Anatolia is the most sampled ancient landscape in West Eurasia: its farmers were sequenced early, its Bronze Age is covered by hundreds of genomes, and its Roman and Byzantine centuries were filled in by the Southern Arc project in 2022. So the question of Turkish ancient origins is unusual: the deep past is well known, and the debate is mostly about the last thousand years, when a Turkic language arrived from Central Asia and the region's name changed.
One thing first: ancestry is not identity. A genome describes which ancient populations a person's ancestors resembled. It does not say what language they spoke, what they believed or what they called themselves; DNA cannot recover any of that. There is no "Turkish gene", no ranking of ancestries and no purity to measure.
The short answer: the ancestry of most people in Turkey today is overwhelmingly Anatolian: Neolithic farmer ancestry local to the peninsula, joined in the Bronze Age by Caucasus- and Iranian-related streams, and reshuffled rather than replaced through the Roman and Byzantine centuries. The Central Asian Turkic layer that arrived with the Seljuks and Ottomans is real but modest: studies typically place the East Eurasian component at a tenth of the genome or less, varying by region.
The Anatolian Neolithic substrate#
The first farmers of central Anatolia were local. Genomes from Boncuklu and Pınarbaşı (Feldman et al. 2019) showed that the earliest farmers of the Konya plain descended mostly from the Epipalaeolithic hunter-gatherers of the same region, with a minor addition of Iranian- and Levantine-related ancestry. Farming was adopted here rather than carried in. Later communities at Tepecik-Çiftlik and Barcın belonged to the same profile, the "Anatolian Neolithic farmer" of every ancestry model, which spread into Europe after 6500 BC and became the largest ancestry stream of the continent.
Every published model of Anatolian Turks starts from this farmer layer as the largest component, as Greek and Armenian models do.
Chalcolithic and Bronze Age: the eastern streams arrive#
Between roughly 5000 and 2000 BC the Anatolian gene pool changed from one end of the peninsula to the other. Ancestry related to the Caucasus hunter-gatherers and the Zagros farmers spread westward, so that Bronze Age Anatolians carry a substantial eastern component the Neolithic farmers lacked. The Southern Arc papers (Lazaridis et al. 2022, three studies in Science) put this on a firm footing with several hundred individuals: populations from the Aegean coast to the Upper Euphrates were blends of the farmer layer with Caucasus- and Iranian-related ancestry, in proportions rising from west to east.
The same papers established that, unlike the Balkans, Bronze Age Anatolia received almost no ancestry from the Pontic-Caspian steppe; individuals from the Hittite-period core show none in the published models. The Anatolian branch of Indo-European therefore arrived without the steppe gene flow that transformed Europe.
A dated timeline for ancestry in Anatolia#
- Before 8500 BC: Epipalaeolithic foragers at Pınarbaşı.
- 8500 to 6000 BC: the Anatolian Neolithic at Boncuklu, Çatalhöyük, Tepecik-Çiftlik and Barcın.
- 5000 to 2000 BC: Caucasus- and Iranian-related ancestry spreads across the peninsula; steppe ancestry is essentially absent.
- 2000 to 300 BC: the Hittite, Phrygian, Lydian and Urartian centuries, broadly continuous.
- 300 BC to 1071 AD: Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine Anatolia; imperial mobility, persistent regional profile.
- 1071 to 1300 AD: the Seljuk conquest after Manzikert and the arrival of Oghuz Turkic groups.
- 1300 to 1922 AD: the Ottoman centuries, ending in the population exchanges of the 1920s.
Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine Anatolia#
The second Southern Arc paper added genomes from Roman and Byzantine Anatolia itself: a population still recognisably Bronze Age Anatolian in its core, with a moderate westward shift on the Aegean coast and eastern Mediterranean contributions in the south. Roman Anatolia was cosmopolitan, but the individuals sampled stayed closer to their local predecessors than to any outside source.
When the Southern Arc modelled modern populations of Turkey, the largest source by far was the Byzantine-era Anatolian profile, with the Central Asian addition as a minority, the conclusion also reached by the qpAdm study in The genetic making of Anatolian Turks.
The Central Asian Turkic layer#
The Turkic languages arrived with people, and those people left a signal. Every genome-wide study of Turkey (Hodoğlugil and Mahley 2012; Alkan et al. 2014; Kars et al. 2021) has found an East Eurasian-related component absent from Greeks, Armenians and Georgians and best explained by medieval gene flow from Central Asia. Estimates vary with the reference set: Hodoğlugil and Mahley reported a Central Asian contribution of about 9 to 15 percent; later work with larger panels tends lower. A fair summary is that the East Eurasian component is typically a tenth of the genome or less, present in almost everyone, and higher in central and eastern Anatolia than on the Aegean coast.
Two observations keep this in proportion. The incoming Oghuz groups were themselves mixed, with West Eurasian ancestry from the Iranian world and the western steppe, so the migration's total contribution was larger than the East Eurasian fraction alone. And identity-by-descent analyses (Yunusbayev et al. 2015) date the shared segments between Anatolian and Central Asian Turkic speakers to the medieval period. Language replacement here was real but numerically small.
Balkan and Caucasus contributions#
The Ottoman state moved people in both directions for six centuries: Muhacir families from the Balkans, Circassian and Abkhaz settlers after 1864, and the population exchange of 1923. These appear as regional structure. Kars and colleagues' 2021 study of more than three thousand exomes found an east-west gradient, with the Central Asian and Caucasus-related components increasing eastward and the European-related component westward.
