title: Origins and genetic legacy of Neolithic farmers and hunter-gatherers in Europe.
abstract: The farming way of life originated in the Near East some 11,000 years ago and had reached most of the European continent 5000 years later. However, the impact of the agricultural revolution on demography and patterns of genomic variation in Europe remains unknown. We obtained 249 million base pairs of genomic DNA from ~5000-year-old remains of three hunter-gatherers and one farmer excavated in Scandinavia and find that the farmer is genetically most similar to extant southern Europeans, contrasting sharply to the hunter-gatherers, whose distinct genetic signature is most similar to that of extant northern Europeans. Our results suggest that migration from southern Europe catalyzed the spread of agriculture and that admixture in the wake of this expansion eventually shaped the genomic landscape of modern-day Europe.
authors.affiliation: Department of Evolutionary Biology, Evolutionary Biology Centre, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden. pontus.skoglund@ebc.uu.se
authors.forename: Pontus
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Skoglund
authors.forename: Helena
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Malmström
authors.forename: Maanasa
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Raghavan
authors.forename: Jan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Storå
authors.forename: Per
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Hall
authors.forename: Eske
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Willerslev
authors.forename: M Thomas P
authors.initials: MT
authors.lastname: Gilbert
authors.forename: Anders
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Götherström
authors.forename: Mattias
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Jakobsson
mesh_terms: D000383:Agriculture / Q000266:history*; D002048:Burial; D004272:DNA, Mitochondrial / Q000235:genetics; D003710:Demography; D004641:Emigration and Immigration / Q000266:history; D014644:Genetic Variation; D015894:Genome, Human; D006239:Haplotypes; D049690:History, Ancient; D006801:Humans; D020641:Polymorphism, Single Nucleotide; D011157:Population Dynamics; D025341:Principal Component Analysis; D017422:Sequence Analysis, DNA; D013548:Sweden; D044465:White People / Q000235:genetics* / Q000266:history
chemical_list: D004272:DNA, Mitochondrial