The research, which has just been published in the prestigious Scientific Reportsshows already a strong and complex interaction of ancient DNA lineages of different origins between 5500 and 4500 BCE -years before our era-. This intensity was maintained throughout the Neolithic, unlike in the rest of Europe, where hunter-gatherer societies were marginalised.
The study has analysed the mitochondrial DNA fingerprint, which is maternally transmitted, in almost 700 ancient and modern individuals from Spain and Portugal and other samples from the European continent, in order to trace the population and genetic movements during the Neolithisation of the territory.
The diversity of female ancestral lineages continued during the Copper Age (3000-2200 BCE), when populations became more homogeneous.
The colonisation and population history of Europe during the Neolithic and Bronze Age has been analysed in recent years in terms of its structure and dynamics, thanks to close collaboration between archaeologists and molecular geneticists. In contrast to the situation in south-eastern and central Europe, very little information is available on the western Mediterranean area, where the first farmers from the East supposedly arrived by sea.
Migratory movements and population dynamics during the Late Prehistoric period have been the focus of a project funded mainly by the German Research Association (DFG) and coordinated by the Department of Bioarchaeology of the University of Mainz (Germany), together with the Department of Prehistory of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), the German Archaeological Institute of Madrid and the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA.
The project "Reconstruction of the population dynamics of the Iberian Peninsula between the Neolithic and the Bronze Age based on aDNA (ancient DNA) analysis", published recently, was carried out between 2011 and 2015 in close collaboration with the Archaeological Museum of Alicante-MARQ and the Prehistory Department of the University of Alicante, together with more than forty archaeologists from Spanish and Portuguese universities, museums and specialised departments. The number of samples analysed totals 318 individuals from 57 archaeological sites in the Iberian Peninsula, the Balearic Islands and North Africa, dated between the Neolithic and Bronze Ages (5500 and 1550 BCE). This anthropological material has been compared with existing data from Central Europe and the Carpathian Basin obtained by the same team at the University of Mainz.
The results, which are now published in Scientific Reports from Nature include the mitochondrial identification of 213 new analysed and 125 already published samples of individuals from present-day Spain and Portugal. In contrast to the situation observed during the Early and Middle Neolithic of central and southeastern Europe, the populations of the Iberian Peninsula show a much more complex and intense interaction between the local hunter-gatherer societies and the new Neolithic populations that arrived from the Near East.
A strong mixing of DNA lineages of female ancestors from different origins has already been observed during the early Neolithic (5500-4500 BCE), when the survival of lineages from hunter-gatherer societies seems to have been marginal in central and southeastern Europe. In contrast, in the Iberian Peninsula, hunter-gatherer mitochondrial DNA haplogroups increase steadily in relation to distance from the Mediterranean coast. The various new haplogroups of eastern origin are mixed with the local hunter-gatherers. "Even so, we also observed the arrival of Neolithic communities related to Central European farmers (so-called "banded pottery groups") in the north-east of the Iberian Peninsula, particularly at the Els Trocs burial site in the central Pyrenees," says Kurt W. Alt, of the Danube Private University in Krems, Austria, and promoter of the project, after presenting the results of this fascinating research in his talk this morning at MARQ.
