London, August 15 (ANI): Researchers are developing new theories on how man first colonised Europe, that are changing long-held, simplistic views about the evolutionary history of humans in Europe.
They believe the first Europeans were two separate groups - one adept at farming, and another hunter-gatherers.
They also claim the spread of farming through Europe was a key part of how people became modern Europeans.
The findings by the new analytical techniques indicate that many cultural, climatic, and demographic events have shaped genetic variation among modern-day European populations and that the variety of those mechanisms is more diverse than previously thought.
Recent advances in paleogenetics is shedding new light into the complex evolution of humans in Europe, helping researchers piece together the events that ultimately created what is now known as modern man.
Following the period when ice sheets were at their maximum extension across the earth - between 27,000 and 16,000 years ago - hunter-gatherer populations had re-colonised most parts of Europe.
Then around 8,000 years ago, the first farming populations appeared on the continent during the Neolithic transition.
For several thousand years, two separate modes of life coexisted in Europe: hunter-gatherer populations continued to rely on wild food resources, while farming populations had an entirely different demographic profile and lifestyle that consisted of domesticated crops and livestock, pottery, housing, and storage technology.
For some decades, it was assumed that the genetic diversity of contemporary Europeans was shaped mainly during the Neolithic transition.
Early Europeans were believed to fall into two main groups, farmers and hunter-gatherers. New research has found the spread of farming through Europe was key to the evolution of the area.
However, it now appears that it was also affected both before and after this key event.
And the spread of farming is likely to have varied to a great extent by region, leading to varying impacts of migrating farmers' and local hunter-gatherers' genetic contributions to future populations.
"We are currently at a stage in which next-generation sequencing technologies, ancient DNA analyses, and computer simulation modelling allow us to obtain a much more accurate and detailed perspective on the nature and timing of major prehistoric processes such as the colonization of Europe by modern humans, the survival of human populations during the ice age, the Neolithic transition, and the rise and fall of complex societies and empires," the Daily Mail quoted the study's first author Dr. Ron Pinhasi, of Trinity College Dublin in Ireland, as saying.
"The development of inter-disciplinary approaches is crucial to elaborate realistic models of human evolution.
"These methods and technologies hold great potential to shed new light on past genetic variation, the onset of major cultural and technological changes that left their imprint on past and present genomes, and potentially on the impact of changes in lifestyle and demography on the appearance of certain diseases and genetic disorders," Pinhasi added.
The study was recently published in the journal Trends in Genetics. (ANI)
