A big new human genetics paper in PLOS has been making a big splash. It tries to distinguish between two extreme possibilities about the people of Europe:
- Europeans are descended from Middle Eastern farmers, who brought their Neolithic cultural toolkit less than 10,000 years ago.
- Europeans are descended from Paleolithic hunter-gatherers, who acculturated to the farming way of life through diffusion of ideas.
The title gives it away: “A Predominantly Neolithic Origin for European Paternal Lineages.” Based on one key Y-chromosome haplotype, it goes for the first option, which is a similar result to studies using mtDNA, although other studies do not agree quite so much. Those old hunter-gatherers — or their genetic traces at any rate — are only to be found in Finland now. The rest of us Europeans can trace our origin to a greater or lesser extent back to the first farmers, those who built Çatalhöyük, for example. Until, that is, the next big new human genetics paper.
I wonder if, when the dust settles, the mtDNA and Y-chromosome studies will end up pointing to different answers. One could imagine that as hunter gatherers were outcompeted by farmers, hunter gatherer women might have been absorbed by the invading society (passing on their paleolithic mitochondrial DNA) while hunter-gatherer men either starved or died childless leaving only the Y-chromosomes of the neolithic immigrants to be passed down through the generations to the present.
That’s the sort of pattern found in the people living in the central valley of Costa Rica and parts of northwest Colombia today. Most men in the region carry Y chromosomes that belong to haplogroups common in Europe and most people’s mitochondrial DNA comes from American Indian lineages. A genetic remnant of colonialism.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00439-002-0899-8