One of the outstanding mysteries of human history is how
agriculture spread across Europe, replacing the hunter-gatherer
lifestyle. Did farmers migrate, bringing a culture of plant and
animal domestication that took over? Or did local hunter-
gatherer groups merely adopt ideas about those practices? A new
study in the journal Science provides new insights. Researchers
suggest that farmers and hunter-gatherers were genetically
distinct groups that intermingled after the migration of the
agriculturally savvy people. "These results are important
because they are using ancient DNA, extracted from skeletal
remains, rather than sampling living populations and making
assumptions about the past," British archaeologist Colin
Renfrew, who was not involved in the study, said in an e-mail.
"The Orion Ground Test Vehicle arrived at NASA's Kennedy Space
Center Operations & Checkout (O&C) Facility on April 21. The
vehicle traveled more than 1,800 miles from Lockheed Martin's
Waterton Facility near Denver, Colo., where it suc