for National Geographic News Europeans owe their ancestry mainly
to Stone Age hunters, not to later migrants who brought farming
to Europe from the Middle East, a new study suggests. Based on
DNA analysis of ancient skeletons from Germany, Austria, and
Hungary, the study sways the debate over the origins of modern
Europeans toward hunter-gatherers who colonized Europe some
40,000 years ago. The DNA evidence suggests immigrant farmers
who arrived tens of thousands of years later contributed little
to the European gene pool. Instead they left a cultural legacy
by introducing agriculture some 7,500 years ago, the researchers
say. The study's findings, published this week in the journal
Science, were a surprise to the study team, according to
anthropologist Joachim Burger of Johannes Gutenberg University
Mainz, in Mainz, Germany. "I expected the distribution of DNA in
these early farmers to be more similar to the distribution we
have today in Europe," he said. "Our paper suggests that there
is a good possibility