New research by scientists from Trinity indicates that Baltic hunter-gatherers acquired knowledge about farming and ceramics by interacting with other cultures and sharing ideas with outside communities.
This is in contrast to their counterparts in Central and Western Europe who acquired these skills through inter-breeding with migrants from the Middle East.
Previous research has shown that farmers from the Levant (the near East) had spread throughout Europe largely thanks to a unique set of skills they cultivated. Prof Daniel Bradley of Trinity’s Smurfit Institute of Genetics, senior author of the study, called this the “Neolithic Package”, which he describes in a press release as, “the cluster of technologies such as domesticated livestock, cultivated cereals and ceramics which revolutionised human existence across Europe during the late stone age”.
The new research, carried out by a collaborative team of scientists from Trinity, the University of Cambridge and University College Dublin (UCD), suggests that the Baltic region was not subject to a migratory wave from the Levant like the rest of the European continent. In order to trace the genetic history of Baltic inhabitants, the researchers analysed six ancient genomes extracted from archeological remains in Latvia and the Ukraine. The samples were between 5,000 and 8,000 years old, dating them back to the Neolithic period.
These genomes showed no genetic traces of farmers from the Levant, in contrast to Central and Western European genomes examined. Bradley explains that, “migration was not a ‘universal driver’ across Europe… in the Baltic region, archaeology shows that the technologies of the ‘package’ did develop – albeit less rapidly – even though our analyses show that the genetics of these populations remained the same as those of the hunter-gatherers throughout the Neolithic”.
In the press release, Dr Andrea Manica, of the University of Cambridge, added: “The findings suggest that indigenous hunter-gatherers adopted Neolithic ways of life through trade and contact, rather than being settled by external communities.”
However, the Baltic genome did not remain completely untouched. One of the samples from Latvia showed some influence, which researchers speculate could be a migration from the Pontic Steppe in the East.
This research shows us that the development of Baltic and some Eastern European hunter-gatherer groups was substantially different from that of their Western and Central European neighbours. We see the manner by which they acquired new skills and technologies, as well as the way in which they interacted with other cultural groups. The research has allowed us to gain a new insight into the migratory path of Levantine farmers and account for the unique genetic makeup of the Baltic remains.