What the Y-DNA and mitochondrial DNA add#
The paternal lineages of Turkey are the old Anatolian and Near Eastern set. In the survey of Cinnioğlu and colleagues (2004), J2 was the largest haplogroup at roughly a quarter of men, followed by R1b at about a seventh, G, E and J1 each near a tenth, and R1a at several percent. Lineages typical of Central Asian and Siberian Turkic speakers (N, Q, C and O) together accounted for only a few percent. Mitochondrial lineages are overwhelmingly West Eurasian (H, U, J, T, K and HV), with East Eurasian lineages again at a few percent. Most Turkish men carry Y chromosomes whose Anatolian history predates the Turkic languages by thousands of years, and no haplogroup is a "Turkish gene" or a "Turkic gene".
Limitations#
The ancient sampling of Anatolia is rich but uneven: the Black Sea coast and far east are thin, and the Seljuk and early Ottoman centuries are barely sampled, so no published medieval Turkic individuals from Anatolia measure the arrival directly. The East Eurasian fraction is estimated against modern Central Asian references that are themselves admixed, so it depends on the proxy chosen. Community-level structure (Yörük, Alevi, Black Sea and Kurdish populations) is only partly described. And nothing here speaks to identity: a genome that is nine tenths Anatolian is not less Turkish for it, and one with more Central Asian ancestry is not more.
Frequently asked questions about Turkish DNA#
Are Turkish people genetically Central Asian?#
Mostly not. Genome-wide studies consistently find that the largest component of Turkish ancestry is Anatolian, continuous with the Roman and Byzantine population of the peninsula and ultimately with its Neolithic farmers. The Central Asian Turkic component is real but a minority, typically a tenth of the genome or less, and higher in central and eastern Anatolia than in the west.
How much Turkic ancestry do Anatolian Turks have?#
Estimates of the East Eurasian-related component range from a few percent to about fifteen percent depending on the study, region and reference populations, with most results near ten percent or below. Because the medieval Oghuz migrants were themselves partly West Eurasian, the total contribution of the migration was somewhat larger than that fraction.
Are Turks closer to Greeks or to Central Asians?#
To Greeks, Armenians and other neighbours of Anatolia and the Aegean. On a principal component plot, Anatolian Turks sit within West Asia, shifted slightly toward East Asia by the Turkic component, but far from Central Asian Turkic speakers such as Kazakhs or Kyrgyz, whose genomes are majority East Eurasian.
Did the Hittites have steppe ancestry?#
The published Bronze Age individuals from the Hittite core lack steppe-related ancestry in the Southern Arc models. This is one reason the origin of the Anatolian branch of Indo-European is still debated: the steppe ancestry that accompanied Indo-European languages into Europe did not accompany them into Anatolia.
How to model Turkish ancestry with qpAdm#
A qpAdm model asks whether a genome can be explained as a mixture of chosen ancient sources, and reports the fit with a p-value and standard errors. For a Turkish genome the Ancestrify catalog has the streams that matter at two depths.
At the distal level: Anatolian Neolithic Farmer (8500 - 6000 BC), Caucasian Hunter Gatherer (13000 - 7000 BC), Iranian Neolithic Farmer (8000 - 5000 BC), a small share of Western Steppe Herder (5000 - 2800 BC), and Levantine Neolithic Farmer (8800 - 6500 BC) for the southeast. At the proximal level, Anatolian (1800 - 300 BC), West Anatolian (0 - 600 AD), Aegean (BC 200 - 600 AD), Pontic (300 - 50 BC) and Eastern Mediterranean (0 - 600 AD) cover the Bronze Age through Byzantine baseline, and Ancient Greek (1500 - 300 BC) helps for Aegean-shifted genomes.
The Turkic layer is where the catalog is only broad. There is no medieval Oghuz or Kipchak source; the East Eurasian stream is represented by Northeast Asian (6000 - 2000 BC), which captures the direction of the signal but not the mixed Central Asian population that actually arrived. Expect a small weight and read it as "Central Asian-related" rather than a specific people. Because the Anatolian, Caucasus and Iranian sources are geometrically close, collinearity is the standing trap, and a model record reporting that the data cannot separate two of them is an honest result. A Global25 analysis is a useful first look, placing a Turkish genome among its modern neighbours before any formal model.
Sources and further reading#
- Feldman, M. et al. (2019). Late Pleistocene human genome suggests a local origin for the first farmers of central Anatolia. Nature Communications 10, 1218.
- Lazaridis, I. et al. (2022). The genetic history of the Southern Arc: A bridge between West Asia and Europe. Science 377, eabm4247.
- Lazaridis, I. et al. (2022). A genetic probe into the ancient and medieval history of Southern Europe and West Asia. Science 377, 940-951.
- Kars, M. E. et al. (2021). The genetic structure of the Turkish population reveals high levels of variation and admixture. PNAS 118, e2026076118.
- Hodoğlugil, U. and Mahley, R. W. (2012). Turkish population structure and genetic ancestry reveal relatedness among Eurasian populations. Annals of Human Genetics 76, 128-141.
- Cinnioğlu, C. et al. (2004). Excavating Y-chromosome haplotype strata in Anatolia. Human Genetics 114, 127-148.
Editorial note: the hero artwork in this article was generated with AI as conceptual illustration. It does not reproduce a scientific figure, an ancient individual or a measured migration route.
