2024-04-20 13:19:37
Scientists do not yet know the exact circumstances that led to the extinction of European hunter-gatherers, but their decline largely coincided with the spread of agriculture in the region. Neolithic farmers arrived in Europe about 8,000 years ago and eventually replaced the hunter-gatherers with whom they shared the continent.
“Agriculturists began to flow into Europe from the Middle East, bringing domesticated animals and cultivated plants, and then there was a coexistence of farmers and hunter-gatherers until 5,000 years ago the hunter-gatherers became extinct,” says Cosimo Posth, professor of archeology and paleogenetics at the University of Tübingen, Germany. .
European hunter-gatherers were not a single entity, but rather a collection of diverse human populations and cultures that survived by hunting animals and foraging for wild food.
Hunter-gatherers came to Europe in waves and began to settle on the continent around 45,000 years ago. C. Posth described this original population as a “dead branch” – because it mostly disappeared, like the nomads who came to Europe earlier. However, these first failed migrations were followed by at least several subsequent hunter-gatherer migrations the waves on the continent flourished.
C. Posthas notes that approximately 10-15 percent of modern Europeans The DNA comes from the last wave of hunter-gatherers that spread out of Italy about 14,000 years ago. Thus, some of their genetic heritage has survived, even though much of their way of life has long since disappeared.
Hunter-gatherers mostly kept separate after the arrival of agriculturalists about 6,000 years later—and while agriculturalists gradually took on hunter-gatherer genes, the hunter-gatherer population remained genetically distinct.
The DNA of a hunter-gatherer man who lived in Spain 7,000 years ago has shown that he had blue eyes and dark skin. This is what most hunter-gatherers across Europe looked like 14,000 years ago, while farmers of that time had lighter skin and dark eyes, says Posth.
As agriculture spread in Europe, hunter-gatherers lost their territories. “The last hunter-gatherers moved to the fringes of Europe, to areas where they did not compete directly with farmers,” explains the scientist.
There are still many unknowns about how these two groups interacted with each other. Some hunter-gatherers eventually settled in or near farming communities. For example, an approximately 5,800-year-old hunter-gatherer burial in present-day Denmark (the so-called Dragsholm Man) shows that the man was buried with hunter-gatherer graves, but his diet was consistent with that of early European agriculturalists. This means he adopted the culture and diet of immigrant farmers, according to 2024. in a study published in the journal Nature.
2024 m. in a study published in the journal PLOS One found that a male hunter-gatherer from Norway or Sweden was violently sacrificed by a farming community in Denmark around 5,200 years ago. The ritual sacrifice was not necessarily a punishment for the hunter-gatherer, who could have been an immigrant or a trader who had gained equal social status among agriculturalists — or he could have been a captive or a slave, the study authors noted.
Some hunter-gatherer communities likely experienced violent death at the hands of agriculturalists or acquired new pathogens from livestock. In Denmark, for example, hunter-gatherers were quickly wiped out a few generations after agriculturalists arrived around 5,900 years ago, according to a 2024 study. In a Nature study.
Anders Fisher, an independent archaeologist and author of both studies, says that as agriculturalists spread, their numbers grew rapidly and they may have gone to war with hunter-gatherers.
“Those late hunter-gatherers didn’t decide to become farmers,” says Fisher. “Someone decided for them, and maybe they were wiped out in the same process.”
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2024-04-20 13:19:37