Our agricultural ancestors

The researchers have successfully extracted and analysed 7500-year-old DNA from skeletons of the first European farmers. They found several DNA types that are very rare in Europe today, showing the farmers are not the ancestors of modern Europeans. Dr. Peter Forster from the The McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at the University of Cambridge has founded an independent venture recruiting the public to contribute their DNA to an in-depth Neolithic project.

Agriculture originated in the Near East in the Neolithic (New Stone Age) about 10,000 years ago, from where farming spread to Europe via Turkey. For many decades, prehistorians have speculated about the identity of the first European farmers.

Some theories included the original European farmers were immigrants from Anatolia (Turkey), or local European tribes who had copied the farming techniques ultimately from their Anatolian neighbours. There were also questions whether modern Europeans descended from immigrant farmers, or from native European hunter-gatherers who started arriving in Europe much earlier, about 35,000 years ago when they replaced the resident Neanderthals.

The team sampled 24 skeletons from Germany, Austria and Hungary, from the so-called Linear Pottery culture of central Europe. They analysed mitochondrial DNA which is passed down exclusively through the female lineage, and enables researchers to distinguish female cultural migrations from male military adventures.

Mainz anthropologist Professor Joachim Burger and his student Wolfgang Haak were able to pick up the few DNA molecules that had survived in the bones. The DNA types which the research team found in the Neolithic skeletons include several distinct DNA types which are very rare in Europeans today.

In the currently available worldwide database of 35,000 modern DNA samples, less than 50 Europeans today have these ancient farmer DNA types.

Dr Forster’s colleague Dr. Matsumura’s computer simulations underline that these early farmers can have had only a limited impact on our modern gene pool. A hunter-gatherer ancestry for modern Europeans seems more likely now.

A potentially tiny genetic migration then triggered one of the greatest cultural changes in human prehistory, namely the transition from hunting and gathering to settled agriculture with houses and pottery in Europe.

Dr Peter Forster said:

“In order to learn more about the fate of these early farmers and their rare DNA types, we now need an extensive sampling of people of European descent.”