Ancient Sheep Genomes Reveal Four Millennia of North European Short-Tailed Sheep in the Baltic Sea Region.

Sheep are among the earliest domesticated livestock species, with a wide variety of breeds present today. However, it remains unclear how far back this diversity goes, with formal documentation only dating back a few centuries. North European short-tailed (NEST) breeds are often assumed to be among the oldest domestic sheep populations, even thought to represent relicts of the earliest sheep expansions during the Neolithic period reaching Scandinavia <6,000 years ago. This study sequenced the genomes (up to 11.6X) of five sheep remains from the Baltic islands of Gotland and Åland, dating from the Late Neolithic (∼4,100 cal BP) to historical times (∼1,600 CE). Our findings indicate that these ancient sheep largely possessed the genetic characteristics of modern NEST breeds, suggesting a substantial degree of long-term continuity of this sheep type in the Baltic Sea region. Despite the wide temporal spread, population genetic analyses show high levels of affinity between the ancient genomes and they also exhibit relatively high genetic diversity when compared to modern NEST breeds, implying a loss of diversity in most breeds during the last centuries associated with breed formation and recent bottlenecks. Our results shed light on the development of breeds in Northern Europe specifically as well as the development of genetic diversity in sheep breeds, and their expansion from the domestication center in general.

Population Genomic History of the Endangered Anatolian and Cyprian Mouflons in Relation to Worldwide Wild, Feral, and Domestic Sheep Lineages.

Once widespread in their homelands, the Anatolian mouflon (Ovis gmelini anatolica) and the Cyprian mouflon (Ovis gmelini ophion) were driven to near extinction during the 20th century and are currently listed as endangered populations by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. While the exact origins of these lineages remain unclear, they have been suggested to be close relatives of domestic sheep or remnants of proto-domestic sheep. Here, we study whole genome sequences of n = 5 Anatolian mouflons and n = 10 Cyprian mouflons in terms of population history and diversity, comparing them with eight other extant sheep lineages. We find reciprocal genetic affinity between Anatolian and Cyprian mouflons and domestic sheep, higher than all other studied wild sheep genomes, including the Iranian mouflon (O. gmelini). Studying diversity indices, we detect a considerable load of short runs of homozygosity blocks (<2 Mb) in both Anatolian and Cyprian mouflons, reflecting small effective population size (Ne). Meanwhile, Ne and mutation load estimates are lower in Cyprian compared with Anatolian mouflons, suggesting the purging of recessive deleterious variants in Cyprian sheep under a small long-term Ne, possibly attributable to founder effects, island isolation, introgression from domestic lineages, or differences in their bottleneck dynamics. Expanding our analyses to worldwide wild and feral Ovis genomes, we observe varying viability metrics among different lineages and a limited consistency between viability metrics and International Union for Conservation of Nature conservation status. Factors such as recent inbreeding, introgression, and unique population dynamics may have contributed to the observed disparities.