Today’s
Scandinavians are not descended from the people who came to Scandinavia at the conclusion of the last ice age but, apparently, from a population that arrived later, concurrently with the introduction of agriculture. This is one conclusion of a new study straddling the borderline between genetics and archaeology, which involved Swedish researchers and which has now been published in the journal Current Biology.
The hunter-gatherers who inhabited Scandinavia more than 4,000 years ago had a different gene pool than ours,” explains Anders Götherström of the Department of Evolutionary Biology at Uppsala University, who headed the project together with
Eske Willerslev of the Centre for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen.
The study, a collaboration among research groups in Sweden, Denmark and the UK, involved using DNA from Stone Age remains to investigate whether the practices of cultivating crops and keeping livestock were spread by immigrants or represented innovations on the part of hunter-gatherers.
Obtaining reliable results from DNA from such ancient human remains involves very complicated work,” says Helena Malmström of the Department of Evolutionary Biology at Uppsala University.
She carried out the initial DNA sequencings of Stone Age material three years
ago. Significant time was then required for researchers to confirm that the
material really was thousands of years old.
“This is a classic issue within archaeology,” says Petra Molnar at the
Osteoarchaeological Research Laboratory at Stockholm University. “Our findings
show that today’s Scandinavians are not the direct descendants of the
hunter-gatherers who lived in the region during the Stone Age. This entails the
conclusion that some form of migration to Scandinavia took place, probably at
the onset of the agricultural Stone Age. The extent of this migration is as of
yet impossible to determine.”
Research short-
Ancient DNA Reveals Lack of Continuity between Neolithic Hunter-Gatherers and
Contemporary Scandinavians
Helena Malmström1, 2, M. Thomas P. Gilbert2, Mark G. Thomas3, Mikael
Brandström4, Jan Storå5, Petra Molnar5, Pernille K. Andersen6, Christian
Bendixen6, Gunilla Holmlund7, Anders Götherström1, 8, , and Eske Willerslev2, 8,
,
1 Department of Evolutionary Biology, Uppsala University, SE-11863 Uppsala,
Sweden
2 Centre for GeoGenetics, University of Copenhagen, DK-2100 Copenhagen, Denmark
3 Research Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment, and the AHRC
Centre for the Evolution of Cultural Diversity, University College London, Gower
Street, London WC1E 6BT, UK
4 Department of Forest Mycology and Pathology, Swedish University of
Agricultural Sciences, SE-10691 Uppsala, Sweden
5 Osteoarchaeological Research Laboratory, Stockholm University, Stockholm,
Sweden
6 Department of Genetics and Biotechnology, Faculty of Agricultural Sciences,
University of Aarhus, PO Box 50, DK-8830 Tjele, Denmark
7 National Board of Forensic Medicine, Department of Forensic Genetics and
Forensic Toxicology, SE-58758 Linköping, Sweden
Corresponding author
Corresponding author
8 These authors contributed equally to the work
Summary
The driving force behind the transition from a foraging to a farming lifestyle
in prehistoric Europe (Neolithization) has been debated for more than a century
[1,2,3]. Of particular interest is whether population replacement or cultural
exchange was responsible [3,4,5]. Scandinavia holds a unique place in this
debate, for it maintained one of the last major hunter-gatherer complexes in
Neolithic Europe, the Pitted Ware culture [6]. Intriguingly, these late
hunter-gatherers existed in parallel to early farmers for more than a millennium
before they vanished some 4,000 years ago [7,8]. The prolonged coexistence of
the two cultures in Scandinavia has been cited as an argument against population
replacement between the Mesolithic and the present [7,8]. Through analysis of
DNA extracted from ancient Scandinavian human remains, we show that people of
the Pitted Ware culture were not the direct ancestors of modern Scandinavians
(including the Saami people of northern Scandinavia) but are more closely
related to contemporary populations of the eastern Baltic region. Our findings
support hypotheses arising from archaeological analyses that propose a Neolithic
or post-Neolithic population replacement in Scandinavia [7]. Furthermore, our
data are consistent with the view that the eastern Baltic represents a genetic
refugia for some of the European hunter-gatherer populations.
For more information please contact Anders Götherström, Uppsala University,
+46-73-992 78 64, e-mail:
anders.gotherstrom@ebc.uu.se or Eske Willerslev, University of Copenhagen,
+45-28751309, e-mail:
ewillerslev@bio.ku.dk