Origin & Evolution of a Family :
The Y-DNA Story

The general scientific consensus today is that man evolved on the African continent, arising from an ancestor species of primate, not yet identified, whose descendents included both man and the great apes. This branching probably occurred some 5 to 7 million years ago.

About 2 million years ago our hominin precursors, the Australopithecine, evolved into the homo genus. This genus produced a plethora of early men, including homo habilis, homo egaster and homo erectus, each iteration standing more erect, with a larger cranium and smaller jaw.

Anatomically modern humans, homo sapiens, or "wise man," emerged during the Middle Paleolithic, about 200,000 years ago. They then spread across the globe and by the late Paleolithic had replaced all of the archaic homo species, including the homo heidelbergensis, homo neanderthalensis and homo denisova. By the way, DNA analysis suggests that Neanderthal man, who inhabited Europe and parts of western Asia early in man's history, was not an ancestor of modern man, but a "dead-end" branch of the species that died out perhaps 50-60,000 years ago. Humans are the only living members of the genus homo.

Recent research has indicated that modern man, as he migrated out of Africa into Europe and East Asia, encountered, and interbred with, archaic men, including Neanderthal, Denisovian, and homo heidelbergensis . . . as any woman will tell you, the sexual habits of men are simply scandalous. The "interchange" with Neanderthal apparenty happened about 60,000 years ago in the Middle East. One of the important traits gained was the tolerance for lactose in milk. An even more recent study indicates that, while modern Europeans do have Neanderthal antecedants, there is no evidence of Neanderthal in their Y-DNA. That is, either there were no male Neanderthal interbreedings, or all of their male progeny died out.

Why did all other branches of the homo family die out? The modern answer is that humans killed them, or murdered them if you prefer the prejorative, but I think the salient point is that they all occupied the same ecological niche; success for one group entailed decline for the others. Archaic men disappeared because they could not successfully compete with modern humans.

Modern humans are mammals of the primate order. That means they have stereoscopic vision and deft hands. However, they are differentiated from other primates and, most significantly, the Great Apes, by several factors.
- They are bipedal, that is they walk upright on two legs. This necessitates the S-curve in their spine. The backbone of four limbed animals, including the apes, forms a simple curving arch. The second curve in humans brings the body's center of gravity directly above the hips so that the head and chest are balanced above the hip region. The fused hipbones, attached to the base of the spine, form a girdle that transmits the weight of the body to the legs. The bone of the heel gives a solid support to the foot. Humans' long legs allow them to have an increased stride length compared to that of apes. At the same time, humans' low center of gravity reduces inertia, or drag, when they walk or run.
- Their hands, while similiar to other primates, have a relatively long thumb with a much larger range of motion. This permits a more precise grasp for delicate work. Perhaps as importantly, the bones of the human arm hang freely from the shoulder, freeing the hands for tool use.
- Their brains are much larger in proportion to their body weight. This is both an advantage and disadvantage. While a larger brain, and especially a larger cerebral cortex, allows higher cognitive functions, brain cells make much higher energy demands on the body. That is, they are expensive. Evolutionarily, we have traded strength (apes are much stonger than we are) for the ability to think on a higher plane.
- A larger brain allowed the complex functioning required for human speech and the human larynx muscles and vocal chords provided the flexibility for the wide range of sounds necessary to articulate this speech. No other animal has both of these atributes. Speech allowed humans to efficiently organize their society.

Single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs, are the most common type of genetic variation among people. Each SNP represents a difference in a single nucleotide of the DNA. For example, a SNP may replace the nucleotide cytosine (C) with the nucleotide thymine (T) in a certain stretch of DNA. These changes are relatively rare. The SNPs of a man's Y-DNA identify his genealogical connections. Haplogroup classifications are based on SNPs.

Short Tandem Repeats, or STRs, is a spot on the DNA where a letter sequence is repeated, i.e. AGTAGT. STRs have a faster mutation rate than SNPs. For men have matching SNP results, their STR marker results determine how recently they are related. For this reason surname studies utilizes STRs.

The beginning of this era predates the emergence of modern man and marked the development of stone tool technology amongst the Australopithecine, a precursor to the hominids. It covers a period from about 3.3 millions years ago to the dawn of farming, 10-12,000 years ago. Prior to this time our earlier ancestors used tools made of the bones, teeth, and horns (or antlers) of their prey. This is called the Osteodontokeratic (i.e. Latin & Greek for bone-tooth-horn).

Stone tools could be as simple as an unshaped rock or as complex as a flint axe. The first evidence of flaked rock tools were found with homo habilis remains dated to circa 2.1 to 1.5 millions years ago. Flint, or obsidian, is shaped by a process known as knapping. When struck by another rock, the flint fractures leaving a smooth surface. Repeated strikes can create an edge on the flint sharp enough to shave with. Other stones can be shaped as well, though with greater difficulty. Flint and obsidian became important commodities and were the foundation of the earliest trading networks.

Also predating modern man was the creation and control of fire, which has been traced to from 700,000 to 120,000 years ago [that's a pretty wide range]. The bow and arrow, however, was a weapon of homo sapiens. It was developed about 65,000 years ago.

Paleolithic society was based on the extended family, a structure required due to the demands of their young. A human child, unlike most animals, is helpless at birth and requires years of care before reaching maturity. It has been estimated that for a human infant to be born at the same level of development as a chimpanzee infant, the gestation period would have to be extended to 18 to 21 months. The family group developed to protect both the child and its mother during this vulnerable period. Even after weaning a child needs years of training and socialization, by mother, father, aunts and uncles, before it can become a full fledged member of the group.

An individual tribe rarely had more than 30 members, many of whom would be children. Its leader would the most successful hunter and his chief advisors the eldest man and woman in the group, most likely his aged parents. Internal conflict was exclusively personal and could be handled one-on-one based on the good of the group. It was a communal society of a general equality in poverty.

