Iberian Neolithic farmer DNA

A currently not available preprint that has important implications about the Neolithic of Europe.

A late Neolithic Iberian farmer exhibits genetic affinity to Neolithic Scandinavian farmers and a Bronze Age central European farmer

Sverrisdóttir, Oddný Ósk et al.

The spread of farming, the neolithisation process, swept over Europe after the advent of the farming lifestyle in the near east approximately 11,000 years ago. However the mode of transmission and its impact on the demographic patterns of Europe remains largely unknown. In this study we obtained : 66,476,944 bp of genomic DNA from the remains of a 4000 year old Neolithic farmer from the site of El Portalón, 15 km east of Burgos, Spain. We compared the genomic signature of this individual to modern-day populations as well as the few Neolithic individuals that has produced large-scale autosomal data. The Neolithic Portalón individual is genetically most similar to southern Europeans, similar to a Scandinavian Neolithic farmer and the Tyrolean Iceman. In contrast, the Neolithic Portalón individual displays little affinity to two Mesolithic samples from the near-by area, La Brana, demonstrating a distinct change in population history between 7,000 and 4,000 years ago for the northern Iberian Peninsula.

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