Farmer Husbands and Hunter-Gatherer Wives

Antiquity, March 2003 v77 i295 p63(4)

The Neolithic transition in Europe: comparing broad scale genetic and local scale isotopic evidence

R. Alexander Bentley et al.

Recently, the geographic distribution of Y-chromosome haplotypes from modern Europeans has been presented in support of the Neolithic demic diffusion model (Chikhi et al. 2002), suggesting that colonising farmers from south-west Asia contributed 70-90% of the genes in the population of each Neolithic settlement with an average contribution of 50% across the continent. Since others have used mitochondrial (mt) DNA evidence to argue for only about 20% Neolithic genes (Richards et al. 2000), there appears to be serious disagreement. Although this apparent discrepancy is probably more a matter of different methods of data analysis than of actual differences in continent-wide prehistoric demography (Barbujani et al. 1998; Simoni et al. 2000), there are ways in which real differences could have developed on a local scale. For example, distributional differences in mtDNA, which is passed through the female line, and male-transmitted Y-chromosomes could have resulted if the colonising farmers were in small groups, with few unmarried, not-closely-related females with which to bear children. In such cases, groups that managed initially to intermarry with indigenous hunter-gatherer women would have reproduced most successfully.

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Strontium isotope analyses in the skeletons of some of the first farmers in south-west Germany, ca. 5400-5000 BC, show a high incidence of non-local females in early Neolithic cemeteries (Bentley et al. 2002; Bentley et al. 2003, Price et al. 2001) ... Because many of these upland non-locals were buried differently from locals, particularly without the characteristic stone adze associated with the early farmers, the strontium isotope analysis may evidence intermarriage between forager and farming communities. However, even if these particular non-local females were from other Neolithic farming communities, this evidence for patrilocality suggests that upon first contact the brides may have been foragers, an occurrence that has often been observed ethnographically (Spielmann and Eder 1994)

Posted by Dienekes at October 26, 2003 10:13 PM | PermaLink