UNIVERSITY OF VIENNA
An international team of researchers led by Pere Gelabert and Ron Pinhasi of the University of Vienna and David Reich of Harvard University has produced the most complete set of Early Neolithic genetic data from Central Europe to date.
The results of this study, published in Nature Human Behaviour, reveal that the culture responsible for the expansion of agriculture in Central Europe 8,000 years ago showed no signs of population stratification.
The expansion of agriculture in Central Europe took place in the 6th millennium BC. Within a few generations, farmers from the Balkan region expanded down the Danube valley into present-day France and eastward into present-day Hungary and Ukraine.
The cultural traces of the farmers are homogeneous across this area, spanning thousands of kilometers—but the lack of genetic data from multiple families makes it difficult to understand whether these communities lived in social equality, or to assess which individuals were the ones who migrated across the continent.
Long-distance travelers
A research team of more than 80 geneticists, anthropologists, and archaeologists studying the social particularities of the Linear Pottery Culture (Linearbandkeramik, LBK) has integrated new genetic data from more than 250 individuals with extensive data sets: bone studies, radiocarbon dates, burial contexts, and dietary data. Studying the genetic links between those Neolithic individuals has shown that the LBK people expanded over hundreds of kilometers in just a few generations.
First and corresponding author Pere Gelabert, scientist at the Department of Evolutionary Anthropology, University of Vienna, says, “We have successfully found distant relatives in Slovakia and others in Western Germany, more than 800 km away.”
“In this study,” corresponding author Ron Pinhasi explains, “we report for the first time that families at the study sites of Nitra in Slovakia and Polgár-Ferenci-hát in Hungary do not differ in terms of the foods they consumed, the grave goods they were buried with, or their origins. This suggests that the people living in these Neolithic sites were not stratified on the basis of family or biological sex, and we do not detect signs of inequality, understood as differential access to resources or space.”
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