PEOPLING × GENETICS

Farmers Walk Into Europe

~8,500 years ago

Neolithic · Neolithic · Holocene · Greenlandian

Farming crossed Europe in the hands of migrants: ancient DNA shows Neolithic Europeans descending mainly from Anatolian farmers, who spread along the Danube and the Mediterranean from about 8,500 years ago and mixed to varying degrees with the foragers already living there. The proportions differ by region and shift over time, hunter-gatherer ancestry rising again generations after first contact.

Why it matters

For a century archaeologists asked whether pots or people moved; the genomes answered that people did, and they kept the detail: pioneer populations squeezed through severe bottlenecks, mixtures that differ region by region, hunter-gatherer communities living on beside farmers for centuries. Most Europeans today still carry this triple inheritance, and its next layer arrived with the steppe herders three millennia later.

Dating & uncertainty

The expansion is a wave, not a moment: farming reached the Aegean before 8,500 years ago and the Atlantic and Baltic by about 6,000. The date chosen here falls where both routes into temperate Europe, Danubian and Mediterranean, are already under way.

Sources

1. Lipson et al. (2017), Nature · Parallel palaeogenomic transects reveal complex genetic history of early European farmersdoi:10.1038/nature24476
2. Rivollat et al. (2020), Science Advances · Ancient genome-wide DNA from France highlights the complexity of interactions between Mesolithic hunter-gatherers and Neolithic farmersdoi:10.1126/sciadv.aaz5344
3. Marchi et al. (2022), Cell · The genomic origins of the world’s first farmersdoi:10.1016/j.cell.2022.04.008

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