Early farmers from across Europe directly descended from Neolithic Aegeans

Abstract

Farming and sedentism first appeared in southwestern Asia during the early Holocene and later spread to neighboring regions, including Europe, along multiple dispersal routes. Conspicuous uncertainties remain about the relative roles of migration, cultural diffusion, and admixture with local foragers in the early Neolithization of Europe. Here we present paleogenomic data for five Neolithic individuals from northern Greece and northwestern Turkey spanning the time and region of the earliest spread of farming into Europe. We use a novel approach to recalibrate raw reads and call genotypes from ancient DNA and observe striking genetic similarity both among Aegean early farmers and with those from across Europe. Our study demonstrates a direct genetic link between Mediterranean and Central European early farmers and those of Greece and Anatolia, extending the European Neolithic migratory chain all the way back to southwestern Asia.

Keywords: Anatolia; Greece; Mesolithic; Neolithic; paleogenomics.

Fig. 1.

North Aegean archaeological sites investigated in Turkey and Greece.

Fig. 2.

PCA of modern reference populations (18, 19) and projected ancient individuals. The Greek and Anatolian samples reported here cluster tightly with other European farmers close to modern-day Sardinians; however, they are clearly distinct from previously published Caucasian hunter-gatherers (20). This excludes the latter as a potential ancestral source population for early European farmers and suggests a strong genetic structure in hunter-gatherers of Southwest Asia. Central and East European (C./E. European), South European (South Eur.). Ancient DNA data: Pleistocene hunter-gatherer (Plei. HG) (20, 21, 22), Holocene hunter-gatherer (Holocene HG) (2, 4, 13, 20, 23), Neolithic (2, 4, 12, 13, 24), Late Neolithic/Chalcolithic/Copper Age (LN/Chalc./CA) (13, 25), and Bronze Age (13). Ancient samples are abbreviated consistently using the nomenclature “site-country code-culture”; see SI Appendix, Table S14 and Dataset S1 for more information. A 3D PCA plot can be viewed as a 3D figure (https://figshare.com/articles/Hofmanova_et_al_3D_figure_S4/3188767).

Fig. 3.

Inferred mixture coefficients when forming each modern (small pies) and ancient (large pies, enclosed by borders matching key at left) group as a mixture of the modern-day Yoruba from Africa and the ancient samples shown in the key at left.