Tracing the Origin and Spread of Agriculture in Europe

Abstract

The origins of early farming and its spread to Europe have been the subject of major interest for some time. The main controversy today is over the nature of the Neolithic transition in Europe: the extent to which the spread was, for the most part, indigenous and animated by imitation (cultural diffusion) or else was driven by an influx of dispersing populations (demic diffusion). We analyze the spatiotemporal dynamics of the transition using radiocarbon dates from 735 early Neolithic sites in Europe, the Near East, and Anatolia. We compute great-circle and shortest-path distances from each site to 35 possible agricultural centers of origin—ten are based on early sites in the Middle East and 25 are hypothetical locations set at 5° latitude/longitude intervals. We perform a linear fit of distance versus age (and vice versa) for each center. For certain centers, high correlation coefficients (R > 0.8) are obtained. This implies that a steady rate or speed is a good overall approximation for this historical development. The average rate of the Neolithic spread over Europe is 0.6–1.3 km/y (95% confidence interval). This is consistent with the prediction of demic diffusion (0.6–1.1 km/y). An interpolative map of correlation coefficients, obtained by using shortest-path distances, shows that the origins of agriculture were most likely to have occurred in the northern Levantine/Mesopotamian area.

The evolutionary adaptation of the C282Y mutation to culture and climate during the European Neolithic

“…Locations of Neolithic sites throughout Europe were partially compiled from Pinhasi et al (2005) and reduced or expanded to reflect regions where C282Y allele frequency data were documented (Whittle, 1996; Tomaž, 2010; Kilhavn, 2013). This resulted in 600 Neolithic sites located in 33 European countries corresponding to our study area as seen in Figure 2.…”

“…Map of the geographic distribution of 600 European Neolithic sites partially compiled from Pinhasi et al (2005). …”

“…Unlike other organisms, humans have the ability to carry or adopt a niche that was constructed in one particular environment to new and novel environments. Such is the case with domestication that was developed in the sunny warm climates of the Middle East and spread throughout Europe from east‐to‐west and south‐to‐north by 6,000 years ago (4000 BCE) (Pinhasi et al, 2005). This migrating Neolithic niche presumably put additional pressures on Europeans to adapt to a new diet in a novel environment.…”

“…The Neolithic first appears in Europe on the Island of Cyprus about 10,000 years ago (Pinhasi et al, 2005). Once the Neolithic reached the Hungarian Plains, by about 7,000 years ago, it rapidly moved throughout central Europe following the Danube River and its tributaries and settled on the rich loess soils ideal for farming (Jochim, 2000; Price, 2000, 2003; Price et al, 2001; Shennan, 2009, 2012; Bentley, 2013).…”

The wheat powdery mildew genome shows the unique evolution of an obligate biotroph

“…3a and Supplementary Table 7). Notably, the divergence of the H old haplogroups coincided with the last ice age (150,000-10,000 years ago), during which time it is assumed that wheat ancestors were restricted to the Fertile Crescent, which stretches from modern-day Israel to Iran 25 . We hypothesize that different B. graminis f.sp.…”