The magazine of the european research area European Commission Copenhagen, a missed chance?

IN BRIEF

4 research

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eu No. 63 | APRIL 2010

Europe seeks its 

ancestors 

It seems that, when it comes 

to tracing our roots, DNA studies 

create as many mysteries as they 

solve. In 2005, researchers at 

the Johannes Gutenberg Institute 

of Anthropology at Mainz Univer-

sity (DE) showed that Europe’s 

first farmers were not the direct 

ancestors of modern-day 

Europeans. Continuing their 

line of investigation, in a subse-

quent study they compared 

the DNA of these farmers with 

that of the hunters-gatherers 

who inhabited Europe after the 

Ice Age. It seems they too had 

no link with the first farmers… 

or with today’s European pop-

ulation. Modern Europeans do 

not therefore descend from either 

of these two groups or even, in 

all probability, from a mixture 

of the two, certain types of DNA 

that are common today being 

absent from the skeletons ana-

lysed. So the mystery remains.  

On the other hand, studies have 

made it possible to shed some 

light on European sedentarisation. 

It was long believed that the 

first farmers were former hunter-

gatherers who came progressively 

to settle in one place. But as 

there is no link between these 

two groups the farmers must 

indeed have come from else-

where. Scientists have managed 

to locate and date this immigra-

tion. They came from the Car-

pathians 7 500 years ago. It is 

an origin that places them close 

to regions where sedentarisation 

first took root, namely Anatolia 

and the Near East.