Publication Date:
2009-09-05
Description:
After the domestication of animals and crops in the Near East some 11,000 years ago, farming had reached much of central Europe by 7500 years before the present. The extent to which these early European farmers were immigrants or descendants of resident hunter-gatherers who had adopted farming has been widely debated. We compared new mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) sequences from late European hunter-gatherer skeletons with those from early farmers and from modern Europeans. We find large genetic differences between all three groups that cannot be explained by population continuity alone. Most (82%) of the ancient hunter-gatherers share mtDNA types that are relatively rare in central Europeans today. Together, these analyses provide persuasive evidence that the first farmers were not the descendants of local hunter-gatherers but immigrated into central Europe at the onset of the Neolithic.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Bramanti, B -- Thomas, M G -- Haak, W -- Unterlaender, M -- Jores, P -- Tambets, K -- Antanaitis-Jacobs, I -- Haidle, M N -- Jankauskas, R -- Kind, C-J -- Lueth, F -- Terberger, T -- Hiller, J -- Matsumura, S -- Forster, P -- Burger, J -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2009 Oct 2;326(5949):137-40. doi: 10.1126/science.1176869. Epub 2009 Sep 3.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Institute for Anthropology, University of Mainz, Mainz, Germany. bramanti@uni-mainz.de〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19729620" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
Agriculture/*history
;
DNA, Mitochondrial/*genetics/history
;
Emigration and Immigration/history
;
Europe
;
European Continental Ancestry Group/*genetics/history
;
Female
;
Genetic Variation
;
Haplotypes
;
History, Ancient
;
Humans
;
Male
;
Population Dynamics
;
Probability
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
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