Extensive Farming in Estonia Started through a Sex-Biased Migration from the Steppe

Abstract

The transition from hunting and gathering to farming in Europe was brought upon by arrival of new people carrying novel material culture and genetic ancestry. The exact nature and scale of the transition-both material and genetic-varied in different parts of Europe [1-7]. Farming-based economies appear relatively late in Northeast Europe, and the extent to which they involve change in genetic ancestry is not fully understood due to the lack of relevant ancient DNA data. Here we present the results from new low-coverage whole-genome shotgun sequence data from five hunter-gatherers and five first farmers of Estonia whose remains date to 4,500 to 6,300 years before present. We find evidence of significant differences between the two groups in the composition of autosomal as well as mtDNA, X chromosome, and Y chromosome ancestries. We find that Estonian hunter-gatherers of Comb Ceramic culture are closest to Eastern hunter-gatherers, which is in contrast to earlier hunter-gatherers from the Baltics, who are close to Western hunter-gatherers [8, 9]. The Estonian first farmers of Corded Ware culture show high similarity in their autosomes with European hunter-gatherers, Steppe Eneolithic and Bronze Age populations, and European Late Neolithic/Bronze Age populations, while their X chromosomes are in addition equally closely related to European and Anatolian and Levantine early farmers. These findings suggest that the shift to intensive cultivation and animal husbandry in Estonia was triggered by the arrival of new people with predominantly Steppe ancestry but whose ancestors had undergone sex-specific admixture with early farmers with Anatolian ancestry.

The genomic history of southeastern Europe

“…34) we observe a transition in hunter-gatherer-related ancestry that is opposite to that seen in Ukraine. We find (Supplementary Data Table 3) that Mesolithic and Early Neolithic individuals (Latvia_HG) associated with the Kunda and Narva cultures have ancestry intermediate between WHG (~70%) and EHG (~30%), consistent with previous reports.…”

“…We find (Supplementary Data Table 3) that Mesolithic and Early Neolithic individuals (Latvia_HG) associated with the Kunda and Narva cultures have ancestry intermediate between WHG (~70%) and EHG (~30%), consistent with previous reports. 34–36 We also detect a shift in ancestry between the Early Neolithic and individuals associated with the Middle Neolithic Comb Ware Complex (Latvia_MN), who have more EHG-related ancestry (we estimate 65% EHG, but two of four individuals appear to be 100% EHG in PCA). The most recent individual, associated with the Final Neolithic Corded Ware Complex (I4629, Latvia_LN), attests to another ancestry shift, clustering closely with Yamnaya from Samara, 7 Kalmykia 15 and Ukraine (Figure 2).…”

Genomic and dietary transitions during the Mesolithic and Early Neolithic in Sicily

“…The final data set includes 868,755 intersecting autosomal SNPs for which our newly reported individuals cover 53,352-796,174 SNP positions with an average read depth per target SNP of 0.09-9.39X (Data file 1). We compared our data to a global set of contemporary ( 21 ) and 377 ancient individuals from Europe, Asia and Africa ( 15-17, 21-51 ).…”

Ancient Fennoscandian genomes reveal origin and spread of Siberian ancestry in Europe

“…Our study also presents the earliest occurrence of the Y-chromosomal haplogroup N1c in Fennoscandia. N1c is common among modern Uralic speakers, and has also been detected in Hungarian individuals dating to the 10 th century 35 , yet it is absent in all published Mesolithic genomes from Karelia and the Baltics 3,8,45,46 .…”