Dienekes ran the fragments of autosomal DNA recovered from a Neolithic farmer buried in Sweden (dated 4800 to 4000 years before present). The results came up like this:
Euro7
- 61.5% Northwestern European (Atlantic)
- 21.4% Southeastern European
- 17.1% Southwestern European
0% for the four other populations, including Caucasus.
K7b
- 59.1% Atlantic-Baltic European
- 40.9% Southern European
0% for the five other populations, including West Asia.
K12b
- 81% Atlantic-Mediterranean
- 8.6% Southwest Asia
- 5.5% North European
- 4.2% Caucasus
- 0.7% East Africa
----
This is all quite unexpected. All evidence point that agriculture arose in the Levant, and domestication in East Anatolia and the Caucasus, and that both spread from there to Mediterranean Europe and the Balkans, then progressively to the rest of Europe. The only point of debate was whether farming and domestication spread through massive migrations, minor migrations or simply through contact between (settled) neighbours.
All the genetic evidence so far has supported a major colonisation of Greece, Italy and the southern Balkans by West Asian Neolithic farmers, then a demic dilution of the West Asian genes towards the Atlantic and the Baltic. This dilution could have be thought as the result of mingling between the Near-Eastern farmers and Mesolithic Europeans as the former slowly made their way deeper into Europe. After all it took over 2500 years for the farmers to reach northern Europe from Anatolia.
But what are we seeing here ? Two serious contradictions of all these hypotheses.
1) The DNA of this Swedish Neolithic farmer contrasted sharply with that of the two contemporary hunter-gatherers also tested (who scored extremely high at Northeastern at Euro7, Atlantic-Baltic at K7b and North European at K12b - all components nearly or completely absent in the Neolithic individual). As this was the end of the Neolithic period in Europe (Bronze Age already under way in the the steppes with the Corded Ware culture), we can therefore conclude that Neolithic farmers did not regularly intermarry with Mesolithic Europeans as they were advancing through Europe. It might have happened very occasionally (the 5.5% of North European at K12b), but overall the two populations remained almost perfectly secluded from each others, in a sort of apartheid.
Modern Europeans are much more mixed. In most countries everybody will have a substantial amount of both Northern and Southern European DNA. Even the Scandinavians and Orcadians have about 20% of Southern European autosomal DNA nowadays. The blending of the two gene pools must have happened after the Neolithic ended, from the Bronze Age onwards, in the next 4,500 years until now.
2) What surprised me most about this Neolithic sample is that it was overwhelmingly Southern and Western European, and almost not West Asian/Caucasian at all. Archaeologists have retraced the spread of agriculture from the Balkans to Scandinavia following the Danube, then moving north across Germany (LBK Culture). Coming from Southeast Europe, how could Neolithic farmers be genetically alike to Southwestern Europeans ? If they didn't mingle with the hunter-gatherers they encountered, how could they lack almost entirely West Asian/Caucasian or Southeast European DNA ? This doesn't make sense at all. Unless of course the farmers did not come from the LBK Culture of Germany, but directly by boats from the Megalithic cultures of Western Europe.
This would explain how megalithic sites were found around Denmark and southern Sweden, virtually bypassing the Benelux and Germany. It also explains why modern Scandinavians have such a small percentage of West Asian Y-DNA haplogroups (roughly 6% for G2a, J1, J2, E1b1b and T together) despite substantial amount of South European autosomal DNA (33% of Atlantic-Med at K12b and 14% of Mediterranean at K12 for the Swedes ). Megalithic people were seafarers. They traded from Iberia to the British Isles along the coast of France, and to Sardinia and Sicily. Continental LBK people apparently lacked the skills to build boats to colonise Scandinavia and the British Isles. That is why these regions seem to have been colonised for Southwest European farmers in the 5th millennium BCE. That would also explain the similarity between Sardinia, Corsica, Iberia, Britain, Ireland and Scandinavia is head shapes (all dolicocephalic, in contrast to the rest of Europe). We still need to find out where exactly the Megalithic culture started and how it expanded.
What this autosomal analysis managed to confirmed is that Europe underwent a major population change after the Neolithic, bringing both Northeastern European and Caucasian genes to most of Europe, with a gradient from east to west. This is indubitably the mark of the Indo-Europeans from the Pontic steppes and the North Caucasus, the theory that I have always supported. The Dodecad Project has shown before that Caucasian DNA, and notably the Gedrosia component in the K12 analysis, was higher in North Europeans, where percentages of haplogroups R1b and R1a are high, than elsewhere. The peak for the Gedrosian element within Europe is in Northwest Europe, which strongly supports the hypothesis that R1b came from the Caucasus region after the Neolithic. The Northeast European component, completely lacking in Neolithic samples and among modern Sardinians, correlates mostly with haplogroup R1a, but was also carried by R1b people (otherwise how could one explain over 10% of Northeast European admixture in the Ireland, Wales, England, Belgium or France, where R1a ranges from 2 to 4%). There is a good chance that Bronze-Age R1b people carried an admixture of Northeast European, Caucasian/Gedrosian and West Asian autosomes, as Caucasian/Gedrosian and West Asian DNA were absent from Mesolithic and Neolithic Scandinavia, but are present today.
