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From: "Aaron Hill" <>
Subject: The Origins of Agriculture in Central Europe
Date: Fri, 12 May 2006 14:15:33 +0000

The Origins of Agriculture in Central Europe

http://archaeology.about.com/od/inventions/a/haak.htm
http://archaeology.about.com/od/inventions/a/haak_p.htm

From K. Kris Hirst,Your Guide to Archaeology.

DNA, LBK, and the Origins of Agriculture

Our modern civilization was built on inventions and innovations, such as farming, pottery, metallurgy, and tracking the seasons. These innovations developed in one or two places and times in prehistory, and then spread out from those places in a process archaeologists call diffusion. How diffusion really worked has always been a question of debate, not really solvable with known archaeological methods. Did people from the core invention area move en masse to other places bringing their innovations with them? Or did people from other places learn about innovations from trade or other relationships such as intermarriage? Or was it a little of both?

An international team led by Wolfgang Haak of the Molecular Archaeology Group of Johannes Gutenberg University have attempted to shed some light onto this difficult question using DNA analysis as a clue to possible past movements of Neolithic farming communities. Their report was published in Science magazine on 11 Nov 2005.

The Origins of Agriculture

Agriculture—the control of plants for human consumption—was invented in what is now Turkey about 12,000 years ago. By 7,500 years ago, farming had begun in Hungary and Slovakia, and then, within a space of 500 years, it spread up and into central Europe, between the Paris Basin and the Ukraine in what is now Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic. In the past, archaeologists noted that the spread of agriculture into central Europe was accompanied by a suite of artifacts and behaviors called the Linear Pottery Culture (linear bandkeramik in German, also known as LBK), from their distinctive banded pottery type. The LBK culture was widespread throughout Europe and had remarkably similar traits wherever it has been found, including the same kinds of crops, the same forms of houses, and the same kinds of stone tool technology, in addition to similarities in pottery decoration.

The speed at which farming cultures spread from what is now the Balkan states into the rest of central Europe, and the uniformity of the LBK culture across the region, suggested to some scholars that the diffusion of agriculture was achieved by massive human migration. In other words, population pressure in the Balkan states led to mass migration outward, the new farmers replacing the hunter-gatherers already living in central Europe. More recently, however, DNA studies began to indicate that instead, the existing Paleolithic peoples of central Europe had merely adopted the new form for themselves, rather than being replaced by a population of farmers. But no conclusive investigations had been published before now.

DNA and the LBK

Haak and his colleagues collected mitochondrial DNA samples of skeletal material from 57 individuals recovered from sixteen Neolithic LBK sites in Germany, Austria, and Hungary. Of these 57, 24 proved to contain adequate sample sizes for comparison. Of the 24 DNA samples, six contained a sequence called the N1a haplogroup. N1a is a distinctive and rare lineage in modern populations, accounting for two tenths of a percent of the people living in the world today. Analysis of the Neolithic data suggested that nearly 25 percent of the people who were buried in Neolithic LBK cemeteries had the N1a sequence; using a probability curve, the authors argue that between 8 and 48 percent of Neolithic populations in central Europe had the N1a haplogroup. Therefore, the Neolithic populations of Europe are quite different than the current populations. Although we do not know as yet about the Paleolithic populations, it is hypothesized by Haak and colleagues that they also did not have the !
N1a haplogroup, and therefore are more like the modern populations than those of the Neolithic.

Questions and Interpretations

So, what does this mean in terms of our diffusion model? Well, it’s difficult to say with certainty, but the results suggest that there was not a massive movement of people from the Balkan states, but rather a small number who were absorbed into existing hunter-gatherer populations. Adoption, says Haak et al., and not massive population change, was the primary process for diffusion of agriculture in central Europe.

Further Issues

The work of Haak and his colleagues will no doubt need additional data. The parts of the puzzle that have yet to be explored include where did the N1a branch originate? Will DNA from skeletons from the eneolithic Balkan states match the central European Neolithic populations? Are the individuals within the LBK sites who don't match the N1a sequence representatives of the original hunter-gatherer bands or simply non-related Neolithic migrants? What does the DNA from the Paleolithic hunter-gatherers look like? Does stable isotope analysis support the migration theories established by Haak et al.?

If the adoption model of the origins of agriculture in central Europe is supported, that does not mean adoption was necessarily the primary diffusion method for other innovations or even other agricultural crops. It does, however, suggest a fruitful pathway for discovering just how the spread of technology may have occurred in the past.

The innovative research of mitochondrial DNA has spread far more rapidly than did agriculture; but the extraordinary changes it has wrought in archaeological studies promise to revolutionize the study of the past.

Source: Wolfgang Haak, Peter Forster, Barbara Bramanti, Shuichi Matsumura, Guido Brandt, Marc Tanzer, Richard Villems, Colin Renfrew, Detlef Gronenborn, Kurt Werner Alt, and Joachim Burger. 2005. Ancient DNA from the First European Farmers in 7500-Year-Old Neolithic Sites. Science 310:1016-1018.
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