Was the Fishing Village of Lepenski Vir Built by Europe’s First Farmers?

Abstract

It is now widely accepted that agriculture and settled village life arrived in Europe as a cultural package, carried by people migrating from Anatolia and the Aegean Basin. The putative fisher-forager site of Lepenski Vir in Serbia has long been acknowledged as an exception to this model. Here, the Mesolithic–Neolithic transition—possibly inspired by interaction with the new arrivals—was thought to have taken place autochthonously on site. Our reinterpretation, based on ancient genomes, as well as archaeological and isotopic evidence, indicates that here, too, house construction, early village society and agriculture were primarily associated with Europe’s first farmers, thus challenging the long-held view of Lepenski Vir as a Mesolithic community that adopted Neolithic practices. Although aspects of the site's occupation, such as the trapezoidal houses, were inspired by local Mesolithic traditions, it is far from certain that the village was founded by Iron Gates foragers. A detailed timeline of population changes at the site suggests that Aegean incomers did not simply integrate into an established Mesolithic society, but rather founded new lineages and households. Iron Gates foragers and their admixed descendants largely appear to have been buried separately, on the fringes of the settlement. The diet of those buried outside in pits shows no major shift from aquatic to terrestrial food resources.

Local increases in admixture with hunter-gatherers followed the initial expansion of Neolithic farmers across continental Europe

“…Given that individual assigning to the HG or FA groups can affect the results, we chose to rerun simulations removing genomes from the exceptional site of Lepenski Vir in Serbia, in which the group attribution is especially challenging ( 19 , 20 ). However, it does not change model choice, with model AM3 still being the best with a relative probability of 40% (Supplementary Text 2).…”

“…[16][17][18], and regional studies provide valuable insights into local population interactions (e.g. [19][20][21]. Some palaeogenomic data support the assertion that hunter-gatherers and farmers only admixed sporadically at the outset of the Neolithic (3,22).…”

“…For instance, at 11 th /10 th millennium BP Boncuklu, in Central Anatolia, small-scale farming was practiced next to hunting and gathering ( 65 ). At 9 th millennium BP Lepenski Vir in the Danube’s Iron Gates, incoming farmers appear to have adopted fishing ( 19 ). The estimated age of the HG genomes ranges between 13,700 and 5,719 YBP, while the age of FAs is between 10,078 and 5,368 YBP (see Supplementary Data S1 for details).…”

Parallel worlds and mixed economies: multi-proxy analysis reveals complex subsistence systems at the dawn of early farming in the northeast Baltic

“…The introduction of farming has been considered one of the key elements of ancient subsistence changes and human-animal interactions. Recent research has disputed the notion of universal and linear economic change [1][2][3][4][5][6], highlighting the importance of deeply contextualized regional studies for revealing the diversity by which people 'transitioned' or adopted their subsistence strategies.…”

Descent, marriage, and residence practices of a 3,800-year-old pastoral community in Central Eurasia

“…To date, studies combining bioarchaeological, anthropological, and palaeogenetic evidence on kinship have inferred family structure among Upper Palaeolithic foragers ( 10 ), Neolithic farmers ( 11 – 19 ), and Bronze Age pastoralists and sedentary farmers ( 11 – 15 , 20 – 25 ), as well as more recent early Medieval populations ( 26 – 28 ). With some exceptions (e.g., ref.…”