Who Were the First Farmers of Europe?

The Genetic Melting Pot of Europe… Corded Ware Culture DNA Revealed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNMWEXzHfDA&t=385s

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Who Were the First Farmers of Europe?

Chapters:
0:00 Intro
0:23 Origins of Farming
1:42 Spread into Europe & Genetics
7:36 Appearance

Who were the first farmers of Europe, where did they come from, how did they spread across the continent and what was their genetic history? I will answer these and many other questions in this video. Now farming obviously changed human civilization forever. The transition from hunter-gatherer societies to stable farming communities allowed for larger populations to grow and more complex societies to develop.

Before we look at the first farmers of Europe specifically, we need to quickly look at the origins of farming more broadly. When and where did humans first start farming? Well wild grains were collected and eaten from at least 105,000 years ago in Mozambique. The earliest evidence of small-scale cultivation of edible grasses is from around 21,000 BC in the north of modern Israel, from the Ohalo II people. Although interesting early examples, these do not constitute farming as such.

Our best guess is that farming originated in the Near East around 11,000 years ago, or around 9,000 BC and soon made its way to the Aegean area through Anatolia, modern-day Turkey, and then into Greece. What crops did the first farmers grow you may be asking? Well they grew the eight Neolithic founder crops: emmer wheat, einkorn wheat, hulled barley, peas, lentils, bitter vetch, chickpeas, and flax. Rye may have been in the mix around this time as well but this is debated. As far as livestock, pigs are thought to have been first domesticated in Mesopotamia around 11,000 years ago, followed by sheep. Cattle are thought to have been domesticated from the wild aurochs in the areas of modern Turkey and India around 8500 BC.

Sources:

Neolithic Britain: where did the first farmers come from? | Natural History Museum (nhm.ac.uk)

Early European Farmers - Wikipedia

Mercader J. Mozambican grass seed consumption during the Middle Stone Age. Science. 2009 Dec 18;326(5960):1680-3. doi: 10.1126/science.1173966. PMID: 20019285.

Hofmanová Z et al. Early farmers from across Europe directly descended from Neolithic Aegeans. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2016 Jun 21;113(25):6886-91. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1523951113. Epub 2016 Jun 6. PMID: 27274049; PMCID: PMC4922144. Early farmers from across Europe directly descended from Neolithic Aegeans - PMC (nih.gov)

Feldman, M., Fernández-Domínguez, E., Reynolds, L. et al. Late Pleistocene human genome suggests a local origin for the first farmers of central Anatolia. Nat Commun 10, 1218 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-09209-7

Snir A, Nadel D, Groman-Yaroslavski I, Melamed Y, Sternberg M, Bar-Yosef O, Weiss E. The Origin of Cultivation and Proto-Weeds, Long Before Neolithic Farming. PLoS One. 2015 Jul 22;10(7):e0131422. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0131422. PMID: 26200895; PMCID: PMC4511808. The Origin of Cultivation and Proto-Weeds, Long Before Neolithic Farming - PMC (nih.gov)

Brace, S., Diekmann, Y., Booth, T.J. et al. Ancient genomes indicate population replacement in Early Neolithic Britain. Nat Ecol Evol 3, 765–771 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-019-0871-9

Ohalo II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohalo_II

Creative Commons Imagery:

Matteo De Stefano/MUSE File:Homo sapiens - Neolithic - reconstruction - MUSE.jpg - Wikimedia Commons Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. CC BY-SA 3.0 Deed | Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported | Creative Commons

Detlef Gronenborn, Barbara Horejs, Börner, Ober File:Expansion of farming in western Eurasia, 9600–4000 BCE.png - Wikimedia Commons Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. CC BY 4.0 Deed | Attribution 4.0 International | Creative Commons

Aurochs Aurochs - Wikipedia

#history #farming #archaeology