By the mid-8th millennium calBP, both sides of the Western Mediterranean were inhabited by hunter-gatherer groups which probably maintained intercontinental contacts. However, from around 7.6 ka calBP, Neolithic groups from the Eastern Mediterranean arrived in the region along the littoral of what is today Andalusia. Neolithic innovations were adopted step by step by local Epipalaeolithic groups and subsequently dispersed via already existing networks. At the same time indigenous elements were integrated into this transitional process. New ¹⁴C-data confirm the simultaneity of the Epipalaeolithic–Neolithic transition in southern Spain and northern Morocco. Results are discussed considering models and concepts from social anthropology dealing with migration and acculturation.

Technology, typology and use wear analysis of lithic tools during the early Neolithic in the cave of Murciélagos de Zuheros (Córdoba, Spain): Reflexions on the Neolithisation of the southern Iberian Peninsula

• António Faustino Carvalho^a,  , 
• Juan Francisco Gibaja^b, , 
• Beatriz Gavilán^c, 

• ^a Instituto de Arqueologia e Paleociências das Universidades Nova de Lisboa e do Algarve, Universidade do Algarve, FCHS, Campus de Gambelas, 8000-117 Faro, Portugal
• ^b Departamento de Arqueología del Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC-IMF), Investigador contratado por el Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación - Subprograma Ramón y Cajal, C/Egipciàques, 15, 08001 Barcelona, Espagne
• ^c Universidad de Huelva, Facultad de Humanidades, Campus del El Carmen, Avda, Tres de Marzo S/N, Espagne

Abstract

The cave of Murciélagos de Zuheros (Cordoba, Spain) is one of the most important sites in Southern Iberian Peninsula. Its thick chronostratigraphic sequence includes occupations ranging from the Middle Palaeolithic to Roman times. Occupation levels corresponding to the earliest farming communities that established in modern-day Andalucia are remarkable due to its archaeological richness. This article focuses on the study of the lithic industry from these Early Neolithic levels, which is approached according to various tightly connected questions: raw material characterization, technical systems of production, and morphology and function of tools. Obtained results in their archaeological context are related to the questions on the origin of the Neolithic in Southern Iberian Peninsula.

DOWNLOAD @ 

Emerging genetic patterns of the european neolithic

American Journal of Physical Anthropology DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.22074

Emerging genetic patterns of the european neolithic: Perspectives from a late neolithic bell beaker burial site in Germany

Esther J. Lee et al. 

Abstract 

The transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture in Europe is associated with demographic changes that may have shifted the human gene pool of the region as a result of an influx of Neolithic farmers from the Near East. However, the genetic composition of populations after the earliest Neolithic, when a diverse mosaic of societies that had been fully engaged in agriculture for some time appeared in central Europe, is poorly known. At this period during the Late Neolithic (ca. 2,800–2,000 BC), regionally distinctive burial patterns associated with two different cultural groups emerge, Bell Beaker and Corded Ware, and may reflect differences in how these societies were organized. Ancient DNA analyses of human remains from the Late Neolithic Bell Beaker site of Kromsdorf, Germany showed distinct mitochondrial haplotypes for six individuals, which were classified under the haplogroups I1, K1, T1, U2, U5, and W5, and two males were identified as belonging to the Y haplogroup R1b. In contrast to other Late Neolithic societies in Europe emphasizing maintenance of biological relatedness in mortuary contexts, the diversity of maternal haplotypes evident at Kromsdorf suggests that burial practices of Bell Beaker communities operated outside of social norms based on shared maternal lineages. Furthermore, our data, along with those from previous studies, indicate that modern U5-lineages may have received little, if any, contribution from the Mesolithic or Neolithic mitochondrial gene pool. 


LINK

BEAN: Bridging the European and Anatolian Neolithic

The Neolithic first appears outside its core region in the Near East and central Anatolia after 7.000 BC, in the western part of Anatolia. This is a key staging area for the further spread of the Neolithic culture through Europe. The mode and tempo of the spread of the Neolithic remains problematic: although detailed chronologies of Neolithisation exist for individual regions, a precise and comprehensive Neolithisation theory is still needed for the entire area between central Anatolia and central Europe.

