A new study suggests that first European farmers migrated from modern-day Greece and Turkey and uses farming as a new strategy for survival.

The findings are based on genetic samples from ancient farming communities in Germany, Hungary and Spain. By comparing these with ancient genomes found at sites in Greece and northwest Turkey, where agriculture was practiced centuries earlier, researchers were able to draw a genetic line linking the European and Aegean populations.

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According to the study, the Neolithic settlers from northern Greece and the Marmara Sea region of western Turkey reached central Europe via a Balkan route and the Iberian Peninsula via a Mediterranean route. These colonists brought sedentary life, agriculture, and domestic animals and plants to Europe. During their expansion they will have met hunter-gatherers who lived in Europe since the Ice Age, but the two groups mixed initially only to a very limited extent.

One of the study’s authors and an anthropologist and population geneticist at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, Joachim Burger said genetic analyses of the samples showed that the ancient farmers in central Europe and Spain were more closely related to the Aegean group than to each other. This suggests that farmers came in two separate waves — northward into the continent and westward along the coastline to Spain.

“There are still details to flesh out, and no doubt there will be surprises around the corner, but when it comes to the big picture on how farming spread into Europe, this debate is over. Thanks to ancient DNA, our understanding of the Neolithic revolution has fundamentally changed over the last seven years,” said study co-author Mark Thomas, a researcher at the University College London.

By modelling ancient and modern genomes as mixtures of DNA from other ancient genomes, the authors could trace most of the ancestry of individuals from ancient farming societies in Germany and Hungary to the ancient Anatolian and Greek genomes. Ancient Greek and Anatolian genomes contributed to all modern day European populations, and are particularly similar to modern Mediterranean populations as well as to Otzi, the ice mummy from the Alps.

Scientists published their findings in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

TagsFarming, Europe, Aegean, Greece, Turkey, stone age, European migration, agriculture