Europe's First Farmers Were Direct Descendants of Aegeans
For most of the last 45,000 years Europe was inhabited solely by hunter-gatherers. About 8,500 years ago a new form of subsistence – farming – started to spread across the continent from modern-day Turkey, reaching central Europe by 7,500 years ago and Britain by 6,100 years ago.
Human skeleton from an archaeological excavation in northern Greece, from where one neolithic genome originates
Photo/©: K. Kotsakis and P. Halstead, Paliambela Excavation Project Archive
Last month, an international research team led by paleogeneticists of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) published a study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America showing that early farmers from across Europe have an almost unbroken trail of ancestry leading back to the Aegean. The scientists analyzed the DNA of early farmer skeletons from Greece and Turkey.
Location of Marmara Region
Credit: Wikimedia
The study used genomic analysis to clarify a long-standing debate about the origins of the first European farmers by showing that the ancestry of Central and Southwestern Europeans can be traced directly back to Greece and northwestern Anatolia. “There are still details to flesh out, and no doubt there will be surprises around the corner, but when it comes to the big picture on how farming spread into Europe, this debate is over,” said Mark Thomas of University College London (UCL), co-author on the study. “Thanks to ancient DNA, our understanding of the Neolithic revolution has fundamentally changed over the last seven years.”
Sedentary life, farming, and animal husbandry were already present 10,000 years ago in the so-called Fertile Crescent, a region covering modern-day Turkey, Syria, Iran, and Iraq. Zuzana Hofmanová and Susanne Kreutzer, the lead authors of the study, concluded: “Whether the first farmers came ultimately from this area is not yet established, but certainly we have seen with our study that these people, together with their revolutionary Neolithic culture, colonized Europe through northern Aegean over a short period of time.”
Another study has shown that the spread of farming, and farmers, was not the last major migration to Europe. Approximately 5,000 years ago people of the eastern Steppe reached Central Europe and mixed with the former hunter-gatherers and early farmers. The majority of current European populations arose as a mixture of these three groups.
Contacts and sources:
Professor Dr. Joachim Burger
Palaeogenetics Group
Institute of Anthropology
Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz
Citation:Z. Hofmanová, S. Kreutzer et al., Early farmers from across Europe directly descended from Neolithic Aegeans, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 8 June 2016 DOI:10.1073/pnas.1523951113
Source: http://www.ineffableisland.com/2016/07/europes-first-farmers-were-direct.html
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