Search results for "Neolithic"
showing 10 items of 124 documents
The Use of Wild Plants in the Palaeolithic and Neolithic of Northwestern Africa: Preliminary Results from the PALEOPLANT Project
2018
Carrión Marco Y., Morales J., Portillo M., Pérez-Jordà G., Peña-Chocarro L., Zapata L. (2018) The Use of Wild Plants in the Palaeolithic and Neolithic of Northwestern Africa: Preliminary Results from the PALEOPLANT Project. En: Mercuri A., D'Andrea A., Fornaciari R., Höhn A. (eds.) Plants and People in the African Past. Springer, Cham
The maternal genetic make-up of the Iberian Peninsula between the Neolithic and the Early Bronze Age
2017
Agriculture first reached the Iberian Peninsula around 5700 BCE. However, little is known about the genetic structure and changes of prehistoric populations in different geographic areas of Iberia. In our study, we focus on the maternal genetic makeup of the Neolithic (~ 5500–3000 BCE), Chalcolithic (~ 3000–2200 BCE) and Early Bronze Age (~ 2200–1500 BCE). We report ancient mitochondrial DNA results of 213 individuals (151 HVS-I sequences) from the northeast, central, southeast and southwest regions and thus on the largest archaeogenetic dataset from the Peninsula to date. Similar to other parts of Europe, we observe a discontinuity between hunter-gatherers and the first farmers of the Neol…
The population genomics of archaeological transition in west Iberia: Investigation of ancient substructure using imputation and haplotype-based metho…
2017
We analyse new genomic data (0.05–2.95x) from 14 ancient individuals from Portugal distributed from the Middle Neolithic (4200–3500 BC) to the Middle Bronze Age (1740–1430 BC) and impute genomewide diploid genotypes in these together with published ancient Eurasians. While discontinuity is evident in the transition to agriculture across the region, sensitive haplotype-based analyses suggest a significant degree of local hunter-gatherer contribution to later Iberian Neolithic populations. A more subtle genetic influx is also apparent in the Bronze Age, detectable from analyses including haplotype sharing with both ancient and modern genomes, D-statistics and Y-chromosome lineages. However, t…
Early farmers from across Europe directly descended from Neolithic Aegeans
2015
WOS: 000378272400038
Survival of Late Pleistocene Hunter-Gatherer Ancestry in the Iberian Peninsula
2019
The Iberian Peninsula in southwestern Europe represents an important test case for the study of human population movements during prehistoric periods. During the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), the peninsula formed a periglacial refugium [1] for hunter-gatherers (HGs) and thus served as a potential source for the re-peopling of northern latitudes [2]. The post-LGM genetic signature was previously described as a cline from Western HG (WHG) to Eastern HG (EHG), further shaped by later Holocene expansions from the Near East and the North Pontic steppes [3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]. Western and central Europe were dominated by ancestry associated with the ∼14,000-year-old individual from Villabruna, Italy…
The Neolithic Transition in the Baltic Was Not Driven by Admixture with Early European Farmers
2017
Summary The Neolithic transition was a dynamic time in European prehistory of cultural, social, and technological change. Although this period has been well explored in central Europe using ancient nuclear DNA [1, 2], its genetic impact on northern and eastern parts of this continent has not been as extensively studied. To broaden our understanding of the Neolithic transition across Europe, we analyzed eight ancient genomes: six samples (four to ∼1- to 4-fold coverage) from a 3,500 year temporal transect (∼8,300–4,800 calibrated years before present) through the Baltic region dating from the Mesolithic to the Late Neolithic and two samples spanning the Mesolithic-Neolithic boundary from the…
Ancient pigs reveal a near-complete genomic turnover following their introduction to Europe
2019
International audience; Archaeological evidence indicates that pig domestication had begun by ∼10,500 y before the present (BP) in the Near East, and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) suggests that pigs arrived in Europe alongside farmers ∼8,500 y BP. A few thousand years after the introduction of Near Eastern pigs into Europe, however, their characteristic mtDNA signature disappeared and was replaced by haplotypes associated with European wild boars. This turnover could be accounted for by substantial gene flow from local Euro-pean wild boars, although it is also possible that European wild boars were domesticated independently without any genetic contribution from the Near East. To test these hyp…
Organic residue analysis shows sub-regional patterns in the use of pottery by Northern European hunter–gatherers
2020
The introduction of pottery vessels to Europe has long been seen as closely linked with the spread of agriculture and pastoralism from the Near East. The adoption of pottery technology by hunter–gatherers in Northern and Eastern Europe does not fit this paradigm, and its role within these communities is so far unresolved. To investigate the motivations for hunter–gatherer pottery use, here, we present the systematic analysis of the contents of 528 early vessels from the Baltic Sea region, mostly dating to the late 6th–5th millennium cal BC, using molecular and isotopic characterization techniques. The results demonstrate clear sub-regional trends in the use of ceramics by hunter–gatherers; …
Evolution of lactase persistence: an example of human niche construction
2011
Niche construction is the process by which organisms construct important components of their local environment in ways that introduce novel selection pressures. Lactase persistence is one of the clearest examples of niche construction in humans. Lactase is the enzyme responsible for the digestion of the milk sugar lactose and its production decreases after the weaning phase in most mammals, including most humans. Some humans, however, continue to produce lactase throughout adulthood, a trait known as lactase persistence. In European populations, a single mutation (−13910*T) explains the distribution of the phenotype, whereas several mutations are associated with it in Africa and the Middle …
The origins of agriculture in Iberia: a computational model
2015
Here we discuss the importance of using the rich and growing database of high-precision, audited radiocarbon dates for high-resolution bottom-up modelling to focus on problems concerning the spread of the Neolithic in the Iberia. We also compare the spread of the Late Mesolithic (so-called Geometric) and the Early Neolithic using our modelling environment. Our results suggest that the source of radiocarbon data used to evaluate alternative hypotheses plays an important role in the results and open up new lines of research for the future.