About 10,000 years ago, the prehistoric hunter-gatherers of Europe began meeting some new neighbors.
These farmers spread gradually at first, expanding from the Near East through Anatolia and the Balkans. Then agriculture exploded, reaching present-day Britain within a few thousand years. The farmers settled into houses, which soon evolved into villages, towns and eventually cities.
The archaeological [...]

Tags: Ancient DNA, Europe, farming, hunter-gatherers, mtDNA

Over the past decade, there has been no shortage of studies focused on the relationship between Neanderthals and our own species, Homo sapiens. Researchers have dug deep into the fossil record and our genomes to uncover how closely related we are to the Neanderthals, whether we interacted with them, and even whether our two species [...]

Tags: Europe, genetics, Homo sapiens, human evolution, neanderthal

By Chris Gignoux and Brenna Henn
Early human history was characterized by many rapid, long-distance migrations. But despite our beginnings as travelers, genetic evidence published online last Sunday in Nature indicates that after expanding to all corners of the earth people (at least those in Europe) tended to stay close to home.
Close on the heels [...]

Tags: Europe, genome-wide association study, pca, Switzerland

By Chris Gignoux and Mike Macpherson
It should be no surprise that in general, we are more genetically similar to our neighbors than to people living far away. The reason is fairly simple — until recently in human history it was fairly rare for people from widely separated geographic regions to even meet, much less reproduce.
This [...]

Tags: ancestry, clines, Europe, prehistory

This guest post is by Roy King, who is a professor of psychiatry at Stanford University and a research colleague of Stanford geneticist and 23andMe scientific adviser Peter Underhill. Roy and Peter have been using genetics to trace the spread of agriculture from the Near East to Europe.

The question of how agriculture first arose and [...]

Tags: agriculture, ancestry, Europe, neolithic, Roy King