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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 6,000-year-old low coverage genome sequences of five ancient barley grains that were excavated at a desert cave in 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. Our findings suggest genetic continuity of cultivated barley in the presence of gene flow between cultivated and sympatric wild populations in the Levant since prehistoric times. |