Marie Curie International Training Network aims to build a new generation of students able to identify and address the main aspects of this crucial period for the future history of the entire Eurasian continent.The BEAN network focuses on demographic questions surrounding the dissemination of the cultural, technological, and biological components of the Neolithic from western Anatolia and the Balkans to the rest of Europe.  The following are the primary research questions of  Marie Curie International Training Network :

       

1.  To determine the extent to which humans migrated (along with their domesticates) into  new lands during the establishment of the Neolithic in western Anatolia and southeastern Europe.

 2.  To understand the mode and tempo of the change from foraging to farming in the Neolithic of western Anatolia and southeastern Europe and the degree of cultural exchange  between local and migrant populations.

 3.  To reconstruct the patterns of circulation of raw materials, manufactured goods and ideas.

 4. To map the population structure and estimate demographic parameters of the human  groups involved in the transition.

BEAN is a Marie Curie initial training network (ITN). The aim of the BEAN training network is to educate a new generation of researchers that will be able to combine the important aspects of  prehistoric archaeology, palaeodemography, population genetics, biostatistics, and next-generation molecular genetics while developing specialized skills in their particular scientific discipline. The broader question of the Neolithisation of Europe will serve as an intellectual framework structuring the research and training opportunities provided by BEAN network participants. 

The BEAN network proposes to carry out much-needed research into the origins of settled farming life in Europe  and the Europeans themselves while training the next generation of European researchers in the cutting-edge techniques of three different research areas:

                1.       Anthropology and Genetics

                2.       Simulations and Modelling

                3.       Prehistoric Archaeology

These  scientific disciplines reinforce each other to form a robust research framework within which researchers in the BEAN network can approach one of the most pressing archaeological questions of our time: the Neolithisation of Europe.

Simulations and Modelling

Advanced computer models can be used to simulate the diffusion of genes through a population with time, in order to test hypothetical demographic scenarios for the Neolithic transition in Western Anatolia and the Balkans.  These  models can be built using data obtained from archaeological and palaeodemographic research, and evaluated using modern and ancient DNA from populations living in the region.  By altering demographic and biological parameters, alternative hypotheses can be explored. Modelling prehistoric gene flow will enable researchers to better understand the genetic correlates and consequences of the Neolithic transition.

Anthropology and Genetics
Recent advances in the anthropological sciences have made the Neolithisation question much more tractable for modern researchers. With the advent of palaeogenetic methods such as the analysis of DNA from archaeological skeletons, and especially with the possibilities of the next generation sequencing technologies (NGS), new data have become available that now render prehistoric demographic inferences possible. When ancient DNA data are analysed by appropriate statistical inference methods, particularly those applying coalescent theory, a reliable reconstruction of past populations structure is feasible. The increasingly sophisticated methods employed by biological anthropologists to examine the morphology and composition of fossilized tissues have further enhanced the informative potential of ancient human remains.

DNA tracks ancient Mediterranean farmers to Scandinavia

Mixing with native foragers led to modern genetic signature.

Geneticists analysing DNA from Neolithic burial sites in Sweden have made a surprising discovery. The genetic make-up of one individual — a female farmer known as Gök4 — bears a startling similarity to that of modern-day Mediterraneans. And the woman's genome provides clues as to how agriculture spread across Europe.

Modern Europeans’ genetic profile may have been partly cultivated by early Mediterranean farmers who moved to what’s now Scandinavia, where they paired up with resident hunter-gatherers.

DNA taken from 5,000-year-old skeletons previously excavated in Sweden unveils a scenario in which agricultural newcomers from the south interbred with northern hunter-gatherers, say evolutionary genetics graduate student Pontus Skoglund of Uppsala University in Sweden and his colleagues. Their findings feed into a picture of many early migrations of farmers into Europe, which often would have included interactions with local hunter-gatherers.

