During the Stone Age in Western Europe, blood relations and kinship were not the only important factors for hunter-gatherer communities. A new genetic study conducted at well-known French Stone Age burial sites revealed that multiple distinct families lived together, likely to avoid inbreeding.
The researchers obtained biomolecular data from human skeletons buried at iconic sites in France, such as Téviec, Hoedic in Brittany, and Champigny, dating back to the last stages of the Mesolithic, approximately 6,700 years ago. This period overlapped with the Neolithic, when settled farmers took over.
This study is the first to analyze the genome of several Stone Age hunter-gatherers from the same place who lived at the same time as newly arrived Neolithic farming communities.
Professor Mattias Jakobsson from Uppsala University, who led the study, stated, “This gives a new picture of the last Stone Age hunter-gatherer populations in Western Europe. Our study provides a unique opportunity to analyze these groups and their social dynamics.”
About 7,500 years ago, the last hunter-gatherer populations in Western Europe encountered incoming Neolithic farmers and were gradually replaced and assimilated. The coexistence of these groups has raised many questions about the extent to which they interacted.
2024-02-29 02:00:04
Link from phys.org