By HELGA VIERICH
Updated: Wed, 31 Aug 2011 19:19:45 UTC

There is still a controversy about the origins of the modern European population. Some genetic studies have suggested that the original hunter-gatherers were assimilated as male farmers took hunter-gatherer women as wives, concubines, or slaves as farming populations spread outward from the middle east. In fact, this had led some researchers to conclude that most modern European males are descended from the farming populations that migrated into Europe in the past ten thousand years. However a recent study provides some indication that, in the male lines too, the hunter-gatherers genes live on.

This would tend to make sense of the recent suggestion that Charles Darwin had some Cro-Magnon ancestors, although it still leaves us puzzling over the reasons why people got shorter and smaller, with smaller brains, more evidence of disease and malnutrition during and after this economic transition from foraging to farming took place. If it was merely a replacement of one population by another through sheer reproductive success (due to higher calorie weaning foods which led to shortened birth spacing), coupled with more success in organized aggression, one would have expected few hunter-gatherers to leave much of a genetic legacy.

On the other hand, these recent data suggest something even more complex and intriguing. Perhaps the ecological impact, especially on wild game and wild plants, of increasing population pressure around farmed zones, necessitated trading and eventually co-dependancy relationships between farming communities and farming settlements that led to gene flow in both directions? by the time hunter-gatherer economic systems could no longer be sustained due to deforestation and over-hunting and trapping, the foragers had no other choice but to turn to farming in the end.

We know we are all, ultimately, descended from the foragers of subsaharan Africa. But, in each part of the world where farming is now the dominant way of feeding people, each person would have to wonder - how long ago was there a hunter-gatherer in my own family? For a few people alive today, the answer would be yesterday or even today. Most, however, might consider this to have been before the Neolithic revolution ten thousand years ago. But they might be wrong about that. It might have been as little as a thousand years in some parts of Eurasia, (perhaps less in more remote parts) and certainly less than a hundred years in the Americas, at least for the "indigenous" folk.

TAGGED: EVOLUTION, GENETICS