Pieces of DNA extracted from an ancient farmer’s remains buried in southern Sweden display gene variants most like those found in people now living in Greece and Cyprus, the scientists report in the April 27 Science. DNA retrieved from the bones of three hunter-gatherers interred on an island off Sweden’s coast contains distinctive gene variants that most resemble those of native Finns.

Most Europeans today possess genetic arrangements in between those of the long-dead farmer and his hunter-gatherer neighbors, Skoglund’s team finds. Breeding between culturally discrete cultivators and foragers contributed to Europeans’ current genetic makeup, the researchers propose.

“Our data suggest that northern European farmers originated in Mediterranean Europe and were genetically distinct from northern hunter-gatherers some 5,000 years ago,” says study coauthor and evolutionary geneticist Mattias Jakobsson, also of Uppsala University.

Ancient DNA in the new analysis came from cell nuclei, a form of genetic material inherited from both parents. Researchers isolated and studied from 1 percent to 3 percent of the nuclear genome for each excavated individual.

Jakobsson  says the new nuclear DNA evidence challenges a 2010 investigation that traced genes extracted from the remains of members of a 7,000-year-old farming culture in Central Europe to current residents of Turkey and areas just to its east. That study, led by human paleobiologist Wolfgang Haak of the University of Adelaide in Australia, examined maternally inherited DNA from cell structures called mitochondria and the paternally inherited Y chromosome.

Archaeological finds point to several routes into Europe for early Middle Eastern farmers, Haak says. A Mediterranean-based farming group may have reached Scandinavia 1,000 to 2,000 years after an initial expansion of farmers from further east into Central Europe, he suggests.

Farming’s rise “was by no means a uniform process across Europe,” Haak says.

Investigators generally agree that farming originated about 11,000 years ago in the Middle East and reached Europe by around 7,000 years ago. Debate has long revolved around whether waves of advancing farmers chased off European hunter-gatherers or traded cultural practices with native groups that then took up agriculture.

DNA links between the ancient Swedish farmer and nearby hunter-gatherers show that agriculture spread across Europe with the aid of genetic as well as cultural exchanges, Jakobsson says.

The result is strong evidence for the migration hypothesis. "If farming had spread solely as a cultural process, we would not expect to see a farmer in the north with such genetic affinity to southern populations,” says Skoglund.

But Wolfgang Haak, a human palaeobiologist at the University of Adelaide in Australia and a co-author of some of the mitochondrial studies, says that “one farmer from Scandinavia is certainly not enough to explain the spread of farming in places like Spain or Bulgaria and we definitely need more farmers from other parts of Europe”.

Another ancient DNA study, published this week in PLoS One, compares the mitochondrial DNA of Neolithic farmers and hunter-gatherers in northern Spain. The genetic variation amongst the farmers indicates that there was a complex pattern of settlement, with waves of colonization bringing small and different Neolithic groups into the region.

“Given the genetic evidence from studies of both modern-day and ancient DNA, I am convinced that farmers expanded in many different ways and under many different demographic scenarios,” says Haak. But Skoglund's study adds “an important piece to the big puzzle” of how farming became commonplace across Europe, Haak adds.

 “The technical advances in the genomic era now provide us with the necessary tools to tackle the different modes of the Neolithization in every corner of Europe with much higher precision,” says Haak.

There is also the tantalizing prospect that as understanding of the genetic basis of behaviour improves, it might be possible to comb fragments of ancient DNA for signs of behavioural differences between prehistoric populations. “In the future we might know a few genes that affect behaviour and we could go back and look into the hunter gatherers and see what variants of those genes are present,” says Mattias Jakobsson, a population geneticist at the University of Uppsala and a co-author of the Science paper. “But that’s not going to happen in the next couple of weeks at least.”

