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Europe's first farmers replaced their Stone Age hunter-gatherer forerunners
University College London ^ | Sep 3, 2009 | Unknown

Posted on 09/03/2009 11:47:19 AM PDT by decimon

Analysis of ancient DNA from skeletons suggests that Europe's first farmers were not the descendants of the people who settled the area after the retreat of the ice sheets. Instead, the early farmers probably migrated into major areas of central and eastern Europe about 7,500 years ago, bringing domesticated plants and animals with them, says Barbara Bramanti from Mainz University in Germany and colleagues. The researchers analyzed DNA from hunter-gatherer and early farmer burials, and compared those to each other and to the DNA of modern Europeans. They conclude that there is little evidence of a direct genetic link between the hunter-gatherers and the early farmers, and 82 percent of the types of mtDNA found in the hunter-gatherers are relatively rare in central Europeans today.

For more than a century archaeologists, anthropologists, linguists, and more recently, geneticists, have argued about who the ancestors of Europeans living today were. We know that people lived in Europe before and after the last big ice age and managed to survive by hunting and gathering. We also know that farming spread into Europe from the Near East over the last 9,000 years, thereby increasing the amount of food that can be produced by as much as 100-fold. But the extent to which modern Europeans are descended from either of those two groups has eluded scientists despite many attempts to answer this question.

Now, a team from Mainz University in Germany, together with researchers from UCL (University College London) and Cambridge, have found that the first farmers in central and northern Europe could not have been the descendents of the hunter-gatherers that came before them. But what is even more surprising, they also found that modern Europeans couldn't solely be the descendents of either the hunter-gatherer alone, or the first farmers alone, and are unlikely to be a mixture of just those two groups. "This is really odd", said Professor Mark Thomas, a population geneticist at UCL and co-author of the study. "For more than a century the debate has centered around how much we are the descendents of European hunter-gatherers and how much we are the descendents of Europe's early farmers. For the first time we are now able to directly compare the genes of these Stone Age Europeans, and what we find is that some DNA types just aren't there - despite being common in Europeans today."

Humans arrived in Europe 45,000 years ago and replaced the Neandertals. From that period on, European hunter-gatherers experienced lots of climatic changes, including the last Ice Age. After the end of the Ice Age, some 11,000 years ago, the hunter-gatherer lifestyle survived for a couple of thousand years but was then gradually replaced by agriculture. The question was whether this change in lifestyle from hunter-gatherer to farmer was brought to Europe by new people, or whether only the idea of farming spread. The new results from the Mainz-led team seems to solve much of this long standing debate.

"Our analysis shows that there is no direct continuity between hunter-gatherers and farmers in Central Europe," says Prof Joachim Burger. "As the hunter-gatherers were there first, the farmers must have immigrated into the area."

The study identifies the Carpathian Basin as the origin for early Central European farmers. "It seems that farmers of the Linearbandkeramik culture immigrated from what is modern day Hungary around 7,500 years ago into Central Europe, initially without mixing with local hunter gatherers," says Barbara Bramanti, first author of the study. "This is surprising, because there were cultural contacts between the locals and the immigrants, but, it appears, no genetic exchange of women."

The new study confirms what Joachim Burger´s team showed in 2005; that the first farmers were not the direct ancestors of modern European. Burger says "We are still searching for those remaining components of modern European ancestry. European hunter-gatherers and early farmers alone are not enough. But new ancient DNA data from later periods in European prehistory may shed also light on this in the future."


TOPICS: History; Science
KEYWORDS: agriculture; animalhusbandry; emptydna; gigo; godsgravesglyphs; helixmakemineadouble; mistergreengenes; mtdna
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To: eleni121

Point # 1 - I never said “farmers” were inartistic or stupid - far from it.

Point # 2 - Those cave paintings were made by NUNTERS, not farmers. Also, not inartistic OR stupid.

Point # 3 - I am not black, I’m Caucasian, despite the name I use


21 posted on 09/04/2009 10:58:27 AM PDT by ZULU (God guts and guns made America great. Non nobis, non nobis Domine, sed nomini tuo da gloriam.)
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To: colorado tanker
"They may not have gotten as far as Britain, but one theory I’ve seen is that farmers from the Black Sea region migrated up the Danube valley after the Bosporus dam broke and flooded the region around the Sea. Same theory that others pushed east, ultimately to Tocharia. The time frame would seem to fit with this paper."