Euro7
- 61.5% Northwestern European (Atlantic)
- 21.4% Southeastern European
- 17.1% Southwestern European
0% for the four other populations, including Caucasus.
K7b
- 59.1% Atlantic-Baltic European
- 40.9% Southern European
0% for the five other populations, including West Asia.
K12b
- 81% Atlantic-Mediterranean
- 8.6% Southwest Asia
- 5.5% North European
- 4.2% Caucasus
- 0.7% East Africa
----
This is all quite unexpected. All evidence point that agriculture arose in the Levant, and domestication in East Anatolia and the Caucasus, and that both spread from there to Mediterranean Europe and the Balkans, then progressively to the rest of Europe. The only point of debate was whether farming and domestication spread through massive migrations, minor migrations or simply through contact between (settled) neighbours.
All the genetic evidence so far has supported a major colonisation of Greece, Italy and the southern Balkans by West Asian Neolithic farmers, then a demic dilution of the West Asian genes towards the Atlantic and the Baltic. This dilution could have be thought as the result of mingling between the Near-Eastern farmers and Mesolithic Europeans as the former slowly made their way deeper into Europe. After all it took over 2500 years for the farmers to reach northern Europe from Anatolia.
But what are we seeing here ? Two serious contradictions of all these hypotheses.
1) The DNA of this Swedish Neolithic farmer contrasted sharply with that of the two contemporary hunter-gatherers also tested (who scored extremely high at Northeastern at Euro7, Atlantic-Baltic at K7b and North European at K12b - all components nearly or completely absent in the Neolithic individual). As this was the end of the Neolithic period in Europe (Bronze Age already under way in the the steppes with the Corded Ware culture), we can therefore conclude that Neolithic farmers did not regularly intermarry with Mesolithic Europeans as they were advancing through Europe. It might have happened very occasionally (the 5.5% of North European at K12b), but overall the two populations remained almost perfectly secluded from each others, in a sort of apartheid.
Modern Europeans are much more mixed. In most countries everybody will have a substantial amount of both Northern and Southern European DNA. Even the Scandinavians and Orcadians have about 20% of Southern European autosomal DNA nowadays. The blending of the two gene pools must have happened after the Neolithic ended, from the Bronze Age onwards, in the next 4,500 years until now.
2) What surprised me most about this Neolithic sample is that it was overwhelmingly Southern and Western European, and almost not West Asian/Caucasian at all. Archaeologists have retraced the spread of agriculture from the Balkans to Scandinavia following the Danube, then moving north across Germany (LBK Culture). Coming from Southeast Europe, how could Neolithic farmers be genetically alike to Southwestern Europeans ? If they didn't mingle with the hunter-gatherers they encountered, how could they lack almost entirely West Asian/Caucasian or Southeast European DNA ? This doesn't make sense at all. Unless of course the farmers did not come from the LBK Culture of Germany, but directly by boats from the Megalithic cultures of Western Europe.
This would explain how megalithic sites were found around Denmark and southern Sweden, virtually bypassing the Benelux and Germany. It also explains why modern Scandinavians have such a small percentage of West Asian Y-DNA haplogroups (roughly 6% for G2a, J1, J2, E1b1b and T together) despite substantial amount of South European autosomal DNA (33% of Atlantic-Med at K12b and 14% of Mediterranean at K12 for the Swedes ). Megalithic people were seafarers. They traded from Iberia to the British Isles along the coast of France, and to Sardinia and Sicily. Continental LBK people apparently lacked the skills to build boats to colonise Scandinavia and the British Isles. That is why these regions seem to have been colonised for Southwest European farmers in the 5th millennium BCE. That would also explain the similarity between Sardinia, Corsica, Iberia, Britain, Ireland and Scandinavia is head shapes (all dolicocephalic, in contrast to the rest of Europe). We still need to find out where exactly the Megalithic culture started and how it expanded.
What this autosomal analysis managed to confirmed is that Europe underwent a major population change after the Neolithic, bringing both Northeastern European and Caucasian genes to most of Europe, with a gradient from east to west. This is indubitably the mark of the Indo-Europeans from the Pontic steppes and the North Caucasus, the theory that I have always supported. The Dodecad Project has shown before that Caucasian DNA, and notably the Gedrosia component in the K12 analysis, was higher in North Europeans, where percentages of haplogroups R1b and R1a are high, than elsewhere. The peak for the Gedrosian element within Europe is in Northwest Europe, which strongly supports the hypothesis that R1b came from the Caucasus region after the Neolithic. The Northeast European component, completely lacking in Neolithic samples and among modern Sardinians, correlates mostly with haplogroup R1a, but was also carried by R1b people (otherwise how could one explain over 10% of Northeast European admixture in the Ireland, Wales, England, Belgium or France, where R1a ranges from 2 to 4%). There is a good chance that Bronze-Age R1b people carried an admixture of Northeast European, Caucasian/Gedrosian and West Asian autosomes, as Caucasian/Gedrosian and West Asian DNA were absent from Mesolithic and Neolithic Scandinavia, but are present today.