Farmers spread into Europe
Ancient DNA shows farming arrives with people, not just with ideas.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 2.5 thousand years
- Known to
- ± 300 years
- Era
- Neolithic, Holocene
Agriculture enters Europe from Anatolia around 6500 BCE and reaches the Atlantic and the Baltic by about 4000. Whether it spread by migration or by local foragers adopting it was argued for a century; ancient genomes settled it decisively in favour of migration. Early European farmers are genetically Anatolian, distinct from the hunter-gatherers already there, and the two populations mix only gradually over thousands of years. Most modern Europeans carry ancestry from both, plus a later steppe component.