September 3, 2009. Copyright 2008, Graphic News. All rights reserved

Migrants introduced farming to Europe


LONDON, September 3, Graphic News: Analysis of ancient mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from skeletal samples suggests that Europe’s first farmers were not the descendants of the hunter-gatherer groups that settled the area after the last great retreat of the ice sheets some 12,500 years ago.

Instead, the early farmers probably migrated into major areas of central and eastern Europe about 7,500 years ago, bringing the domestication of plants and animals with them, says Dr. Barbara Bramanti of the Institute of Anthropology, at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany.

Human DNA, which occurs in all 60 thousand billion cells of an individual, consists of nuclear DNA and mtDNA. Nuclear DNA is found inside the cell’s nucleus and is inherited from both parents, while mtDNA, found outside the nucleus but still within the cell, is inherited only from the mother. By comparing types of mtDNA different genetic links between ancestral populations can be identified.

Bramanti and colleagues analysed mtDNA from Stone Age hunter-gatherer and early farmer burials, comparing them both to each other and to the mtDNA of modern Europeans. They conclude that there is little evidence of a direct genetic link between the hunter-gatherers and the early farmers, and 82% of the types of mtDNA found in the hunter-gatherers are relatively rare in central Europeans today.

“Further research is needed to pinpoint the exact geographic origin of the migrating farmers”, says Bramanti.

This research appears in the September 3, 2009 issue of Science Express, published by AAAS.
/ENDS