Farming Came to Europe by Varied Routes

How agriculture reached Europe from its origins in the Middle East some 11,000 years ago has remained a tantalizing mystery for scientists. Now a new DNA-based study suggests that Europe’s earliest farmers used two different routes.

According the magazine Science:

Some of this research, most notably in Germany, suggests that male farmers entering central Europe mated with local female hunter-gatherers ~ thus possibly resolving the contradiction between the Y chromosome and mtDNA results. 

A team led by molecular anthropologist Marie Lacan of the Paul Sabatier University in Toulouse, France, reports work on ancient DNA ~ both mitochondrial and Y-chromosomal ~ from more than two dozen skeletons found in the 1930s in a cave called Treilles in southern France. Archaeologists think Treilles is a communal gravesite because the bones add up to 149 individuals, 86 adults and 63 children.

They found that the female and male lineages seemed to have different origins. The mtDNA showed genetic markers previously identified as having deep roots in ancient European hunter-gatherer populations, but the Y chromosomes showed the closest affinities to Europeans currently living along the Mediterranean regions of southern Europe, such as Turkey, Cyprus, Portugal, and Italy.

The team also concluded that, in addition to the spread of farming into Central Europe suggested by the German studies, there appears to have been at least one additional route via southern Europe.

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Bacteria Causing 'Black Death' Conclusively Found

Anthropologists at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) have determined that the Yersinia pestis bacteria caused the Black Death that raged across Europe in the Middle Ages. Cause of the epidemic has remained highly controversial and other pathogens were often named as possible causes, in particular for northern Europe.

 Using DNA and protein analyses from skeletons of plague victims, an international team led by the scientists from Mainz has now conclusively shown that Yersinia pestis was responsible for the Black Death in the 14th century and the subsequent epidemics that continued to erupt throughout the European continent for the next 400 years.

"Our findings indicate that the plague traveled to Europe over at least two channels, which then went their own individual ways," explains Dr. Barbara Bramanti from the Institute of Anthropology of Mainz University.

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Advanced Balkan Society Predated Greece, Rome

Front and back of fired-clay female figurine, circa 4050 BC.

Archaeologists and historians are assembling the history of a society that existed in the Balkan foothills around 5000 BC ~ long before the rise of Greece and Rome ~ and produced surprisingly advanced art, technology, and long-distance commerce. No one knows what these people called themselves, but historians are now labeling them simply “Old Europe.”

According to the New York Times:

For 1,500 years, starting earlier than 5000 B.C., they farmed and built sizable towns, a few with as many as 2,000 dwellings. They mastered large-scale copper smelting, the new technology of the age. Their graves held an impressive array of exquisite headdresses and necklaces and, in one cemetery, the earliest major assemblage of gold artifacts to be found anywhere in the world.

Until recently, the most recognizable artifacts from Old Europe were terracotta “goddess” figurines, originally regarded as evidence of the spiritual and political power of women in society.

Although excavations over the last century uncovered traces of ancient settlements and the goddess figurines, it was not until local archaeologists in 1972 discovered a large fifth-millennium B.C. cemetery at Varna, Bulgaria, that they began to suspect these were not poor people living in unstructured egalitarian societies. Even then, confined in cold war isolation behind the Iron Curtain, Bulgarians and Romanians were unable to spread their knowledge to the West.

The story now emerging is of pioneer farmers after about 6200 B.C. moving north into Old Europe from Greece and Macedonia, bringing wheat and barley seeds and domesticated cattle and sheep. They established colonies along the Black Sea and in the river plains and hills, and these evolved into related but somewhat distinct cultures, archaeologists have learned. The settlements maintained close contact through networks of trade in copper and gold and also shared patterns of ceramics.

New research, archaeologists and historians say, has broadened understanding of this long overlooked culture, which seemed to have approached the threshold of “civilization” status.

Click here for the New York Times article.

Fired clay architectural model from Old Europe, circa 4050 BC.