The hunter-gatherers who lived in what is now Denmark went extinct within a few generations after the first farmers arrived in the area some 5,900 years ago, a new study has found. But these farmers became the new top dogs for only about 1,000 years, and DNA analysis of prehistoric human remains shows that they were first introduced by immigrants with Eastern Plains ancestry about 4,850 years ago. It turns out that most of them are extinct.
The study shows that Denmark has had two near-complete population turnovers in the past 7,300 years, according to one of four studies published together in the journal Nature on January 10. Nature.
“This transition has traditionally been assumed to be peaceful, but our study shows the opposite,” said the study co-authors. Anne Birgit Nielsenhe is a geologist and director of the Radiocarbon Dating Laboratory at Lund University in Sweden, in a paper. statement. “In addition to violent deaths, new pathogens from livestock likely killed many foragers.”
To investigate Denmark’s population turnover, researchers examined DNA from 100 skeletons from the Mesolithic, Neolithic, and Early Bronze Ages spanning 7,300 years. The researchers also looked at changes in isotopes, or elements, in the bodies of the deceased, which can reveal their diets and where they lived over time.
The researchers found that the region’s Mesolithic cultures, the Magremose, Kongemose, and Ertebore peoples, are related to other Western European hunter-gatherers. And while the genetic makeup of these groups remained roughly constant from 10,500 to 5,900 years ago, it changed when Neolithic farmers with Anatolian-related (modern-day Turkey) ancestry arrived in Denmark.
Related: Who were the first farmers?
Farmers associated with the Funnel Beaker culture lived there for about 1,000 years. The study found that the people behind the Funnel Beaker culture, known for their funnel-shaped pottery, “had already mixed with Western hunter-gatherers before arriving in Denmark.” Eva Maria GeiglThe head of research at France’s National Center for Scientific Research told Live Science via email. Geigl, who is also group leader of the paleogenome research group at the Institut Jacques Monot in Paris, was not involved in the study.
The few people studied who lived during the Neolithic-Mesolithic transition had hunter-gatherer roots but “adopted the culture and diet of immigrant farmers,” the researchers say. concluded. “Thus, individuals with hunter-gatherer ancestry persisted for decades, perhaps even centuries, after the arrival of agricultural populations in Denmark, but left only a small genomic trace in the population of subsequent centuries. “There was no such thing,” the research team said in the study.
About 4,850 years ago, another population took over Scandinavia. It is a mixture of non-local Neolithic farmers and steppe pastoralists. According to the statement, the genetic roots of pastoralists are primarily related to the Yamnaya people, a group of semi-nomadic people who domesticated animals, herded livestock, and moved around the continent using horses and carts. It is. In Denmark, pastoralist-farmer groups gave rise to a single-grave culture. thousands of single graves It is marked by a low hill.
Again, violence and new pathogens may have wiped out the area’s original inhabitants, the farmers who had previously wiped out the hunter-gatherers.
Once the people behind the Single Grave culture arrived, “population turnover was so intense that the descendants of their predecessors virtually ceased to exist,” Nielsen said. In their study, the researchers noted that people associated with the Single Grave culture had “an ancestral profile more similar to modern Danes.”
What happened in prehistoric Denmark is similar elsewhere in Scandinavia.
“We don’t have that much DNA material from Sweden, but [DNA] “There are indications of a similar trajectory,” Nielsen said. “In other words, many Swedes are also, to a large extent, descendants of these semi-nomadic peoples.”