Archaeologists Uncover New Clues to Lives of Stone Age Farmers and Foragers

Farmers have been around for a long time. In fact, they've been around since the Stone Age. Now, archaeologists have made a breakthrough when it comes to understanding the demographic history of Stone-Age humans. It turns out that expanding Stone-Age farmers assimilated local hunter-gatherers and that hunter-gatherers were historically in lower numbers than the farmers.

Researchers have long debated how humans transitioned between a hunting-gathering and farming lifestyle. Yet new tools are making it easier for researchers to understand exactly how this happened. More specifically, scientists are looking at DNA from ancient human material to learn about historic populations.

In this case, the scientists conducted a genomic analysis of 11 Stone-Age human remains from Scandinavia. This allowed them to find out a little bit more about the people in the area.

"We have generated genomic data from the largest number of ancient individuals," said Helena Malmstrom, one of the researchers, in a news release. "The eleven Stone-Age human remains were between 5,000 and 7,000 years old and associated with hunter-gatherer or farmer lifestyles."

Stone-Age hunter-gatherers actually had a much lower genetic diversity than farmers. This suggested that the foraging groups were low in numbers compared to the farmers. Not only that, but the findings reveal that the hunter-gatherers and farmers were genetically distinct; yet there was some mixing between the two populations.

"We see clear evidence that people from hunter-gatherer groups were incorporated into farming groups as they expanded across Europe," said Pontus Skoglund, one of the researchers, in a news release. "This might be clues towards something that happened also when agriculture spread in other parts of the world."

The findings reveal that it's possible that hunter-gatherer groups eventually were assimilated by the farmers, which explains the shift to a farming lifestyle. In addition, the fact that the hunter-gatherer groups were smaller shows that they were less likely to persist than the farmers.

The findings are published in the journal Science.