Europe’s first farmers replaced hunter-gatherers 4 September
2009 Analysis of ancient DNA from skeletons suggests that
Europe’s first farmers were not the descendants of the people
who settled in the area after the retreat of the ice sheets.
Instead, the early farmers probably migrated into major areas of
central and Eastern Europe about 7,500 years ago, bringing
domesticated plants and animals with them, according to new
research from Mainz University, UCL and the University of
Cambridge, published online in Science. The researchers analysed
DNA from hunter-gatherer and early farmer burials, and compared
those to each other and to the DNA of modern Europeans. They
conclude that there is little evidence of a direct genetic link
between the hunter-gatherers and the early farmers, and that 82%
of the types of mtDNA found in the hunter-gatherers are
relatively rare in central Europeans today. For more than a
century, archaeologists, anthropologists, linguists, and more
recently, geneticists, have argued about th