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Migrants introduced farming in Europe 5,000
years ago: Study
Saturday April 28, 2012 09:44:29 AM,
IANS
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London: Migrants
from the Mediterranean region brought agriculture to northern
Europe some 5,000 years ago when its original inhabitants were
nomadic hunter-gatherers living off plants and animals, says a new
research.
Both groups bred and created the modern northern Europeans, says
genetic evidence unearthed by scientists from a quartet of
Stone-Age skeletons in Sweden.
Three were hunter-gatherers, buried in flat grave sites. The
fourth happened to be a farmer, buried 400 km away beneath one of
the megalithic tomb stones tied to agrarian communities. DNA from
the bones revealed a stark difference between the hunter-gatherers
and the farmer, the journal Science reports.
Analysis of thousands of molecular markers showed that the farmer
had genetic fingerprints matching those of present-day populations
from southern Europe, according to the Daily Mail.
"The Stone-Age farmer's genetic profile matched that of people
currently living in the vicinity of the Mediterranean, on Cyprus,
for example," said researcher Pontus Skoglund from the Uppsala
University in Sweden.
"The three hunter-gatherers from the same time most resembled
Northern Europeans, without exactly matching any particular
group," said Skoglund.
"When you put these findings in archaeological context, a picture
begins to emerge of Stone-Age farmers migrating from south to
north across Europe," Skoglund added.
"And the result of this migration, 5,000 years later, looks like a
mixture of these two groups in the modern population," added
Skoglund.
The study also showed that although the remains were excavated in
Sweden, none shared many similarities with modern Swedes. The
hunter-gatherers were genetically most similar to Finns and
Orcadians.
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