Early farmers from across Europe directly descended from Neolithic Aegeans
Significance One of the most enduring and widely debated questions in prehistoric archaeology concerns the origins of Europe's earliest farmers: Were they the descendants of local hunter gatherers, or did they migrate from southwestern Asia, where farming began? We recover genome wide DNA sequences from early farmers on both the European and Asian sides of the Aegean to reveal an unbroken chain of ancestry leading from central and southwestern Europe back to Greece and northwestern Anatolia. Our study provides the coup de grace to the notion that farming spread into and across Europe via the dissemination of ideas but without, or with only a limited, migration of people. Farming and sedentism first appeared in southwestern Asia during the early Holocene and later spread to neighboring regions, including Europe, along multiple dispersal routes. Conspicuous uncertainties remain about the relative roles of migration, cultural diffusion, and admixture with local foragers in the early Neolithization of Europe. Here we present paleogenomic data for five Neolithic individuals from northern Greece and northwestern Turkey spanning the time and region of the earliest spread of farming into Europe. We use a novel approach to recalibrate raw reads and call genotypes from ancient DNA and observe striking genetic similarity both among Aegean early farmers and with those from across Europe. Our study demonstrates a direct genetic link between Mediterranean and Central European early farmers and those of Greece and Anatolia, extending the European Neolithic migratory chain all the way back to southwestern Asia.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences