All in the family!

In case you ever have had a sleepless night pondering about whether or not the first farmers in Central Europe were homies with the hunter-gatherers that's been roaming these parts of the world before them, then a there's a report in Science to give you some answers. By comparing mitochondrial DNA sequences from skeletal remains, as well as to modern Europeans they compared so called haplotypes - a pice of a DNA sequence that can be present in two or more versions. For instance, one individual might carry a sequence as TTGCCA while the other has a TTCCCA. The nice thing is that thanks to reproduction and time (and a lot of other factors that I won't write about now), individuals within a population may have more of one of the haplotypes than the other, while in another population the situation can be the opposite.

And this is the case for these mitochondrial haplotypes that the researches looked at. One, that's simply called U, was dominating the pre-farming populations, while modern Europeans carry another version called N1a. The latter was found to be present mainly in the early farmers and therefore, the researchers conclude that no, the early farmers seemed not to interbreed with the hunter-gatherers, because then the Europeans today ought to have a blend of both the U and N1a haplotypes. And no genetic exchange of women occurred, they state (why now that should be a suprise). They also say that we who live in Europe today (and humanoid earthlings with european background, I assume) have very little left of these first inhabitants.

If you want to read a longer and better overview of the story, there's another blog that's doing an excellent job about it. You will find it here (at the cool blog dienekes.blogspot.com). Either way, what I find most facinating with this story is that all us million people calling us Europeans today seems to walk around with similar haplotypes, which in turn means that we are decendants from a small group of ancestors that lived came here not that long ago. That's like having a great-great-great-ans-so-on grandmother that was an awsome geographical entrepreneur!