Mavi Boncuk | Most Visited Archeology Posting

Mavi Boncuk |"The appearance and dispersion of the first farmers in Europe has been the subject of heated debate among anthropologists, archaeologists, and linguists for over a century. While each discipline focused on different aspects of this grand topic, the central point of contention is what may be regarded as the demographic nature of the process. There is lack of consensus regarding two main aspects:
(1) the extent to which the transition to farming was an indigenous process, involved some admixture between incoming farmers and local hunters, or a population replacement process; and
(2) the historical pattern in terms of the timing and tempo of the dispersion events." from Ron Pinhasi, A new model for the spread of the first farmers in Europe.
Mavi Boncuk |
Some findings of the Palaeogenetics Group [1] at the Johannes Gutenberg-University Institute of Anthropology

Central Asia

Fifteen Kurgan skeletons of Central-Asian, Sarmatian, origin (400-200 BC) were investigated. The exceptional preservation conditions in the South-Russian steppe has led to the recovery of DNA in 14 of these 15 individuals. The haplotypes were compared to a database of more than 30,000 modern day individuals (in collaboration with Dr. Peter Forster, Cambridge) and led to the following conclusions:

1. All 14 individuals show differing haplotypes which suggests an unexpectedly heterogeneous gene pool.
2. Most of these haplotypes are rare in modern day populations of the same region.
3. Most of the haplotypes are nowadays found in Europe, the Caucasus or around the Black Sea.
4. Two individuals stem from a Middle-Age burial in the Kurgan and show haplotypes that nowadays are found in Arabic speaking countries.
5. The burial with the highest status –according to grave goods- is female and shows a haplotype that is found in modern day East Asia.
Figure 1: The spread of farming across Europe (from Burger et al. 2006).

The early Europeans (Neolithisation)

This study has recently been finished and published in Science (Haak et al. 2005; Burger et al. 2006). The project relates to the first Central European phase of the Neolithic, the Linear Pottery Culture (LBK), and was conducted in collaboration with Peter Forster, Shuichi Matsumura and Colin Renfrew of Cambridge University and others. We successfully extracted DNA from 24 skeletons from the LBK area (fig. 1) and compared it to the modern day population of the same region and found that there is a genetic hiatus between the archaeological population and today, as the predominating Haplogroup N1a that was found in high frequency amongst Neolithic farmers is almost absent in modern day Central-Europeans.

See Also:9th NEOLITHIC SEMINAR The Neolithization of Eurasia - Reflections in Archaeology and Archaeogenetics Ljubljana, 28 November - 1 December 2002 Abstract book

[1] Head of Working Group Prof. Dr. Joachim Burger E:jburger@uni-mainz.de
Johannes Gutenberg-University Institute of Anthropology
SB II, Colonel Kleinmann-Weg 2 2nd Floor Germany-55128 Mainz