READ MORE

ALSO READ     ...       +++++++++++

The pollen signal of early neolithic farming along a habitation gradient in northern Drenthe

(2005) Bottema, S.; Cappers, R.T.J.; Kloosterman, A. 

ABSTRACT: It is concluded from the uneven distribution of megalith graves (hunebedden) and the presence or absence of surface (settlement) finds in northern Drenthe that the inhabitants of the Funnel Beaker culture were not evenly distributed over the area. Habitation seems to concentrate on the highest part of the Hondsrug and less on the lands to the west. It was studied whether this habitation gradient is reflected in the human impact upon the vegetation.

For this purpose sixteen pollen sites were investigated of which six gave information for the Early Neolithic.
The Early Neolithic was selected by radiocarbon dating and analysed with high resolution. In the pollen analysis the role of the anthropogenic indicators throws doubt upon their value for the archaeological record. Pollen production, distribution and precipitation of Artemisia vulgaris have been studied from modern vegetation. Pollen evidence from the Early Neolithic at various elevations, ranging from three-and-halve to nine metres above Dutch Ordnance Level, demonstrate the differences in vegetation at short distances. No palynological gradient paralleling the archeological record could be found.
Suggestions for prehistoric cattle keeping are compared with the management of nature reserves with primitive breeds. Alder may well have profited from the prehistoric grazing whereas birch may have suffered from it.

LINK

One of Earliest Farming Sites - Vashtëmi, Albania

University of Cincinnati research is revealing early farming in a former wetlands region that was largely cut off from Western researchers until recently. The UC collaboration with the Southern Albania Neolithic Archaeological Project (SANAP) will be presented April 20 at the annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology (SAA).

Susan Allen, a professor in the UC Department of Anthropology who co-directs SANAP, says she and co-director Ilirjan Gjipali of the Albanian Institute of Archaeology created the project in order to address a gap not only in Albanian archaeology, but in the archaeology in Eastern Europe as a whole, by focusing attention on the initial transition to farming in the region.

"For Albania, there has been a significant gap in documenting the Early Neolithic (EN), the earliest phase of farming in the region," explains Allen. "While several EN sites were excavated in Albania in the '70s and '80s, plant and animal remains - the keys to exploring early farming - were not recovered from the sites, and sites were not dated with the use of radiocarbon techniques," Allen says.

"At that time (under communist leader Enver Hoxha), Albania was closed to outside collaborations and methodologies that were rapidly developing elsewhere in Europe, such as environmental archaeology and radiocarbon dating. The country began forming closer ties with the West following Hoxha's death in 1985 and the fall of communism in 1989, paving the way for international collaborations such as SANAP, which has pushed back the chronology of the Albanian Early Neolithic and helped to reveal how early farmers interacted with the landscape."

The findings show that Vashtëmi, located in southeastern Albania, was occupied around 6,500 cal BC, making it one of the earliest farming sites in Europe. The location of early sites such as Vashtëmi near wetland edges suggests that the earliest farmers in Europe preferentially selected such resource-rich settings to establish pioneer farming villages.

During this earliest phase of farming in Europe, farming was on a small scale and employed plant and animal domesticates from the Near East. At Vashtëmi, the researchers have found cereal-based agriculture including emmer, einkorn and barley; animals such as pigs, cattle and sheep or goats (the two are hard to tell apart for many bones of the skeleton); and deer, wild pig, rabbit, turtle, several species of fish and eels. What seems evident is that the earliest farmers in the region cast a wide net for food resources, rather than relying primarily on crops and domesticated animals, as is widely assumed.

Allen was awarded a $191,806 (BCS- 0917960) grant from the National Science Foundation to launch the project in 2010.

Albania: Agriculture Goes Beyond Its Roots

Anthropology professor earns NSF grant to dig in Albanian wetlands.

Date: 10/11/2010
By: Ryan Varney
Phone: (513) 556-0142
Photos By: Susan Allen
Susan Allen, field service assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology, researches paleoenvironmental issues in Southeastern Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean among other areas.

