Archaeological evidence indicates that pig domestication had begun by ∼10,500 y before the present (BP) in the Near East, and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) suggests that pigs arrived in Europe alongside farmers ∼8,500 y BP. A few thousand years after the introduction of Near Eastern pigs into Europe, however, their characteristic mtDNA signature disappeared and was replaced by haplotypes associated with European wild boars. This turnover could be accounted for by substantial gene flow from local European wild boars, although it is also possible that European wild boars were domesticated independently without any genetic contribution from the Near East. To test these hypotheses, we obtained mtDNA sequences from 2,099 modern and ancient pig samples and 63 nuclear ancient genomes from Near Eastern and European pigs. Our analyses revealed that European domestic pigs dating from 7,100 to 6,000 y BP possessed both Near Eastern and European nuclear ancestry, while later pigs possessed no more than 4% Near Eastern ancestry, indicating that gene flow from European wild boars resulted in a near-complete disappearance of Near East ancestry. In addition, we demonstrate that a variant at a locus encoding black coat color likely originated in the Near East and persisted in European pigs. Altogether, our results indicate that while pigs were not independently domesticated in Europe, the vast majority of human-mediated selection over the past 5,000 y focused on the genomic fraction derived from the European wild boars, and not on the fraction that was selected by early Neolithic farmers over the first 2,500 y of the domestication process.
In European and many African, Middle Eastern and Southern Asian populations lactase persistence (LP) is the most strongly selected monogenic trait to have evolved over the last 10,000 years 1 . While LP selection and prehistoric milk consumption must be linked, considerable uncertainty remains concerning their spatiotemporal configuration and specific interactions 2,3 . We provide detailed distributions of milk exploitation across Europe over the last 9k years using c. 7,000 pottery fat residues from >550 archaeological sites. European milk use was widespread from the Neolithic period onwards but varied spatially and temporally in intensity. Surprisingly, comparison of model likelihoods indicates that LP selection varying with levels of prehistoric milk exploitation provides no better explanation of LP allele frequency trajectories than uniform selection since the Neolithic. In the UK Biobank 4,5 cohort of ~500K contemporary Europeans, LP genotype was only weakly associated with milk consumption and did not show consistent associations with improved fitness or health indicators. This suggests other hypotheses on the beneficial effects of LP should be considered for its rapid frequency increase. We propose that lactase non-persistent individuals consumed milk when it became available, but that under particular conditions and microbiological milieux this was disadvantageous, driving LP selection in prehistoric Europe. Comparison of model likelihoods indicates that population fluctuations, settlement density and wild animal exploitationproxies for these driversprovide better explanations of LP selection than the extent of milk exploitation. These findings offer new perspectives on prehistoric milk exploitation and LP evolution.
Recent work at Vinča-Belo Brdo has combined a total of more than 200 radiocarbon dates with an array of other information to construct much more precise narratives for the structural history of the site and the cultural materials recovered from it. In this paper, we present the results of a recent attempt to construct formal models for the chronology of the wider Vinča potscape, so that we can place our now detailed understanding of changes at Belo Brdo within their contemporary contexts. We present our methodology for assessing the potential of the existing corpus of more than 600 radiocarbon dates for refining the chronology of the five phases of Vinča ceramics proposed by Milojčić across their spatial ranges, including a total of 490 of them in a series of Bayesian chronological models. Then we outline our main results for the development of Vinča pottery. Finally, we discuss some of the major implications for our understanding of the source, character and tempo of material change.
The setting and context of the Vinča-Belo Brdo tellThe great tell or settlement mound of Vinča-Belo Brdo sits directly beside the Danube, a little to the south of Belgrade, Serbia (Fig.1). Its eight metres of Late Neolithic deposits span the later sixth to the mid-fifth millennium cal BC, and are underlain by a Starčevo culture occupation of the earlier sixth millennium cal BC (Tasić et al. 2015; in press). The site has given its name to the Vinča culture (or interaction sphere or network; for convenience and familiarity we use the first term here), which extends through the river valleys of the Danube, its tributaries and their catchments, in the northern and central Balkans, from southernmost Hungary and easternmost Croatia through southern Serbia and Kosovo down to northern Macedonia, and from Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina eastwards as far as parts of Transylvania in Romania (Fig. 1). Belo Brdo, near the centre of this distribution, appears to have emerged relatively early in the Vinča culture sequence and was clearly, as the largest known tell of the complex, a place of considerable and enduring significance. This was a time, after the initial emergence of a Neolithic way of life in the region, of the spread, consolidation and diversification of settlement, involving the formation of large settlements and tells; the emergence of both larger communities and distinctive households within such sites; the intensification of subsistence; and changing materiality and the expansion of material networks (Chapman 1981;Kaiser and Voytek 1983;Tasić 2009;Tringham and Krstić 1990;Tripković and Milić 2009;Orton 2010). To understand the initiation, formation, duration and ending of Vinča-Belo Brdo is to grasp some of the major features of the development of Neolithic communities in a major swathe of south-east Europe as a whole.
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