That is not to say that hierarchies did not exist. All animals have structures of dominance just as birds have their pecking orders. It is just that until larger numbers of people were grouped together the hierarchical order would of necessity be very flat. But human nature doesn't change. Strong men attempted to dominate those weaker than themselves and strong women, who today we'd call queen bees, tormented their frailer rivals.

Y-DNA haplogroups in Europe during the Paleolithic included BT, CT, C1, F and IJK. Haplogroup I is only found starting about 17,000 years ago.

This was a transition period between eras. In Europe it is usually considered to begin at the end of the last Ice Age, circa 10,000 BC. Haplogroups BT, CT, C1 and IJK had disappeared from Europe by this time while haplogroup I was undergoing a great diversification and expansion. R1a and R1b had emerged in Russia.

The next period of history recognized is the Neolithic when agriculture was invented.

Recent archaelogical exploration has unearthed the remains of anatomically modern humans in Arabia and the Levant that are much older than the presumed out of Africa movement. Those in Arabia were dated to greater than 85,000 years ago and in the Levant to greater than 175,000 years ago. This has been called a failed dispersal because no descendants have been found for these early migrators.

At some point, and it's apparently around 70,000 years ago, the human population faced a sharp reduction in its size.

"Unlike our close genetic relatives - chimps - all humans have virtually identical DNA. In fact, one group of chimps can have more genetic diversity than all of the six billion humans alive today. It is thought we spilt from a common ancestor with chimps 5-6 million years ago, more than enough time for substantial genetic differences to develop. The absence of those differences suggests to some researchers that the human gene pool was reduced to a small size in the recent past, thereby wiping out genetic variation between current populations." - from BBC New Online Science Editor

One possible explanation for this bottleneck in human development may be the eruption of a supervolcano at Lake Toba in Sumatra approximately 70,000 years ago. The resultant cooling of the planet, a volcanic winter, may have caused a large die-off and restriction of the human population to a few tropical refugia. A drastic reduction in the population, to perhaps as few as 40 breeding pairs, resulted in an equally drastic reduction in genetic diversity. It was not until the late Stone Age that the human population recovered to its pre-catastrophe levels.

This isn't necessarily relevant to our discussion, but I think it interesting that the cheetah, the super-fast feline of the African savanna, also experienced a near-extinction event. About 10,000 years ago, when many large mammals were dying out as the planet warmed, the cheetah population crashed. Today they suffer from extremely low genetic diversity and resultant deformities.

The earliest men were hunter-gatherers, that is, they hunted game and gathered roots and berries for their subsistence. They were a mobile people, tracking the ever moving herds and staying in one place only until the food that could be gathered in the area had been exhausted. Being mobile they had few possessions; some skins for clothing, a few tools or weapons made of bone and antler, and later of stone, wooden spears with fire-hardened tips, some baskets woven of reeds to carry food, a gourd to carry water. They had no shelter, unless it was a rapidly built lean-to made of leaves and branches or a hole in the ground covered with similar materials.

The band or tribe was probably a small one, numbering no more than 30 individuals. There would be several adult males and a similar number of adult females, and a variety of adolescents, small children, and infants. If the group grew any larger it would tend to splinter.

Most of the food was gathered by the women from the local brush. Accompanied by their children, they spent most of the day digging for roots and tubers, and gathering whatever fruit or nuts could be pulled from the trees. The men would leave on long hunts. Lacking effective weapons they had to track the animals they wounded for many miles, and often for many days, until the animal, exhausted, could be cornered and killed. Man, while a relatively poor sprinter, is an unparelleled distance runner and can, given time, out run a gazelle. The meat, fat and marrow they brought home was a welcome respite to the usual vegetable fare. The band, lacking means to preserve and store the meat, would gorge. As often as not though, the men came back empty handed.

Humans had to compete not only with the other predators, such as lions, bears and wolves, but with other early hominids like the Neanderthal.

For the majority of man's time on earth we have been hunter-gatherers, existing at a very simple level. While this life could be hard, it also had its advantages. People only worked when they needed food, the rest of the time they might laze about, much like a pride of lions that has had a recent kill. Note that in later periods people considered hunting to be a recreation, a relief from the stress of work and responsibility. The change to this mode of living happened relatively recently, as will be discussed below.

By the way, the dog was the first animal domesticated. This happened 15,000-35,000 years ago, depending on your source, during this hunter-gatherer phase. The human-dog combination made for an unbeatable hunting team, combining human ingenuity and wolf speed and ferocity. Watch one of those police video shows ["Bad boys, bad boys"] and note the perp's response when the police release the dog.

Human groups had to meet and compete with other humans. Like other territorial animals, conflicts would occur between other roving bands of humans as they sought to maintain or expand their hunting domain. As has been seen in research with chimpanzees, animals other than man do make war and plan the conquest of competing groups. Humans fought, perhaps frequently, though the primitive nature of their weapons meant these battles were short. However, the loss of hunting territory could mean eventual death for the entire group.

There must have been some friendly coordination between groups, of course, if only to trade prospective sexual partners to prevent inbreeding. A patrilocal society is one in which women move to the tribe of their husband. A matrilocal society is one where men move to the tribe of their wife.

A genetic chokepoint results in a smaller population in which mutations, when they occur, get passed through a very large percentage of its members. This can result in fairly fast shifts in the population, especially if a few dominant males are responsible for the majority of the offspring. Anthropologists have proposed that such bottlenecks were responsible for the rapid development of hominids.

The action of a chokepoint may result in what is known as the 'founder effect.' This occurs when a small, isolated population drastically diverges from the original population. As humans spread across the planet, scientists believe that our population experienced multiple bottlenecks and, as a result, a serial-founder effect kicked in to create the diversity we currently see in the human race today. One bottleneck occurred when a small group of humans left Africa. Another happened when this group split up in the Middle East, with one group heading to Europe and the other to Asia. Others occurred when humans left Southeast Asia for Austronesia, crossed the Beringia land bridge into Alaska, and spread into South America through what is now Panama.