This summer, she received a National Science Foundation grant of $191,806 to visit Albania and study the widespread dispersal and adoption of agriculture beyond its roots.

Professor Susan Allen and UC anthropology senior Kathleen Forste (left) visited the Vashtëmi dig site in southern Albania.

Your project is titled “Wetlands and the Transition to Agriculture in Europe: The Southern Albania Neolithic Archaeological Project.” Can you provide a little background on the purpose of this project?

I noticed in the literature that scholars commonly cited wetland environments in explanations for why agriculture developed in key centers around the world, such as Mesoamerica, East Asia and the Eastern Woodlands of North America. But they had largely ignored their role in shaping the adoption of farming in other areas. 

So what I am really interested in is addressing this question by looking at the transition to farming in Europe, which is not one of the centers of “pristine” origins. The site we are excavating, Vashtëmi, is at the leading edge of the shift to agriculture in Europe, in an area of the southern Balkans that was once part of a series of vast wetlands that stretch into present-day Greece and Macedonia. 

Now that you’re back from Albania and have had some time to reflect, what stands out most clearly about your experience?

What stands out most clearly is the urgent need for projects like this one, due to the rapid pace of development and the ineffectiveness and lack of enforcement of the recently implemented Albanian heritage laws in the current political climate. I was devastated to see that someone had started to build a house right on the site itself. Thankfully, the owner agreed to delay construction and allowed us to excavate in a small area within the house. 

The research team studied the Vashtëmi site for clues about agricultural migration.

So, were you able to draw any conclusions regarding the shift to agriculture in Europe?

I have to say that what I have now are more questions than conclusions! One of the very interesting discoveries is the diversity of meat-eating represented on the site. In the trash deposits we excavated, we found a surprisingly high diversity of wild animals—turtle, red deer, roe deer, boar, hare and fish—recovered only because of the specific methodology that we are using, as well as a possible lion bone. The domesticated animals we identified include sheep, goat, pig, cow and dog. 

One issue that really intrigues me is the role of cattle in the southern Balkans and the question of the beginning of dairying, which has recently been placed slightly later (around 5500 B.C.) in the Central Balkans according to DNA evidence. At present, what is clear is that the earliest farmers in the area were not wholly reliant on domesticated plants and animals, but also made use of wild resources from a diversity of habitats. So the transition, whether local or by colonization, was neither abrupt nor immediate.

Is there a similar habitat here in the U.S. that might help us better visualize your dig site?

Well, people hear about the project and they expect something totally different on the ground than the reality. One of the tragic environmental legacies of the Communist period throughout the Balkans is the widespread drainage of wetlands. The Maliq wetland, where we are working, suffered the same fate. So today, you’d need to picture a Midwestern cornfield, but place it in a broad agricultural valley surrounded by beautiful mountains on all sides. When it was first occupied around 8,500 years ago, the site would have been located in an area with a mosaic of streams and marshes, a short distance from a broad open lake filled with a great abundance of eels, other fish and waterfowl.

One of the goals of the project was to offer environmental archaeological training for young Albanians. How was your experience working with Albanian students?

It was fantastic! I got to know some of these students as participants in an Environmental Archaeology course that I taught in Albania in 2006-07 while there on a Fulbright Fellowship. The students who worked with us have a remarkable passion for archaeology, despite limited prospects for career advancement or economic gain. They worked very hard and were thrilled to learn a lot of new skills and approaches that they can take with them to any excavation—in Albania or elsewhere. I should also add that the American students—including three from UC—also did really well in the field.

Were any of these items a part of your dig apparel:  fedora, bullwhip, revolver, leather satchel?

Only when absolutely necessary of course, but only my wardrobe specialist knows for sure!

Report on the symposium on Modern Human Genetic Variation

The following text is taken from the http://dienekes.blogspot.com/

Joshua Akey summarizes the talks of a recent symposium at the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences. Two bits of information stand out from his report. 

