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Early farmers from across Europe directly descended from Neolithic Aegeans
8 June 2016
One of the most enduring and widely debated questions in prehistoric archaeology concerns the origins of Europe's earliest farmers: Were they the descendants of local hunter-gatherers, or did they migrate from southwestern Asia, where farming began? Genome-wide DNA sequences were recovered from early farmers on both the European and Asian sides of the Aegean to reveal an unbroken chain of ancestry leading from central and southwestern Europe back to Greece and northwestern Anatolia.
This study provides the coup de grâce to the notion that farming spread into and across Europe via the dissemination of ideas but without, or with only a limited, migration of people.
Early farmers from across Europe directly descended from Neolithic Aegeans
Zuzana Hofmanová, Susanne Kreutzer, Garrett Hellenthal, Christian Sell , Yoan Diekmann, David Díez-del-Molino, Lucy van Dorp, Saioa López, Athanasios Kousathanas, Vivian Link, Karola Kirsanow, Lara M. Cassidy, Rui Martiniano, Melanie Strobel, Amelie Scheu, Kostas Kotsakis, Paul Halstead, Sevi Triantaphyllou, Nina Kyparissi-Apostolika, Dushka Urem-Kotsou, Christina Ziota, Fotini Adaktylou, Shyamalika Gopalan, Dean M. Bobo, Laura Winkelbach, Jens Blöcher, Martina Unterländer, Christoph Leuenberger, Çiler Çilingirogl, Barbara Horejs, Fokke Gerritsen, Stephen J. Shennan, Daniel G. Bradley, Mathias Currat, Krishna R. Veeramah, Daniel Wegmann, Mark G. Thomas, Christina Papageorgopoulou, and Joachim Burger