"A 2005 study from Rutgers University theorized that the pre-1492 native population of the Americas are the descendants of only 70 individuals who crossed the land bridge between Asia and North America." - from Wikipedia

The period from 50,000 to 10,000 years ago has been called the Late Stone Age or Uppler Paleolithic, and pre-dates the discovery of agriculture. It was in this period that anthropoligists believe mankind first began to demonstrate the ability to use complex symbolic thought and express cultural creativity, seen in cave paintings and the carving of voluptuous fertility figures.

While we tend to talk about Anatolia as being analgous to today's Turkey, it anciently was considered to comprise only that part which is a penisula of Asia. It was for that reason known as Asia Minor, "lesser asia," in classical times. It was bounded by the Black Sea to the north, the Mediterranean Sea to the south, and the Aegean Sea and Sea of Marmara to the west. In the east it extended to the Armenian Highlands, also known as Armenia Major, and bordered the Euphrates river before that river bends to the southeast to enter ancient Mesopotamia.

The portion of Turkey to the east of Anatolia is generaly referred to as East Anatolia.

A warming of the Earth, and subsequent glacial retreat, began in about 12,000 BC. The warming was shortly interrupted by a sudden cooling, known as the Younger-Dryas. Evidence from ice cores in Greenland show that about 12,000 to 13,000 years ago, something drastically disrupted our climate. The change was sudden, and it wiped out the remaining great fauna on Earth at the time, including the wooly mammoth, the saber-tooth tiger, and the giant sloth. Scientists speculate that this cooling may have been caused by the release of fresh water trapped behind ice on North America into the North Atlantic Ocean. The release altered vertical currents in the ocean which exchange heat energy with the atmosphere. A later theory was that the cooling was triggered by a comet strike. Fragments of a large, disintegrating asteroid or comet struck North America, South America, Europe, and western Asia around 12,800 years ago. Multiple airbursts/impacts produced the Younger Dryas boundary layer, depositing peak concentrations of platinum, high-temperature spherules, meltglass, and nanodiamonds, forming an isochronous datum at more than 50 sites across about 50 million km2 of Earth’s surface. Some scientists have proposed that this event triggered extensive biomass burning, a brief impact winter and the Younger Dryas abrupt climate change, contributed to extinctions of late Pleistocene megafauna.

The warming resumed by 8,500 BC and between 5,000 and 3,000 BC average global temperatures reached their maximum level during the Holocene and were 1 to 2 degrees Celsius warmer than they are today. Climatologists call this period the Climatic Optimum. During the Climatic Optimum, many of the Earth's great ancient civilizations began and flourished. In Africa, the Nile River had three times its present volume, indicating a much larger tropical region.

From 3,000 to 2,000 BC a cooling trend occurred. This cooling caused large drops in sea level and the emergence of many islands and coastal areas that are still above sea level today. A short warming trend took place from 2,000 to 1,500 BC, followed once again by colder conditions. Colder temperatures from 1,500-750 BC caused renewed ice growth in continental glaciers and alpine glaciers, and a sea level drop of between 2 to 3 meters below present day levels.

The period from 750-150BC saw warming, however temperatures did not get as warm as the Climatic Optimum. During the time of the Roman Empire, 150 BC-300 AD, a cooling began that lasted until about 900 AD. At its depth, the cooling caused the Nile River and the Black Sea to freeze, 829 and 800-801 AD respectively.

The period 900-1200 AD has been called the Little Climatic Optimum. It represents the warmest climate since the Climatic Optimum. During this period, the Vikings established settlements on Greenland and Iceland. The snow line in the Rocky Mountains was about 370 meters above current levels. A period of cool and more extreme weather followed the Little Climatic Optimum. A great drought in the American southwest occurred between 1276 and 1299. There are records of floods, great droughts and extreme seasonal climate fluctuations up to the 1400s.

From 1550 to 1850 AD global temperatures were at their coldest since the beginning of the Holocene. Scientists call this period the Little Ice Age. During the Little Ice Age, the average annual temperature of the Northern Hemisphere was about 1.0 degree Celsius lower than today. During the period 1580 to 1600, the western United States experienced one of its longest and most severe droughts in the last 500 years. Cold weather in Iceland from 1753 and 1759 caused 25% of the population to die from crop failure and famine. Newspapers in New England were calling 1816 the year without a summer.

The period 1850 to present is one of general warming. - from PhysicalGeography.net

The Neolithic, or New Stone Age, began when man invented farming and so varies in time around the world. In the Middle East, where it is believed farming first originated, it began in about 10,000 BC. Early Neolithic farming was limited to a narrow range of plants, both wild and domesticated, which included einkorn wheat, millet and spelt, and to the keeping of dogs, sheep and goats. By about 6,900-6,400 BC it included domesticated cattle and pigs and the establishment of permanently or seasonally inhabited settlements. The period is generally divided into four eras,
- Proto-Neolithic. A hunter-gatherer society which was semi-sedentary. Wild seeds were harvested and some re-seeding occurred.
- Pre-Pottery Neolithic A, circa 10,000 BC. A fully sedentary life-style with the construction of small, circular mud brick homes. Crops were cultivated, but people still depended heavily on the hunting of wild game. Collective burials of relatives were made under the floors of the dwellings.
- Pre-Pottery Neolithic B, circa 8,800 BC. People began to depend more heavily upon domesticated animals to supplement their earlier mixed agrarian and hunter-gatherer diet. Dwellings now were rectangular and stone tool technology significantly improved.
- Pottery Neolithic, circa 6,400 BC. Culturally distinctive pottery was produced for storage and cooking.

The invention of farming and establishment of settled communities brought problems as well as advantages. With a guaranteed source of food the population boomed, but as it became dependent on a limited variety of foods, the general health was, paradoxically, poorer than that found amongst the hunter-gatherers. With an increasing population the margin of error between a good harvest and famine also narrowed dramatically. Finally, farming is hard, back-breaking work, requiring continuous vigilance against bad weather and pests. In future times people might hunt simply for the fun of it, but if the poor could escape the farm by fleeing to the cities, they did so. Today people garden as a hobby because they don't have to depend on it (I'm gardener and I know).

