A burial site of a neolithic culture found near Saxony-Anhalt, Germany. A rapidly growing supply of DNA from ancient skeletons is changing evolutionary history. LDA Sachsen-Anhalt
Carl Zimmer of the Matter blog at the NY Times has a piece on the agricultural revolution and how our DNA changed due to it. A recent study, which is the first of its kind, has found that agriculture arrived in Europe 8,500 years ago. The international team of researchers studied the ancient human DNA from bones and other physical remains, some of the material dated as far back as 45,000 years ago.
“For decades we’ve been trying to figure out what happened in the past,” saidRasmus Nielsen, a geneticist at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the new study. “And now we have a time machine.”
Before the advent of studies of ancient DNA, scientists had relied mainly on bones and other physical remains to understand European history. The earliest bones of modern humans in Europe date to about 45,000 years ago, researchers have found.
Early Europeans lived as hunter-gatherers for over 35,000 years. About 8,500 years ago, farmers left their first mark in the archaeological record of the continent.
By studying living Europeans, scientists had already found evidence suggesting that their ancestors adapted to agriculture through natural selection. As tools to sequence DNA became more readily available, researchers even discovered some of the molecular underpinnings of these traits."
