\n <\/p>\n
The Bell Beaker culture, named after a type of ceramic vessel, arose in Europe from around 2800 BC.<\/span>Credit: Lanmas\/Alamy<\/span><\/p>\n A western European \u2018water world\u2019 was a holdout for hunter-gatherers for thousands of years.<\/p>\n Ancient inhabitants of the Rhine\u2013Meuse river delta \u2014 wetland, riverine and coastal areas of modern-day Netherlands, Belgium and western Germany \u2014 maintained high levels of hunter-gatherer genetic ancestry. This genetic signature persisted long after most of Europe was transformed into farming and animal-herding-based communities by successive migrations from the east, starting around 9,000 years ago. The findings come from a study published in Nature on 11 February1.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s really an island of persistence and resistance to the incorporation of external ancestry,\u201d says David Reich, a population geneticist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, who co-led the study.<\/p>\n For two decades, ancient-genomics laboratories, including Reich\u2019s, have painted Europe\u2019s population history over the past 10,000 years in broad brushstrokes. This work showed that resident hunter-gatherers were, to varying degrees, replaced by Middle Eastern farmers, who were themselves usurped by pastoralists whose ancestry traced back to the central Eurasian steppe (See ‘Hunter-gatherers holdouts’).<\/p>\n But geneticists \u2014 and certainly archaeologists \u2014 knew that more fine-grained studies of individual regions would add nuance and reveal exceptions to the wider story.<\/p>\n Archaeological work in the Rhine\u2013Meuse region pointed to the persistence of hunter-gathering lifestyles. But the adoption of certain farming practices as well as characteristic pottery and burial styles suggested cultural exchange, at least, with both early farmers and groups carrying steppe ancestry.<\/p>\n When Reich and his colleagues analysed ancient genome data from 112 individuals who lived between 8500 BC and 1700 BC, including new data from people in the region, they found that the inhabitants maintained high levels of hunter-gatherer ancestry for thousands of years after its disappearance from neighbouring regions in France and Germany, as well as Britain. A patchwork of wetlands, forested river dunes and coastline could have restricted farming, while connecting water-based communities in the Rhine\u2013Meuse area.<\/p>\n When Rhine\u2013Meuse hunter-gatherers mixed with outsiders, the researchers found evidence of a sex bias. Patterns of genetic diversity on the X and Y chromosomes suggested that European-farmer ancestry seemed to arrive mostly through females.<\/p>\n \u201cWe really do think that the bits and pieces of the farming lifestyle that were incorporated by these hunter-gathering groups came in through these women,\u201d says co-author Eveline Altena, an archaeogeneticist at Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands.<\/p>\n This is a surprise, says Daniela Hofmann, an archaeologist at the University of Bergen, Norway. Archaeologists will now need to work out the social forces that led female farmers to join hunter-gatherer communities.<\/p>\n Mixing between Rhine\u2013Meuse hunter-gatherer farmers and people carrying steppe ancestry seemed to be limited \u2014 at least initially. Elsewhere in Europe, this steppe ancestry had become widespread from around 3000 BC.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Bell Beaker culture, named after a type of ceramic vessel, arose in Europe from around 2800 BC.Credit: Lanmas\/Alamy A western European \u2018water world\u2019 was a holdout for hunter-gatherers for thousands of years. Ancient inhabitants of the Rhine\u2013Meuse river delta \u2014 wetland, riverine and coastal areas of modern-day Netherlands, Belgium and western Germany \u2014 maintained<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":44336,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[715,23036,23037,10124,1183,550],"class_list":{"0":"post-44335","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-european","9":"tag-huntergatherers","10":"tag-millennia","11":"tag-refuge","12":"tag-water","13":"tag-world"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44335","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=44335"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44335\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/44336"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=44335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=44335"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=44335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Cultural integration<\/h2>\n
Bell Beaker mystery<\/h2>\n