It has been said that the Neolithic revolution was a trap. Once a society made the transition to farming they could never go back to hunting and gathering; their populations had grown too great to be supported by the old methods.

Villages too had their disadvantages. They were targets for predatory nomads who could smash and grab before the farmers could organize to resist them. The history of Europe is of slow economic growth, periodically swept away by riders out of the east, or seaborne raiders from the north. It was only after about 1350 AD that Europeans were able to put an end to nomadic raids.

The change to farming and permanent settlements resulted in political change as well. A Paleolithic society would tend to be a communal one of general equality in poverty. The Neolithic unleashed a surplus not only of food, but of the crafts that there was now time to develop. Trade resulted, which increased the wealth. However, over time wealth stratified the society into the successful and unsuccessful. The former became the leaders which accelerated their rise in wealth. While a hunter-gatherer band was a family group, the farmers' world was one of many families and competing interests. As the size of a Neolithic community increased so did its complexity. Intermediaries had to exist to resolve inter-family, or inter-clan disputes. Others were needed to resolve arguments between farmers, artisans and merchants. And, because family ties were still the most important, once a man got a position of power he would try to keep it in his family group for succeeding generations. It was not long, therefore, before hereditary leaders arose.

The Neolithic revolution had a sexual aspect as well. In the period of population growth that followed the spread of agriculture, circa 8,000-4,000 BC, a bottleneck developed in the male line resulting in modern populations having many more female ancestors than male of this era (on the order of 17 to 1). Researchers believe that this drastic drop in male diversity was caused by the rise of an elite few males who accumulated wealth, power and, subsequently, access to females, at the expense of other males. The elite then passed on their wealth, and reproductive success, to successive generations of sons. Apparently our fathers were amongst this lucky elite since we're here now. A stellar example of this elite advantage is evidence that Genghis Khan's DNA is present in about 16,000,000 men alive today. There are another 10 men who similarly dominate the genetic pool, though their identities are unknown. Male diversity recovered, though even in more recent history a global average of 4 women have reproduced for every 1 man.

At this time religion too grew from a hunter's cult of animal spirits into one of hierarchial gods who governed the prospects for a good harvest. Farmers are the original pessimists of the world so it is not surprising that their gods were unpredictable and mean spirited, kinda like the weather. The Greek myths are replete with stories of gods that act like spoiled children or your most regrettable relatives.

Y-DNA haplogroups in Europe during the Neolithic included G2a, as well as the hunter-gatherer groups already present during the Mesolithic.

The next period of history recognized is the Chalcolithic, staring in about 4,500 BC, when copper metallurgy was developed.

A Neolithic settlement in southeastern Turkey, at the foot of the Taurus mountains. It prospered from circa 8,630 to 6,800 BC, a period that covers the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A & B (PPNA & PPNB) and Pottery Neolithic (PN). It lies near the Bogazcay river, a tributary of the upper Tigris River. Archeological finds include farming tools that suggest both crops and animal husbandry as well as domestication of the dog. Religion is represented by figurines of Cybele, a mother goddess.

Genetic studies of emmer wheat, the precursor of most current wheat species, show that the slopes of Mount Karaca, which is located in close vicinity to Cayonu, was the location of first domestication. This was also possibly the place where the pig was first domesticated. An analysis of blood found at the site suggested that human sacrifice occurred there (!).

In the period between the Paleolithic and Neolithic eras, a population in the Levant, dubbed the Natufian culture, were able to give up their migratory habits and settle into a sedentary lifestyle. They were able to do so, despite continuing as hunter-gatherers, because the Middle East was at this time, unlike today, cool and lush with vegetation and animal life. The people hunted the numerous game and gathered the grains of the many wild cereal plants that grew there without the need to move on as the vegetation was depleted. In this friendly environment they forsook their previously nomadic lifestyle, settled down, and multiplied quickly.

However, after long centuries of warming earth's temperature took a sudden and precipitous drop. This ushered in a 1000-year cold snap called the Younger Dryas, between 12,000 and 13,000 years ago, and had a profound effect on man's history. When the cold temperatures of the Younger Dryas intervened the wild cereals were crowded out by scrub that could better survive the new, colder, drier environment. It is thought that farming began as people cleared away the scrub, creating beds in which the wild cereal they had become dependent upon could prosper. Inspired by this they began to sow the wild seed themselves and, eventually, to domesticate and improve the plants. The success of their efforts resulted in the Neolithic farming revolution. With a more secure food source, a mankind of limited numbers and precarious existence was transformed into a burgeoning mankind of towns and cities that could manipulate their natural environment and free others to create new technologies in other fields.

By the way, there's some conjecture that it was women who invented farming. This makes sense since in most hunter-gatherer populations the men go out hunting game and women, encumbered by their children, seek roots, berries, and cereals in the nearby brush. As such it was more likely that it was they who cleared away the scrub that was crowding out the food plants they had been harvesting.

From DNA testing of the sparse remains available, the Natufians of the Levant appear to have been haplogroup E1b, so they are not ancestors of our family.

Mankind has, through selective breeding, influenced the development of both plants and animals. These domesticated breeds were selected, sometimes inadvertantly, for desirable traits. For example, wild wheat "shatters and falls to the ground to reseed itself when ripe, but domesticated wheat stays on the stem for easier harvesting. This change was possible because of a random mutation in the wild populations at the beginning of wheat's cultivation. Wheat with this mutation was harvested more frequently and became the seed for the next crop. Therefore, without realizing, early farmers selected for this mutation. The result is domesticated wheat, which relies on farmers for its reproduction and dissemination." - from Wikipedia.

