Interactions between earliest Linearbandkeramik farmers and central European hunter gatherers at the dawn of European Neolithization

Abstract

Archaeogenetic research over the last decade has demonstrated that European Neolithic farmers (ENFs) were descended primarily from Anatolian Neolithic farmers (ANFs). ENFs, including early Neolithic central European Linearbandkeramik (LBK) farming communities, also harbored ancestry from European Mesolithic hunter gatherers (WHGs) to varying extents, reflecting admixture between ENFs and WHGs. However, the timing and other details of this process are still imperfectly understood. In this report, we provide a bioarchaeological analysis of three individuals interred at the Brunn 2 site of the Brunn am Gebirge-Wolfholz archeological complex, one of the oldest LBK sites in central Europe. Two of the individuals had a mixture of WHG-related and ANF-related ancestry, one of them with approximately 50% of each, while the third individual had approximately all ANF-related ancestry. Stable carbon and nitrogen isotope ratios for all three individuals were within the range of variation reflecting diets of other Neolithic agrarian populations. Strontium isotope analysis revealed that the ~50% WHG-ANF individual was non-local to the Brunn 2 area. Overall, our data indicate interbreeding between incoming farmers, whose ancestors ultimately came from western Anatolia, and local HGs, starting within the first few generations of the arrival of the former in central Europe, as well as highlighting the integrative nature and composition of the early LBK communities.

Figure 1

The location of Brunn am Gebirge, Wolfholz site on the map of Europe. Map image is from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Europe_blank_map.png (image is in the Public Domain).

Figure 2

Individuals from Brunn am Gebirge site 2 plotted onto the space of principal components defined by 1035 present-day individuals with West Eurasian ancestry and including selected published ancient individuals of European and Anatolian hunter gatherer and Anatolian farming ancestries. Sources of the published data are given in the Materials and Methods. I6912, Individual 1; I6913, Individual 2; I6914, Individual 3. The PCA computation was done with smartpca, version 16690 and the visualization was made in R, version 3.5.1.

Figure 3

Distribution of carbon and nitrogen isotope ratios of Individuals 1, 2 and 3 from Brunn am Gebirge site 2 in relation to the mean isotope ratios (±SD) from Anatolian Neolithic (AN), European Inland Mesolithic (EIM), European Inland Neolithic (EIN), and Linearbandkeramik (LBK) populations. Sources of the published data are given in Table 2. The figure and underlying statistical analyses were generated using Microsoft Excel 2019 for Mac, version 16.25.