PEOPLING × GENETICS
The First Farmers of Europe
~8,500 years ago
Neolithic · Neolithic · Holocene · Greenlandian
Farming reached Europe about 8,500 years ago with migrating populations, as ancient DNA shows, and not by the spread of techniques alone.
The neolithisation of Europe took place through the migration of populations and not through the diffusion of techniques alone, as a three-term genetic comparison establishes: the DNA of European Neolithic skeletons, set on one hand against that of the earlier hunter-gatherers of the same region and on the other against that of the farmers of Anatolia, resembles the latter. These populations spread from about 8,500 years ago along the Danube and the Mediterranean coast, mixing to varying degrees with the resident hunter-gatherers. The proportions vary by region and change over time, hunter-gatherer ancestry increasing again several generations after first contact.
Why it matters
The question, posed for a century, whether neolithisation resulted from a circulation of objects and techniques or from the movement of populations, is settled by the genomes, which further document the detail of the process: bottlenecks in the pioneer populations, admixture proportions varying by region, the persistence of hunter-gatherer communities for several centuries alongside farmers. The majority of present-day Europeans carry this threefold inheritance, to which that of the steppe herders will be added three millennia later.
Dating & uncertainty
The expansion constitutes an extended process and not an event: agriculture reaches the Aegean before 8,500 years ago, the Atlantic and the Baltic around 6,000. The date retained corresponds to the moment when both routes of penetration into temperate Europe, Danubian and Mediterranean, are under way.
Our species’ history as one day
23:21:0838 min 51 s before midnight
if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day