Cereal crops were first domesticated around 9,000 BC in the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East. The first domesticated crops were generally annuals with large seeds or fruits. These included peas, wheat and rye. The two most important grains domesticated were,
- Emmer wheat is native to the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, growing in the grass and woodland of hill country from modern-day Israel to Iran. Emmer was collected from the wild and eaten by hunter gatherers for thousands of years before its domestication. The location of the earliest site of emmer domestication is still unclear and under debate, but includes all of the Fertile Crescent. It was a more prominent crop than its cereal contemporaries and competitors, einkorn wheat and barley.
- Einkorn wheat, right, commonly grows wild in the hill country in the northern part of the Fertile Crescent and Anatolia although it has a wider distribution reaching into the Balkans and south to Jordan near the Dead Sea. It is a short variety of wild wheat, usually less than 28 inches tall, and is not very productive of edible seeds. Evidence from DNA finger-printing suggests einkorn was first domesticated near Karaca Dag in southeast Turkey, an area in which a number of Pre-Pottery Neolithic-B farming villages have been found. From the northern part of the Fertile Crescent the cultivation of einkorn wheat spread to the Caucasus, the Balkans, and central Europe. Einkorn wheat was more commonly grown in cooler climates than emmer wheat, the other domesticated wheat.

Dogs were the first domesticated animals. This occurred 15,000-35,000 years ago, during the Paleolithic, and it is now thought that these early canines may have domesticated themselves. That is, while humans may have intentionally domesticated some wolves into dogs, for the most part wolves self-domesticated by establishing a mutually beneficial relationship with Paleolithic humans. They began by scavenging on the remains of prey animals left at human settlements or at kill sites. Those wolves that were less anxious around and aggressive to humans thrived and effectively colonized the human-dominated environment. Once this relationship was established humans began to use the canines for their own purposes.

The domestication of other animals had to wait upon the Neolithic, when man established settlements that could hold the animals.

Because of their smaller size, these were the first food-source animals to be domesticated. Due to its aggressive personality, however, pigs trailed the others. Both Paleolithic and Neolithic man preyed on these animals, but it was only the latter that had the settled communities that made it possible to capture and hold some of these animals for later consumption. Feeding these captures and eventually breeding them followed.

Because of their size, and the danger this posed, cattle were the latest of the prey animals to be domesticated, which followed a similar course to the above.

Cats first began to live in conjunction with humans during the Neolithic, drawn to farms in pursuit of the rodents that ate man's grain. They were, however, free-living, requiring nothing from humans and suffered to roam at will because of the service they provided. This reminds me of my father, a farm boy, who talked of the cats around the family farm. These cats were not treated as pets and certainly never fed, which would have defeated the purpose of them living there. They were not feral, but they also weren't tamed. The word is synanthropic, "a member of a species of wild animal or plant that lives near, and benefits from, an association with human beings and the somewhat artificial habitats that people create around themselves (see anthropophilia). Such habitats include houses, gardens, farms, roadsides and rubbish dumps." Cats followed human farmers as they moved into and across Europe.

The horses of the Ice Age were hunted by early modern humans for meat in Europe, across the Eurasian steppes, and into North America. Cave paintings in Europe indicate what these horses looked like. They had large heads, thick necks, stiff upright manes, relatively short, stout legs, and a dun coloration. The horse was first domesticated in the Eurasian Steppes in approximately 3,500 BC. Apparently this occurred among the Botai people of Akmola Province in Kazakhstan. They rode horseback to hunt wild horses, there being no other large prey animals in that region. They also milked their horses. Under domestication the horse evolved into its current larger, longer legged version.

The invention of farming did not spring from a single source. Multiple cultures made this discovery at different times and in different places. Who was first is still open for debate. Recent research,

". . . reveals three genetically distinct farming populations living in the Near East at the dawn of agriculture 12,000 to 8,000 years ago: two newly described groups in Iran [Ganj Dareh] and the Levant [Natufians] and a previously reported group in Anatolia [Konya plain], in what is now Turkey. Together, the results suggested that agriculture spread in the Near East at least in part because existing groups invented or adopted farming technologies, rather than through population replacement . . . The findings tell a different story from what researchers believe happened later in Europe, when the first farmers moved in from Anatolia and largely replaced the hunter-gatherer populations who had been living there . . . The integration of ancient DNA samples from archaeological skeletal samples allows us to redefine the parameters of population history at the origin of agriculture. Clearly the transition from hunter-gatherer communities to agricultural ones is not a singular invention and spread, but the result of a series of innovations, aggregations and disseminations on both the cultural and biological sides of human history . . . The researchers also learned how descendants of each early farming group, even as they began to intermingle, contributed to the genetic ancestry of people in different parts of the world: Farmers related to the Anatolian group spread west into Europe, people related to the Levant group moved south into East Africa, people related to those in Iran or the Caucasus went north into the Russian steppe, and people related to both the farmers in Iran and hunter-gatherers from the steppe spread into South Asia." - from Anthrogenica.com

Apparently there are only a handful of places around the globe that have native foods that could support such an innovation. The map below displays these places and the crop that supported them. Note that not all crops are equally valuable. While the cereals of the Middle East were easy to store and its lentils and peas were high in protein, the yams and bananas of New Guinea were much less nutritious and spoiled quickly, limiting the potential of the societies that depended upon them. Other factors that limited modernization were the availablity of suitable animals for domestication and navigable rivers to support trade. See "Guns, Germs, and Steel" by Jared Diamond for an excellent account of this.

By the way, those environmentalists who believe that our capitalistic economy is unsustainable and whose battle-cry is "Back to the Paleolithic!," see the farming revolution as the great tragedy of human development. On a less extreme level, many dieticians look to the pre-Neolithic to identify foodstuffs more "natural" for the human diet than the carbohydrate-rich foods of the Neolithic farmers. That is perhaps true, but it takes a modern economy to make a Paleolithic diet possible for a large audience.

This very early Neolithic site is just 10 kilometers north of Catalhoyuk, see below. The people of Boncuklu lived in oval shaped buildings, usually dug down into the ground, with mud brick walls. This is quite unlike the pueblo-like buildings built at Catalhoyuk a thousand years later. Boncuklu Y-DNA samples are quite similar to the later farmers at Barcin, Mentese, and early European farmers.

