |
| R2-M124 | Deep South Asian; present in Ganj Dareh-region maternal lineages as R2 mtDNA too, hinting at a very old plateau–subcontinent axis. | Broadly across South Asia. |
| H, F*, C5 | The AASI layer. Not on the plateau. This is what the Indus branch picked up that the Elamite branch did not. | Peninsular India, hill tribes, Scheduled Castes. |
The cleanest single statement: L1 is the male lineage that tracks CIHG eastward. J2 tracks the Anatolian farmers, who reached western Iran but barely touched the Indus. The Indus was built by the highland-herder branch, not the lowland-farmer branch — and the language family most associated with L1 today is Dravidian.
The honest limits.
- Cited: the Ganj Dareh genome and its Caucasus affinity (Broushaki et al. 2016, Scientific Reports); goat management at 8200 BCE from ancient goat genomes (Daly et al. 2021, PNAS); the Neo-Elamite Jubaji samples, Shahr-i Sokhta BA1 composition and plateau continuity (Kaveh-Firouz et al. 2025, Scientific Reports, DOI 10.1038/s41598-025-99743-w); the Indus Periphery outliers and the ~20% proximal model (Narasimhan et al. 2019, Science, Table S30); the Proto-Elamite network's reach (Encyclopaedia Iranica); L1-M22 origins and branches (Pathak et al. 2024, iScience).
- NOT claimed: that Elamite and Dravidian are related languages. That is McAlpin's contested hypothesis; most linguists treat Elamite as an isolate. The genetic link is between populations, and populations change languages.
- NOT claimed: a direct Jubaji–Indus Periphery comparison. It has not been published.
- NOT claimed: anything about Sumerian ancestry. There are no genomes.
- NOT claimed: that farming originated in South Asia. Zebu domestication did; wheat and barley almost certainly did not.
- Source note: the Indus Periphery reconstruction is a Reich-lab output; the 2025 Iranian study is a separate team, and the two agree on the CIHG base — a genuine independent convergence.
What "Iranian-related" actually names here
This page exists to stop a modelled component being read as a people. The inspector labels each claim by evidence type, which is the same distinction.