Ancient DNA Says Europe's First Farmers Came From Afar

摘要

About 11,000 years ago, farming began to replace the hunting-and-gathering lifestyle in the Near East. At first, agriculture spread slowly into Europe via modern-day Turkey, Greece, and Bulgaria. But about 7500 years ago, farming suddenly took off in central Europe, spreading in just a handful of centuries from an epicenter in Hungary and Slovakia to as far east as Ukraine and as far west as France. Rectangular houses sprang up, surrounded by cow pastures and fields of wheat and barley. Researchers have long debated whether this agricultural explosion was sparked by massive migrations of farmers themselves, so-called demic diffusion, or by the spread of farming ideas, known as cultural diffusion.