This Neolithic village is located north of Catal hoyuk on the bank of the Melendiz brook. Due to its date and structural organization it is known to be "a prime example of a first foray into sedentism." The village was located near an obsidian source, and became a base of trade which stretched to modern day Cyprus and Iraq. Wikipedia notes that some 6,000 obsidian objects were retrieved from the surface layer of the site.

Or Catal Huyuk. A Neolithic town that, from 7,500 to 5,700 BC, was one of the world's largest settlements. At a time when most of the world's people were wandering hunter-gatherers, it had as many as 10,000 inhabitants living in its mud-brick houses.

The pueblo-like settlement of Catalhoyuk, on the Konya plain in south-central Anatolia, was founded in the Neolithic by cereal and pulse [dry pea, lentil, chickpea, lupin and fava bean] farmers who also brought domesticated goats and sheep. Only a few centuries later (circa 6,500 BC) cattle were introduced to Catalhoyuk and other sites in Central Anatolia, presumably by trading with their eastern neighbours. Also around 8,500 years ago, G2a Neolithic farmers arrived in northwest Anatolia and Thessaly in central Greece, as attested by the ancient genomes sequenced by Mathieson et al. (2015) and Hofmanova et al. (2015). - derived from Haplogroup G2a

The story of the very early city of Gobekli Tepe, circa 9,000 BC, in southeast Turkey on a tributary of the Tigris river, upends the discussion above about the origins of settled life. Here it appears that the settling down, which apparently occurred for religious purposes (the explanation for anything we don't understand), led to the later development of an agricultural economy. It is here that the earliest stone buildings are found.

A ritual complex composed of as many as 20 circular temples containing curiously carved pillars, like that to the left, have been found. All the pillars are T-shaped with heights changing from 3 to 6 meters. Archeologists interpret those T-shapes as stylized human beings, mainly because of the depiction of human extremities that appear on some of the pillars. What also appears on these mystical rock statues are carvings of animals as well as abstract symbols, sometimes picturing a combination of scenes. Foxes, snakes, wild boars, cranes, wild ducks are most common. Most of these were carved into the flat surfaces of these pillars. There are also three-dimensional sculptures in the shape of a lion descending on the side of the T-pillar. The circular temples were probably covered by wood and thach roofs.

A city subsequently grew up around the ritual complex and the needs of the growing population forced a more intensive form of food production.

Alternate explanations of this site's settlement exist, of course. One is referred to as 'Beer before Grain.' It upends the idea that agriculture came first, followed by the discovery of brewing. The new theory says that people assembled at Gobekli Tepe to drink low-alcohol beer made from native wheat and barley. This quasi-religious bacchanalia was such a delight that peoplle rushed to find new sources of grain to increase the supply of beer, and the invention of farming followed.

Another (less likely) theory is that Gobekli Tepe shows that mankind has gone through multiple rises & falls. The theory posits that this community was actually based on a farming technology (there is no proof for this) and they then built their great complex as a result of their new-found wealth, but crashed due to unknown factors, returning to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

Another theory says aliens built the site (what would we do without aliens?), while another says its all a fraud perpetrated by the Turkish government.

"Kumtepe is the oldest permanent settlement in the Troas, the region in northwestern Anatolia, where later Troy was built. Kumtepe has four layers, Kumtepe IA, IB, IC and II. The last two have been largely disturbed in the twentieth century. The remaining and relatively undisturbed IA and IB are of special interest to the archaeologists, because these are older than other settlements in the region.

Around 4,800 BC the first settlement in Kumtepe was founded. The inhabitants lived on fishing, and their diet included oysters. The dead were buried, but without grave gifts. Although Kumtepe belongs to Neolithic, the occupants used also copper. Around 4,500 BC the settlement was abandoned.

Around 3,700 BC new settlers came to Kumtepe. The people of this new culture, Kumtepe B, built relatively large houses with multiple rooms, sometimes a porch. They also practiced animal husbandry and agriculture. The main domestic animals were goats and sheep, bred not only for meat but for milk and wool as well. They knew lead and bronze along with copper. Shortly after 3,000 BC Yassitepe and Hisarlik (Troy) were colonized probably from Kumtepe." - from Wikipedia

"Brewing and beer consumption have played a significant role in prehistoric human cultures around the world. Beer was a tasty, nutritious food, a substance affecting the mind, medicine, a religious symbol, as well as a social medium and an accelerator. Alcohol relieved the pain and prevented the spread of infection. Beer was a safe and healthy drink compared to contaminated water. At the time when our ancestors began to domesticate agricultural crops, they commonly produced not only bread but also beer. It is probable that the first ceramic vessels in the Near East were created precisely out of the need to more effectively control the technological process of beer production. Similarly, in the Central European Copper Age, beer production and its growing social significance influenced the emergence of the set Ceramic complex that lasted continuously for more than three millennia. Beer has entered almost all aspects of social life, from everyday consumption and social interactions to initiation ceremonies and major religious celebrations. The study of beer and other fermented beverages sheds light on many aspects of the biocultural development of humans on this planet." - from "Beer, Pottery, Society and Early European Identity" by Turek, et al, Jan 2020.

The invention of bread and beer has been argued to be responsible for humanity's ability to develop technology and build civilization. People have been imbibing alcohol for most of their history in the form of rotting fruit, which ferments as it decays. Afterall, we know that apes, elephants and birds become drunk in this way. As hunter-gatherer tribes settled into agrarian civilizations based around staple crops like wheat and barley, they appear to have stumbled upon the knowledge that low-alcohol beer could be created from wheat and barley. This probably occurred when wild yeasts in the air caused spontaneous fermentation in grain products. In fact, some anthropologists have argued that these early peoples' insatiable thirst for hooch may have contributed to the Neolithic Revolution by inspiring new agricultural technologies. Little is known of this early invention because clay pots, which provide the best evidence we have of beer making, was not invented until about 2,000 years after the invention of agriculture.

An alternative theory is that fermentation was discovered with native grains during the hunter-gatherer period, which led to the invention of farming to increase the available product for the increased manufacture of beer.

