About 4,600 years ago, in northern Germany, a small village buried 13 of its residents.  The deceased ranged in age from less than a year to nearly 60 years old and were buried in pairs or small groups. And virtually all of them had suffered violent, probably painful deaths.  Because the majority of the deceased [...]

Tags: Ancient DNA, burial rites, Germany, neolithic

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