The first:
In another talk focused on demography, Mattias Jakobsson (Uppsala University, Sweden) presented novel data on the impact of the agricultural revolution on the genetics of contemporary European populations. Specifically, Jakobsson and colleagues obtained nearly 250 Mb of sequence from three 5,000-year-old remains of Neolithic hunter-gatherers and one Neolithic farmer excavated in Scandinavia. Analysis of these sequences in the context of the present day European gene pool suggests that the spread of agriculture involved the northward migrations of farmers. Thus, these data provide the most direct and compelling support for the demic diffusion model of agriculture (as opposed to cultural diffusion) described to date.

It seems I have my answer to the what's next question. Jakobsson has been doing some interesting work on the demography of human emergence and dispersal, so it will be interesting to see not only the novel sequences from these Neolithic Scandinavians, but also how they fit into existing models of demic diffusion.

The second bit of information:

Similarly, Jeff Wall (University of California San Francisco, USA) described a novel method for inferring archaic admixture, which he applied to publicly available whole-genome sequence data generated by Complete Genomics. Provocatively, he finds higher rates of introgression in Asians compared to Europeans. An advantage of Wall’s method is that it does not require an archaic genome to infer introgression, and thus he was able to also test the hypothesis that contemporary African genomes have signatures of gene flow with archaic human ancestors. Strikingly, Wall indeed did find evidence of archaic admixture in African genomes, suggesting that modest amounts of gene flow were widespread throughout time and space during the evolution of anatomically modern humans.

I guess that I shouldn't throw explanation #1 out the window yet. Wall was involved in the recent paper on archaic African admixture, which only looked at a small subset of the genome, so it is nice to see that he is now working with full genomes, and that the race to data mine complete genomes for archaic admixture is afoot.

The book of abstracts is online at the symposium site. The Jakobsson paper does seem to agree with our emerging picture of a non-local origin of northern European farmers as well as greater survival of pre-farming populations in the northern periphery of Europe, but it will be interesting to see where exactly extant populations fall on the farmer-hunter/gatherer continuum.

Origins and genetic legacy of Neolithic farmers and hunter-gatherers in Northern Europe
Mattias Jakobsson
Department of Evolutionary Biology, Evolutionary Biology Centre (EBC), Uppsala University, Sweden

The prehistoric spread of farming in Europe has garnered intense interest for almost a century, and was one of the first questions to which population genetic data was used to investigate demographic hypotheses. However, the impact of the agricultural revolution on the European gene pool remains largely unknown. We obtained 249 million base pairs of quality-filtered human autosomal sequence data from some 5,000 year-old remains of three Neolithic hunter-gatherers and one Neolithic farmer excavated in Scandinavia, the northernmost fringe of agricultural practice at the time. Applying novel methods to study population structure based on low genome-coverage data, we find that Northern European Neolithic farmers are most similar to modern-day southern Europeans, contrasting sharply to Neolithic hunter-gatherers who are most similar to extant individuals from northern Europe. With most extant European populations appearing genetically intermediate between the two Neolithic groups, our results suggest that migration from the south by a genetically distinct group of humans accompanied the spread of agriculture to geographic regions where hunting and gathering was the mode of subsistence, but that admixture eventually shaped modern-day patterns of genomic variation.

Archaic admixture in the human genome
Jeff D Wall
Department of Epidemiology & Biostatistics, University of California, San Francisco, USA

We describe a method that uses patterns of linkage disequilibrium in extant human populations to identify regions of the genome that were inherited from ‘archaic’ human ancestors, such as Neandertals, Homo erectus or H. floresiensis. We validate this approach using two recently published archaic human genomes, and show that several ancient admixture events must have occurred, both within and outside of Africa. We also explore differences in the amount of archaic admixture across different contemporary human populations.


Finally, here is the meeting report:

Investigative Genetics 2012, 3:7 doi:10.1186/2041-2223-3-7

Understanding human evolutionary history: a meeting report of the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences symposium of modern human genetic variation

Joshua M Akey