Tag: Agriculture

Blonde Bombshell: Scandinavians Descended From Stone Age Immigrants

If youre wondering where Scandinavians got their blonde hair and impressive bone structure from then you can tick hunter-gatherers who inhabited the region at the end of the Ice Age off your list. It seems that an immigrant people from the Eastern Baltic region, who drifted into modern Scandinavia in the Stone Age around the time of the advent of farming are the real genetic ancestors of modern Swedes, Danes and Norwegians and even the Saami people of northern Scandinavia, according to new research straddling the boundaries of genetics and archaeology.

The study, published recently in the journal Current Biology, is the work of groups from Sweden, Denmark and the UK, and is led by Anders Gtherstrm from the Department of Evolutionary Biology at Uppsala University and Eske Willerslev, of the Centre for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen.

It involved examining DNA from Stone Age remains to try and determine whether agricultural process were developed by hunter-gatherer communities the so-called Pitted-Ware culture themselves or brought in by new arrivals to the region, who co-existed beside Pitted-Ware people for a millennium until about 2000 BC. The evidence pointed firmly to population replacement by that stage. The hunter-gatherers who inhabited Scandinavia more than 4,000 years ago had a different gene pool than ours, stated Gtherstrm, speaking to ScienceDaily.

Our findings show that todays Scandinavians are not the direct descendants of the hunter-gatherers who lived in the region during the Stone Age.

Petra Molnar, at the Osteoarchaeological Research Laboratory at Stockholm University, concurred. Our findings show that todays Scandinavians are not the direct descendants of the hunter-gatherers who lived in the region during the Stone Age. This entails the conclusion that some form of migration to Scandinavia took place, probably at the onset of the agricultural Stone Age. The extent of this migration is as of yet impossible to determine.

The process by which humans populated the planet is being constantly revised, and this new finding may cause pre-historians to scribble out an extra line on their human migration map.

Picture by Candida.Performa. Some rights reserved.

First Farmers Didn’t Hunt or Gather

A century-old case may have been closed – DNA evidence appears to show Europe’s first farmers were not related to their hunter-gatherer forebears. Teams from the University of Mainz, Cambridge University and University College London have been comparing the genetic make-up of central and northern European hunter-gatherers with ancient farmers and even today’s central Europeans.

Their results show that hunter-gatherers share very little of their DNA with the farmers, and just 18 per cent with modern Europeans. Though relatively muted in comparison with other recent finds, the research provides the answer to a question that has mystified thinkers for over a hundred years. Humans traveled to Europe around 45,000 years ago, after which they foraged their way through the last ice age, which ended around 9,700 BC. Agriculture from the Near East then took hold from around 7,000 BC, which increased food potential 100-fold. The group’s results appear to prove once and for all that the farmers almost solely flocked from Mesopotamia, and weren’t indigenous to Europe.

So if we’re not related to the Stone Agers, and not the Near East farmers – who are we?

However, as much as the team have shaken off one doubt, another even stranger conundrum has appeared in its place. For not only are modern Europeans different from their Stone Age compatriots alone, but neither are they the sole descendents of the Near Eastern farmers who spread across the region either. As population geneticist Mark Thomas puts it, “This is really odd.” The researchers have asserted that the Carpathian Basin, which straddles nearly all central European nations, as the genesis for European agriculture. “It seems that farmers of the Linearbandkeramik culture immigrated from what is modern day Hungary around 7,500 years ago into Central Europe, initially without mixing with local hunter gatherers,” says Barbara Bramanti, the study’s first author. “This is surprising, because there were cultural contacts between the locals and the immigrants, but, it appears, no genetic exchange of women.”