Gene analysis shows male farmers spread across Europe

From Barth Anderson at Fair Food Fight, used with permission.

In a PloS Biology study released Tuesday and led by geneticist Patricia Balaresque of England's University of Leicester, researchers examined modern European men's genes to see how the continent was settled.

In particular, researchers were searching for clues as to how farming spread across Europe. When you look at the spread of agriculture out of the Fertile Crescent in the New Stone Age, the relative swiftness of it (just a few thousand years) makes you wonder if it was that new-fangled farming craz taking Neolithic Europe by storm, or if it was people with the technology that were migrating steadily and quickly out of Syria and Iraq. According to the genetic record, it's the latter.

"The incoming farming populations expand," Jobling [the study's senio author] says. Rather than gene differences clustering around some areas and not appearing in others — to be expected if early farmers had traded technology instead of migrating — the pattern of gene differences depicts a smooth march of male farmers' genes across Europe.

The genetic record apparently also shows that European mothers were probably not women from the same source locale of the population explosion (the "Near East"). Via Scientific American blog:

"More than 80 percent of European Y chromosomes descend from incoming farmers," geneticist Patricia Balaresque, also of the University of Leicester and lead study author, said in a prepared statement. "In contrast, most maternal genetic lineages seem to descend from hunter-gatherers."

How could these early European ancestors come from such different groups? "To us, this suggests a reproductive advantage for farming males over indigenous hunter-gatherer males during the switch from hunting and gathering to farming," Balaresque said. "Maybe, back then, it was just sexier to be a farmer."

Look. Here's your conquering hero now!