Tomenable
Elite member
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- Poland
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- Polish
- Y-DNA haplogroup
- R1b-L617
- mtDNA haplogroup
- W6a
What we don't see, however, is Neolithic farming communities full of people who are autosomally "hunter-gatherer" and yDna I2a. In other words, we don't have whole groups of hunter gatherers becoming farmers through cultural transmission. It always seems to have occurred through admixture genetically.
I think you have just fallen into the trap of chronology here.
Why do we assume that those people became farmers through genetic admixture, and not the other way around?
Maybe they first became members of farming communities, and then intermarried with farmers - acquiring the admixture in question. In order to definitely prove it, we would need to find samples of people who died immediately after transition from hunting to farming ("first and second-generation" farmers, whose great-grandparents were still hunters). It's like trying to find a needle in a haystack, but maybe it will happen one day.
For example, Dienekes has published on his blog, that recently a fourth-generation mixed-race Human-Neanderthal has been found. His great-grandpa or great-granny was a Neanderthal. This is the first such finding so far. The 45,000 years old Siberian found previously, was only 2,3% Neanderthal, and his Neanderthal admixture dated to 55,000 years ago - so some 10,000 years before his birth. And now we have a 1/8 Neanderthal.
What we need is a similar case of a farmer with very recent hunter ancestors.
BTW - farmers are more densely packed in space than hunters. A hunter needs ca. 10 km2 to feed his family, while a farmer needs - at the most - 0,5 km2. When farmers migrated, and they entered some area, they were immediately more numerous in that area than local hunters.
Hunters could only remain the majority in such areas which were unsuitable for farming, or where farmers didn't settle for other reasons.
Mesolithic genes must have survived in greater amounts in remote and isolated areas, while most fertile areas became heavily Neolithic-infested. The spread of farming to regions with most fertile soils was probably overwhelmingly through immigration from Asia Minor. But the spread of farming to remote areas, could be more through cultural transition (local hunters switching to farming), and less through population movement.