See also Early Europe.

43,000 to 33,000 years before the present (BP). Also known as Cro-Magnon, these Early Modern Humans (EMH) come out of the Middle East to spread across Europe. These have been described as a "robust" people, which means, I think, heavily built. a

"The Aurignacian tool industry is characterized by worked bone or antler points with grooves cut in the bottom. Their flint tools include fine blades and bladelets struck from prepared cores rather than using crude flakes. The people of this culture also produced some of the earliest known cave art, such as the animal engravings at Trois Freres and the paintings at Chauvet cave in southern France. They also made pendants, bracelets, and ivory beads, as well as three-dimensional figurines. Perforated rods, thought to be spear throwers or shaft wrenches, also are found at their sites." - from Wikipedia

33,000 to 22,000 years BP, although some elements lasted until 17,000 BP. Its disappearance roughly coincided with the bitter cold of the Last Glacial Maximum. As the climate chilled and glaciers advanced, this population had sought refuge in southern Europe, in Iberia and the Balkans.

"The Gravettians were hunter-gatherers who lived in a bitterly cold period of European prehistory, and Gravettian lifestyle was shaped by the climate . . . Gravettian culture thrived on their ability to hunt animals. They utilized a variety of tools and hunting strategies. Compared to theorized hunting techniques of Neanderthals and earlier human groups, Gravettian hunting culture appears much more mobile and complex. They lived in caves or semi-subterranean or rounded dwellings which were typically arranged in small "villages". Gravettians are thought to have been innovative in the development of tools such as blunted-back knives, tanged arrowheads and boomerangs. Other innovations include the use of woven nets and oil lamps made of stone. Blades and bladelets were used to make decorations and bone tools from animal remains." - from Wikipedia

22,000 to 17,000 years BP. The Solutrean industry is a relatively advanced flint tool-making style of the Upper Palaeolithic of the Final Gravettian and employed techniques not seen before and not rediscovered for millennia.

17,000 to 12,000 years BP. Later culture of the Upper Paleolithic and Mesolithic.

"It was characterized by a cold and dry climate, the existence of humans in association with the reindeer, and the extinction of the mammoth. The use of bone and ivory as implements, begun in the preceding Solutrean epoch, increased, making the period essentially a bone period [i.e. not flint?]. Bone instruments are quite varied: spear-points, harpoon-heads, borers, hooks and needles . . . The later phases of Magdalenian culture are contemporaneous with the human re-settlement of north-western Europe after the Last Glacial Maximum." - from Wikipedia

The earliest Neolithic Farmers in Europe arrived from Anatolia and settled first in Greece, around 6,500 BC, roughly coincident with their settlement of western Turkey. They may have arrived via a still existent land bridge at the Bosphorus, or used primitive boats to paddle across the Aegean, moving from island to island, never losing site of land.

Early Neolithic sites in Greece are shown on the map to the right.

The earliest villages are found in the eastern half of the country, from Macedonia in the north to the Peloponnese Peninsula in the south, with the largest concentration of villages in Thessaly, in central Greece. The area was not densely inhabited. There are probably no more than about three hundred Early Neolithic sites, and their total population at the time was no more than a few tens of thousands. The villages are found well inland, often near a copious spring or a perennial river. The early farmers apparently selected only the best and most reliable soils for farming. Studies of pollen from cores taken from lakes and swamps show that forest cover was not adversely affected by clearing of fields for nearly a thousand years after the first farmers arrived. Village farming was simple, based on the clearing of small fields that could be cultivated with digging sticks and hoes to grow wheat, barley, and pulses. Herds of cattle and sheep were grazed on meadows in nearby hills.

The late Neolithic site at Kleitos, in Thessaly, yielded G2a2a1b (4,200-4,000 BC). "Genetic origins of the Minoans and Mycenaeans" by Lazaridis, et al, claimed that the ancient remains of 19 Bronze Age Minoan and Mycenaean individuals show that three-quarters of their ancestry came from the first Neolithic farmers of western Anatolia and the Aegean.

Old Europe is a term describing a relatively homogeneous pre-Indo-European Neolithic culture centered in the Danube river valley of southeastern Europe, but stretching as far as Britain. It occupied a time period from about 7,000 BC, when the first farming societies in Greece were founded, to 3,000 BC and the advent of the Bronze Age.

Most European Neolithic groups shared certain basic characteristics. They lived in small-scale, family-based communities and were more egalitarian than the city-states and chiefdoms of the Bronze Age [assumed because they were small-scale?]. They subsisted on domesticated plants and animals supplemented with the collection of wild plant foods and hunting. They produced hand-made pottery without the aid of a potter's wheel. There were exceptions, of course, most notably the large cities of the Cucuteni-Trypillian.

The survival of non-Indo-European languages, such as the modern Basque and the ancient Etruscan, are supposedly markers of this old culture.

Haplogroup G has not been found in any Paleolithic or Mesolithic sites in Europe. Of Early/Middle Neolithic remains in Europe 61% are G2a, 16% I2a, 6% F, 3% C1a, 3% H2, 3% I, 3% T, 1.5% E1b1b, 1.5% I1, 1.5% J2, and 1.5% R1b - from eupedia.com.

The earliest Neolithic culture to develop north of Greece was the Vinca. It ranged from northern Greece through Macedonia, Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia, and parts of Romania and Bulgaria.

"Farming technology first introduced to the region during the First Temperate Neolithic was developed further by the Vinca culture, fueling a population boom and producing some of the largest settlements in prehistoric Europe. The First Temperate Neolithic is an archaeological horizon consisting of the earliest archaeological cultures of Neolithic Southeastern Europe, dated to 6,400-5,100 BC. The cultures of the First Temperate Neolithic were the first to practice agriculture in temperate Europe, which required significant innovations in farming technology previously adapted to a mediterranean climate. - from Wikipedia.

Two of three DNA samples taken from the ancient remains of the Vinca taken at Szederkeny-Kukorica-dulo, in southern Hungary, were tested as G2a2a and G2a2b2a1a (PF3346). The latter is part of the parent-stock of the Hissem family type. The other sample was H2-M282.

