Tomenable
Regular Member
- Messages
- 5,419
- Reaction score
- 1,337
- Points
- 113
- Location
- Poland
- Ethnic group
- Polish
- Y-DNA haplogroup
- R1b-L617
- mtDNA haplogroup
- W6a
Another lesson showing that it is better to avoid sweeping generalizations based on snippets of data. This paper is specifically about North-Eastern Europe (the Baltic region), but I suppose that people of the Trypillian culture in Ukraine will also turn out to be much more Euro HG and much less of Non-Euro immigrant ancestry than more westerly Neolithic groups:
The Neolithic Transition at the Edge of Europe
Jones et al.
In Europe, the Neolithic transition marked the beginning of a period of innovations which saw people move from a mobile lifestyle, dependent on hunting and gathering for survival, to a more sedentary way of life based on food production. This new lifeway, which began in the Near East ~11 kya, spread quickly across the continental interior of Europe predominantly through demic diffusion.
While the genetic impact of the Neolithic transition has been well explored in central Europe, its impact on more peripheral regions of the continent has not been as extensively studied. To broaden our understanding of this dynamic phase in European prehistory, we analysed genomes from a 4,000 year temporal transect through the Baltic region spanning from the Late Mesolithic to the Late Neolithic period. We found evidence for connectivity from the Mesolithic to the Neolithic however, we also detected signals consistent with influxes from non-local populations. These influences were distinct from the early farmer admixture which transformed the genetic landscape of central Europe during the Neolithic. Interestingly, dietary stable isotope analyses (δ15N and δ 13C) show that the genetic shifts coincide with diversifications in subsistence strategy. These results suggest that the Neolithic was a period of genetic flux in the Baltic however, the cultural and technological changes observed were largely independent of forager-farmer genetic exchange.