An international team led by Wolfgang Haak of the Molecular Archaeology Group of Johannes Gutenberg University have attempted to shed some light onto this difficult question using DNA analysis as a clue to possible past movements of Neolithic farming communities. Their report was published in Science magazine on 11 Nov 2005.
The Origins of Agriculture
Agriculture—the control of plants for human consumption—was invented in what is now Turkey about 12,000 years ago. By 7,500 years ago, farming had begun in Hungary and Slovakia, and then, within a space of 500 years, it spread up and into central Europe, between the Paris Basin and the Ukraine in what is now Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic. In the past, archaeologists noted that the spread of agriculture into central Europe was accompanied by a suite of artifacts and behaviors called the Linear Pottery Culture (linear bandkeramik in German, also known as LBK), from their distinctive banded pottery type. The LBK culture was widespread throughout Europe and had remarkably similar traits wherever it has been found, including the same kinds of crops, the same forms of houses, and the same kinds of stone tool technology, in addition to similarities in pottery decoration.The speed at which farming cultures spread from what is now the Balkan states into the rest of central Europe, and the uniformity of the LBK culture across the region, suggested to some scholars that the diffusion of agriculture was achieved by massive human migration. In other words, population pressure in the Balkan states led to mass migration outward, the new farmers replacing the hunter-gatherers already living in central Europe. More recently, however, DNA studies began to indicate that instead, the existing Paleolithic peoples of central Europe had merely adopted the new form for themselves, rather than being replaced by a population of farmers. But no conclusive investigations had been published before now.
