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A large international team of researchers has found that Neolithic hunter-gatherers living in several parts of Europe interbred with farmers from the Near East. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the team describes comparing DNA from several early groups in Europe and evidence of interbreeding.
The Neolithic period, often described as the New Stone Age, was a period of human history from approximately 15,000 BCE to 3,000 BCE. It was a time defined by the development of settlements and the refinement of tools and the arts. Prior research has shown that people living in what is now Germany, Hungary and Spain were mostly hunter-gatherers during the early Neolithic period, but were "replaced" by farmers moving in from the Near East (Anatolia). In this new effort, the researchers suggest that interbreeding between the two groups led to the decline of the hunter-gatherers. The end result is that most modern Europeans are descended from the Near East immigrant farmers, but have remnants of hunter-gatherer DNA.
To learn more about the early history of humans in Europe, the researchers obtained and analyzed 180 DNA samples of people from early Hungary, Germany and Spain dating from between 6,000 and 2,200 BCE.
Ironic that Europeans resist admitting Turkey to the EU when they're descended from people from Asia Minor.
Mark Lipson et al. Parallel palaeogenomic transects reveal complex genetic history of early European farmers, Nature (2017). DOI: 10.1038/nature24476
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 12 2017, @12:37AM (1 child)
First, you have the usual (bad, one-sided) source material.
Next, you grossly understate the murderous thuggery of The Conquistadors.
Source: Historian and friar Bartolomé de las Casas who accompanied The Conquistadors.
Retold by Howard Zinn in "A People's History of the United States".
...and this shit was still going on with USAians at Sand Creek (1864) and Wounded Knee (1890), where hundreds of natives (mostly women and children) were murdered.
Custer (1876) was attempting to do the same murderous shit when he got outsmarted.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday November 14 2017, @01:21PM
Killing Indians by the hundreds was a lot of work. Killing hundreds of thousands by disease takes no work at all. There were millions of Indians in the Americas prior to contact, so disease is the only way the Europeans, with their tenuous first footholds on the continent, could have managed it.
One of the rare examples of a straight-up fight between the first European arrivals and original Indian cultures was between de Soto's expedition and the Caddoan people, one of the last of the Mississippian cultures. The Spaniards had all the advantages European historians have credited the conquest of the Americas with: guns, armor, cannon, horses. They got their asses kicked by people with atlatls and bows & arrows, who fought as organized units. The Spaniards were massively out-numbered by men who were healthier and stronger than they were, because the Indian diet was much better than theirs. That would have been the case everywhere in the Americas except for disease and pure accident like it was in Cortez's case. A few hundreds of Europeans would never have been able to prevail against millions of Indians with home court advantage and they with their supply lines that stretched months across a vast ocean.
It's a remnant of the racist lens that has always colored the history of the Americas that anyone would still assert that Europeans won because they had superior technology or tactics or culture.
Washington DC delenda est.