How farmers and hunters became the best of Stone Age friends

‘Mixed to a great extent’

EARLY farmers lived alongside and interbred with the more primitive hunter-gatherers, according to DNA evidence.

The transition from hunting and gathering to farming is a significant one in human history.

As such, hunter-gatherers and farmers are usually thought about as two entirely different sets of people.

But findings from new research into ancient DNA evidence show that in what is now Romania, hunter-gatherers and farmers were living side by side, intermixing with each other, and having children.

The researchers recovered four ancient human genomes from Romania spanning a time transect between 8,800 and 5,400 years ago. They also analysed two Mesolithic (huntergatherer) genomes from Spain to provide further context.

The DNA revealed that the Romanian genomes from thousands of years ago had ‘significant’ ancestry from Western hunter-gatherers.

However, they also had a lesser but still sizeable contribution from Anatolian farmers, suggesting ‘multiple admixture’ events between huntergatherers and farmers.

Researcher Dr Michael Hofreiter, of Potsdam University in Germany, said the findings, which have been published in the journal Current Biology, indicate that ‘contacts went beyond the exchange of food and artefacts.

‘In some places, as the new evidence shows, incoming farmers and local hunter-gatherers mixed to a great extent.

‘They lived together, despite large cultural differences.’