Central and western Europe's first farmers weren't crafty, native hunter-gatherers who gradually gave up their spears for seeds, a new study says.
Instead, they were experienced outsiders who arrived on the scene around 5500 B.C. with animals in tow—and the locals apparently didn't roll out the welcome wagon.
"Within a few generations, all the farmers—probably coming from southeast Europe—moved into central Europe bringing their culture, [livestock], and everything," Joachim Burger, a molecular archaeologist at the University of Mainz in Germany, said via email.
The finding is based on analysis of genetic material in the skeletal remains of ancient hunter-gatherers and early farmers found in Germany, Lithuania, Poland, and Russia—though farming is thought to have reached areas as far west as western France during the period of rapid expansion, about 7,500 years ago.
The study goes against a long-standing idea that Europe's first farmers were former hunter-gatherer populations that had settled the region after the last ice age, about 10,000 years ago.
Perhaps, the thinking went, the hunter-gatherers had observed farming practices during their travels or had learned from neighbors.
Instead, the researchers found, the hunter-gatherers and the early farmers remained segregated, according to the study, to be published tomorrow in the journal Science.
Though the two groups had "cultural contacts," Burger said, they generally didn't mate, at least initially, according to the genetic analysis.
"We have to think of parallel existing societies of hunter-gatherers and farmers," Burger said. "They were different people."
Ok, so I trolled on the post name. Byte me! :P
1 comment:
This isn't particularly new, though the genetic result is. There's been a growing belief within European archaeology that farmers in central Europe -- the Linearbandkeramik culture specifically -- did not have close connection with the hunter-gatherers previously there. If memory serves, the main archaeological evidence for interaction is embedded weapon points in skeletal remains.
But for the past several decades, Colin Renfrew and his school promoted a theory of slow, local development of Europe changing through cultural diffusion and (of course) they had an extremely crappy mathematical model they used to justify it. No migrations or replacements.
LBK material culture moved quickly across Europe, as far as Ukraine and the Paris basin, and with remarkable uniformity. It would be an unusually rapidly adoption of a new cultural complex, although not completely unheard of. But the main reason not to think of it in terms of migration or replacement was the Renfrew school's insistence that this did not happen in prehistoric Europe until much later.
Burger previously accepted the cultural diffusion hypothesis and published early results with Renfrew in Science in 2005 that seemed to support the idea. Now it's "a major migration event that I never would have believed in before." So this is news more from a sociology of science perspective.
Carlos
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