I like this idea too. (Also,spreads Indo-European language) However, Oppenheimer's DNA studies (mostly) doesn't support it.

22 posted on 09/04/2009 11:56:54 AM PDT by blam
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To: blam

How do you explain the differences in the DNA found here - or is this just a flawed study?


23 posted on 09/04/2009 12:09:27 PM PDT by colorado tanker (Martha's Vineyard is great! Hey, honey, let's take a drive . . . .)
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To: colorado tanker
"How do you explain the differences in the DNA found here - or is this just a flawed study?"

Maybe flawed memory?

I'll re-read chapter #5 in The Origins Of The British, titled: Invasion Of The Farmers: The Neolithic And The Metal Age.

24 posted on 09/04/2009 2:00:04 PM PDT by blam
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To: blam

What I am saying is that there were “Modern” humans in Europe thousands of years before the population sampled here. Some of them may have been farmers also, but did not contribute to the gene pool of “modern Europeans” who arrived after the last great ice sheet melt off.

Does that make sense?


25 posted on 09/04/2009 2:15:29 PM PDT by ZULU (God guts and guns made America great. Non nobis, non nobis Domine, sed nomini tuo da gloriam.)
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To: colorado tanker

The Tocharians were probably descendants of people who’d been there for a long while (see that recent topic about the Tarim basin mummies). Their language was fortuitously preserved in written form; it’s not too far gone to think that there were plenty of others in Central Asia which were not preserved, or some which may yet be found. Tocharian (A & B) is extinct, and seems to be alone on its branch — based on what has survived. Seems likely that there were a bunch of other twigs.

But yeah, the Danube farmers coming out of the flooding Black Sea basin (inundation took perhaps 50 years) is theorized by Ryan and Pitman.


26 posted on 09/04/2009 4:29:30 PM PDT by SunkenCiv (https://secure.freerepublic.com/donate/__Since Jan 3, 2004__Profile updated Monday, January 12, 2009)
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To: Citizen Tom Paine
One wonders what kind of a world we would live in if the original Europeans had driven the IndoEuropeans back to Carpathia?
Until the cessation of WWII and the Cold War, the invasion and colonization of Europe by waves of ethnic groups from Central Asia and/or the Far East had never been stopped. :') So I'd quibble with that 'what-if' because whomever was in Europe just before the Indo-Europeans were probably not the original Europeans. :') The commonly held view is that an isolate probably indicates that its speakers either are the sole survivors of a much larger group which was there first but the rest of them were overwhelmed or absorbed by the now-dominant groups; or, that an isolate represents a later introduction from some unrelated group. A commonly referenced example of the former would be the Basque, while an example of the latter would be Malagasy, the 'native' language of Madagascar, which is a language right out of Borneo. OTOH...
America B.C.
by Barry Fell
(1976)
find it in a nearby library
A fascinating letter I received from a Shoshone Indian who had been traveling in the Basque country of Spain tells of his recognition of Shoshone words over there, including his own name, whose Shoshone meaning proved to match the meaning attached to a similar word by the modern Basques. Unfortunately I mislaid this interesting letter. If the Shoshone scholar who wrote to me should chance to see these words I hope he will forgive me and contact me again. The modern Basque settlers of Idaho may perhaps bring forth a linguist to investigate matters raised in this chapter. [p 173]

27 posted on 09/04/2009 4:50:50 PM PDT by SunkenCiv (https://secure.freerepublic.com/donate/__Since Jan 3, 2004__Profile updated Monday, January 12, 2009)
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To: ZULU

HI Zulu-— I do not believe any secular anthropologist can ever really know who replaced who.

IN fact the first humans were neither nor—they were fortunate enough to find a baaket of foodstuffs at their doorstep courtesy of the Lord.


28 posted on 09/04/2009 7:15:43 PM PDT by eleni121 (The New Byzantium - resurrect it!)
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To: decimon

Linearbandkeramik culture.


29 posted on 09/06/2009 9:46:45 AM PDT by Little Bill (Carol Che-Porter is a MOONBAT.)
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