Agriculture spread to Europe thousand of years ago from the
South to the distant North, with successive steps, according to the
Swedish-danish scientific research. The study analysed the DNA of the four
[inhabitants of Scandinavia] of the Neolithic period and found that they had
many more genes in common with today’s Southern Europeans, as the Greeks,
Cypriots the inhabitants of Sardinia, than with any other European people.
The researchers of the Universities of Upsala, Stockholm,
and Copenhagen, having at their head
Pontus
Skoglund and Mattias Jakobsson who published the
study in the American journal “Science” according to the French Agency
and “Nature”, analysed using new developed techniques, the genetic material
that they took from the skeletons of one farmer and three hunter-gatherers, who
had been discovered in Sweden and are dated to about 5000 years from the
present. The two distinct civilisations, one agricultural and one of
hunter-gatherers, coexisted for about 1000 years at a distance of about 400 km,
the first in the Swedish hinterland and the second on the island of Gotland,
south of Stockholm.
By comparing the
DNA of these people of the Stone Age with the DNA of modern populations of
Europe, the team found that, from a genetic point of view, the hunter-gatherers
were less developed and had a greater relation with the Northern populations –
especially the inhabitants of today’s Finland, while the farmer had a very
close genetic relationship with today’s Mediterranean populations, especially
Cypriots and Greeks.
This discovery by the Scandinavian scientists shows that the
ancient farmers transported their agricultural knowledge and technique from the
South to the rest of Europe, up to the frozen North, where they finally mingled
with the indigenous populations, while teaching them how to grow their food
rather than hunt and gather fruits.
As Skoglund stated,
the genetic findings reveal that agriculture spread to the whole of Europe by
people who live in the Mediterranean and this happened through migratory waves
and not just by the cultural transmission of agricultural knowledge from mouth
to mouth. “If farming had spread only as a cultural process, we would not find
a farmer in the North who has such a genetic relation to the Southern
populations”, declared the Swedish scientist.
The Scandinavian research illuminates a
longstanding dispute among scientists concerning the way that farming reached
Europe from the Middle East, where it appeared approximately 11000 years ago.
At about 3000 B.C. farming had already spread to the greater part of Europe.
The basic dispute concerns the way that the transition from the hunter-gatherer
lifestyle to that of farmer, and whether farming spread through the migration
of farmers or if just ideas and the agricultural know-how spread slowly from
civilisation to civilisation. The new study gives more weight to the first
view, confirming previous DNA analyses, which had found similar indications
about the migration of people themselves from the Mediterranean, who brought
their farming knowledge with them.
Furthermore earlier
this year scientists
published almost all of the genome of “Ötzi”, the Neolotic mummy that was discovered
in the Alp in 1991. In this case as well, the genetic analysis shows a very
possible Mediterranean origin.
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The farming way of life originated in the Near East some
11,000 years ago and had reached most of the European continent 5000 years
later. However, the impact of the agricultural revolution on demography and
patterns of genomic variation in Europe remains unknown. We obtained 249
million base pairs of genomic DNA from ~5000-year-old remains of three
hunter-gatherers and one farmer excavated in Scandinavia and find that the
farmer is genetically most similar to extant southern Europeans, contrasting
sharply to the hunter-gatherers, whose distinct genetic signature is most
similar to that of extant northern Europeans. Our results suggest that
migration from southern Europe catalyzed the spread of agriculture and that
admixture in the wake of this expansion eventually shaped the genomic landscape
of modern-day Europe.
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