A biomolecular archaeologist and a Swiss botanist have spent nearly a decade studying the world’s cultivated and wild vines, and according to DNA evidence they have unearthed, southeastern Anatolia – the Asian part of modern Turkey – could be where Stone Age farmers first domesticated the wine grape.

The biochemist used a sensitive chemical technique to look for significant amounts of tartaric acid, for which grapes are the only source in the Middle East. While Georgia, Armenia and Iran all played a role in ancient winemaking, preliminary evidence from pottery and even older clay mineral containers, seems to place the very first domestication of the wild Eurasian grape Vitis vinifera in southeastern Anatolia, sometime between 5,000BC and 8,500BC.

Southeast Anatolia is a vast fertile area stretching through modern-day Iraq and Iran to the Nile Valley in the south. Evidence found by the research duo suggests that hundreds of today’s grapes have their roots in varieties descended from the wild grapes of the region.

Through DNA profiling, the botanist says he isolated 13 of these founder grapes by tracing the family trees of European fine-wine grapes. He believes farmers across southeast Anatolia or the Near East started domesticating the wild Vitis vinifera grape around the same time – giving rise to the 13 founders. This, he says, debunks the long-held notion that most Western European grapes were introduced independently from the Middle East, Near East or Egypt, Turkey or Greece, at different times and in different places.