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Study sheds new light on Stone Age Central Europe

Indigenous hunter-gatherers and immigrant farmers lived side-by-side for more than 2,000 years in Central Europe, before the hunter-gatherer communities died out or adopted the agricultural lifestyle. The results come from a study  that has just been published in the eminent journal Science.

“Until now, scientists believed that hunter-gathering cultures disappeared in Central Europe almost immediately after farming began around 5,000 B.C.,” says Olaf Nehlich, a post-doctoral researcher at the University of British Columbua. “These new findings show that hunter-gatherers continued to exist alongside farming societies for a much longer period of time.”

Until around 7,500 years ago all central Europeans were hunter-gatherers. They were the descendants of the first anatomically modern humans to arrive in Europe, around 45,000 years ago, who survived the last Ice Age and the warming that started around 10,000 years ago. Previous genetic studies indicated that agriculture and a sedentary lifestyle were brought to Central Europe around 7,500 years ago by immigrant farmers. From that time on, little trace of hunter-gathering can be seen in the archaeological record, and it was widely assumed that the hunter-gatherers died out or were absorbed into the farming populations.

The study focused on preserved Stone Age specimens found in the ancient Blätterhöhle archaeological site in Hagen, Germany. Canadian researchers analyzed sulfur, nitrogen and carbon isotopes in the specimens’ bones and teeth while a team lead by Ruth Bollongino of Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz conducted genetic testing, which found surprisingly little cross-mating between the two cultural groups.



The Mainz anthropologists have now determined that the foragers stayed in close proximity to farmers, had contact with them for thousands of years, and buried their dead in the same cave. This contact was not without consequences, because hunter-gatherer women sometimes married into the farming communities, while no genetic lines of farmer women have been found in hunter-gatherers. “This pattern of marriage is known from many studies of human populations in the modern world. Farmer women regarded marrying into hunter-gatherer groups as social anathema, maybe because of the higher birthrate among the farmers,” explains Professor Joachim Burger.

For a long time the Mainz researchers were unable to make sense of the findings. “It was only through the analysis of isotopes in the human remains, performed by our Canadian colleagues, that the pieces of the puzzle began to fit,” states Bollongino. “This showed that the hunter-gatherers sustained themselves in Central and Northern Europe on a very specialized diet that included fish, among other things, until 5,000 years ago.

The team also pursued the question of what impact both groups had on the gene pool of modern Europeans. Dr. Adam Powell, population geneticist at the JGU Institute of Anthropology, explains: “Neither hunter-gatherers nor farmers can be regarded as the sole ancestors of modern-day Central Europeans. European ancestry will reflect a mixture of both populations, and the ongoing question is how and to what extent this admixture happened.”

It seems that the hunter-gatherers’ lifestyle only died out in Central Europe 5,000 years ago. Agriculture and animal husbandry became the way of life from then on. However, some of the prehistoric farmers had foragers as ancestors, and the, hunter-gatherer genes are found in Central Europeans today.

According to the researchers, further study is needed to determine the social relationships between the two groups. “How these two groups of homo sapiens interacted is still very much a mystery,” says Nehlich. “Our findings suggest they lived separately, and kept to each other, but at this point, we have no idea if they were friends or foes.”

Click here to access the article 2000 Years of Parallel Societies in Stone Age Central Europe from the journal Science.

Sources: University of British Columbia, Johannes Gutenberg University

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