8,000 years ago a group of farmers crossed the Aegean Sea. Its trail can still be seen in the DNA in Media Europe

A little before 7,000 before Christ, the western hunters-gatherers and the center of the Anatolia They started cultivating. It seems likely and unimportant. But that little change ended up causing a deep social, economic and demographic reorganization of the entire European continent.

And it is not an exaggeration. It was so strong that even today we can see her on the maps.

PH2TER

What are we talking about? Between 6,000 and 4,000 before Christ, those Neolithic Farmers of Anatolia They began to move beyond the Aegean And, progressively, they took agriculture to Europe and North Africa. They thus became the ancestral genetic component of this whole area of ​​the world.

Subsequently, the arrival of the shepherds of the western steppe (the known as Yamnaya culture) He finished configuring the basic genetics of the historical peoples of Europe, but the strength of the legacy of the anatolian farmers remained very strong. Above all, in the south of the continent.

How can this know? Taking into account that the databases are even more incomplete than we would like and, therefore, there is always enough speculative content, a map can be built by comparing historical and contemporary samples.

On the map, you can see a spectrum in which blue represents populations with greater “genetic distance“With the neolithic anatolic farmers and the red the slightest distance. And, to tell the truth, it has enough surprises.

Detlef Gronenborn, Barbara Horejs, Börner, Obe

Who is who (genetically speaking)? As usually explained, in the European countries of the Mediterranean there is a greater genetic closeness with the first European farmers. Specifically, Greece and Italy are the sites with the greatest closeness. Sardinia, of which we already knew that They were a very unique genetic populationit seems that the palm is taken.

As a curiosity, it seems that current anatolia is not so great.

Paleogenetics for beginners. All this is still a curiosity of an amateur forum (one that presumably has serious reliability problems as we approach detail). However, it is a good example of the enormous depth that genetic studies give us to understand the intrahistory of humanity.

As we said Half decade ago“Paleogenetic techniques are like Galileo’s telescope: they let us see where we could not until now, but we need to accumulate evidence, works and studies to know what is true and what is a mirage.” As happened with carbon-14 techniques (it took almost 40 years to be reliable to one hundred percent), we are about to see how the past changes.

Image | PH2TER |

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