JOIN them or beat it. Hunter-gatherer groups didn’t adopt farming in Europe, but were instead displaced by farmers or joined their groups.
That’s the suggestion from a genetic analysis of the remains of 11 Stone Age individuals who lived between 5000 and 7000 years ago.
One theory of how farming spread globally is that hunter-gatherers were converted to an agricultural way of life as they encountered farmers. The latest findings tell a different story.
Pontus Skoglund of Uppsala University in Sweden and his colleagues sequenced the DNA of four Stone Age farmers and seven hunter-gatherers – and found deep-rooted genetic differences. “It is quite clear that the two groups were very different,” he says. He thinks the farmers were so successful that they displaced hunter-gatherers as they spread across the continent.
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The data also showed the farmers had a small amount of hunter-gatherer DNA. This suggests that as the farmers swept north, they bred with some hunter-gatherers and assimilated them into their cultures (Science, doi.org/sh3).
The exchange seems to have been unidirectional: there is scant evidence that farmers joined the hunter-gatherer groups.
This article appeared in print under the headline “Farming didn’t interest hunter-gatherers”
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