This is fascinating to me. I luv science!
One of the outstanding mysteries of human history is how agriculture spread across Europe, replacing the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Did farmers migrate, bringing a culture of plant and animal domestication that took over? Or did local hunter-gatherer groups merely adopt ideas about those practices?
A new study in the journal Science provides new insights. Researchers suggest that farmers and hunter-gatherers were genetically distinct groups that intermingled after the migration of the agriculturally savvy people.
"These results are important because they are using ancient DNA, extracted from skeletal remains, rather than sampling living populations and making assumptions about the past," British archaeologist Colin Renfrew, who was not involved in the study, said in an e-mail.
The current thinking is that about 11,000 years ago, humans began the agricultural way of life in the Near East. About 5,000 years later, that culture arrived in continental Europe. Farmers and hunter-gatherers had different dietary habits, funeral rites and expressions of material culture, experts say.
To investigate the impact of the farmers, Swedish researchers examined DNA from four samples of human remains, all approximately 5,000 years old, in Sweden. Three were from a hunter-gatherer site, and one was excavated from an ancient burial site from a farming culture.
Researchers sequenced about 250 million genetic base pairs, which is between 1% and 3% of genomes of each of the four individuals, Mattias Jakobsson of Uppsala University in Uppsala, Sweden, said at a at news conference Thursday. The authors of the study compared this genetic information with that of reference materials from many different parts of Europe.
"What we find is that hunter-gatherers are most genetically similar to individuals who today live in the northern ends of Europe," Jakobsson said at the news conference. Specifically, people in Finland, Russia and the Orkney Islands of Scotland have genetic variants in common with the hunter-gatherers these researchers studied.
By contrast, today's residents of Southern Europe, such as Italians and Cypriots, are more genetically similar to the ancient farmers. Even in Sweden today, people who live in the north are closer to the hunter-gatherers' genetic signature than people who live in the south, who have a bit more in common with the ancient farmers.
Read more here: http://lightyears.blogs.cnn.com/2012/04/26/study-looks-at-how-farming-conquered-ancient-europe/?hpt=hp_t3