These were three related Neolithic cultures, successors to the early Vinca culture of southeastern Europe, see map below. They were located in Serbia, eastern Hungary and Romania, respectively. Their pottery was usually coarse, but finer fluted and painted vessels later emerged. - from Wikipedia.

"Their Neolithic agricultural economy was based primarily on the cultivation of crops from the Fertile Crescent, such as Emmer wheat, Einkorn wheat, barley, spelt millet, pulses (peas and bitter vetch), and buckwheat. Some fruit trees were also cultivated, including plums and apricots. Starcevo farmers bred livestock, especially goats and sheep, but to a lower extent also cattle and pigs. They also supplemented their diets by fishing in rivers and hunting deer and wild boar in forests." - from Eupedia

See also, Starcevo-Koros-Cris Culture at eupedia.com.

The late Neolithic Cucuteni-Trypillian culture, from Western Ukraine, Moldova, and Romania, produced an enormous farming population. They lived alongside and just to the west of the Yamnaya culture steppe nomads, who were type R1a/b. When the climate suddenly got much warmer and drier around 3,500 BC the Cucuteni-Trypillian sites were abandoned because the region became too dry to support such a large population. The Yamnaya began a westward migration soon after, supplanting the Cucuteni-Trypillians.

Four out of five Cucuteni-Trypillian samples from Ukraine were G2a2. The following seems to have been a mistake, based on a contaminated specimen [One of these, from Western Ukraine circa 3,619 to 2,936 BC, was G2a2b2a1a1b1a1a1, or G-L42, the earliest G-L497 found so far. That is, L42 is downstream from L497. Today there is still a hot spot of G-L497 in Moldavia. Note that L42 is a subclade of L43, which is a sister clade of our Z726. L42 is especially common today in Switzerland and the Austrian Tyrol, but it is also found in the Balkans and Italy. L42 seems to be associated with the Raetian-speaking region of Western Austria and Eastern Switzerland.]

A successor to the Starcevo-Koros-Cris culture, located across Central Europe from Hungary to the Netherlands. Linear Pottery, more often known as LBK, from the German Linearbandkeramik, is a Neolithic decorative style that gets its name from the incised lines it bears, in imitation of painted bands. The pottery itself consists of simple cups, bowls, vases and jugs.

"Farming was established in Central Europe by the Linearbandkeramik culture (LBK), a well investigated archaeological horizon, which emerged in the Carpathian Basin, in today's Hungary. However, the genetic background of the LBK genesis has not been revealed yet. Here we present 9 Y chromosomal and 84 mitochondrial DNA profiles from Mesolithic, Neolithic Starcevo and LBK sites (7th/6th millennium BC) from the Carpathian Basin and south-eastern Europe. We detect genetic continuity of both maternal and paternal elements during the initial spread of agriculture, and confirm the substantial genetic impact of early farming south-eastern European and Carpathian Basin cultures on Central European populations of the 6th-4th millennium BC. Our comprehensive Y chromosomal and mitochondrial DNA population genetic analyses demonstrate a clear affinity of the early farmers to the modern Near East and Caucasus, tracing the expansion from that region through south-eastern Europe and the Carpathian Basin into Central Europe. Our results also reveal contrasting patterns for male and female genetic diversity in the European Neolithic, suggesting patrilineal descent system and patrilocal residential rules among the early farmers.

. . . We observe genetic discontinuity between Mesolithic foragers and early farmers, and genetic continuity between farming populations of the 6th-4th millennium BC across a vast territory of southeastern and Central Europe. Nine novel Y chromosome DNA profiles offer first insights into the Y chromosome diversity of the earliest European farmers, and further support the migration (demic diffusion) from the Near East into Central Europe along the Continental route of Neolithisation . . . On the Continental route, the Carpathian Basin connected south-eastern Europe to the Central European loess plains . . . We successfully generated unambiguous NRY [Non-Recombining Y-DNA] SNPs profiles for nine male individuals . . . Three STA [Starcevo] individuals belong to the NRY haplogroup F* (M89) and two specimens can be assigned to the G2a2b [L30] (S126) haplogroup, and one each to G2a (P15) and I2a1. The two investigated LBKT [Linear Pottery Transdanubia] samples carry haplogroups G2a2b (S126) and I1 (M253). Furthermore, the incomplete SNP profiles of eight specimens potentially belong to the same haplogroups; STA: three G2a2b (S126), two G2a (P15), and one I (M170); LBKT: one G2a2b (S126) and one F* (M89) . . . Interestingly, the STA mtDNA signature was still preserved in Neolithic cultures of the 5th/4th millennium BC in Central Europe (Figure 3, Dataset S10), attesting a direct and enduring genetic legacy of the STA and LBKT in the Central European Neolithic, with minimal or no additional genetic influence from outside for the subsequent 2,500 years.

. . . Considering the entire set of 32 published NRY records available for Neolithic Europe thus far, the low paternal diversity is indeed quite remarkable: G2a is the prevailing haplogroup in the Central European and Carpathian Basin Neolithic, and in French and Iberian Neolithic datasets." - from "Tracing the Genetic Origin of Europe's First Farmers Reveals Insights Into Their Social Organization" by Szecsenyi-Nagy, et al

The people who produced Linear Pottery were the first true farmers in central Europe. Their crops included wheat, crab apples, peas, lentils, flax, linseed, poppies and barley. Domestic animals included cattle, sheep and goats. They lived in small villages alongside waterways and built large longhouses with rectangular plans.

There is evidence of a violent relationship with the native hunter-gatherer population and, perhaps, other LBK communities as well. One-third of burials show evidence of traumatic injuries and a large number of LBK villages were fortified with ditches, walls and complex gates.

"The later phase of the Central European Early Neolithic witnessed a rise in collective lethal violence to a level undocumented up to this date. This is evidenced by repeated massacres of settled communities of the Linearbandkeramik (ca. 5600-4900 cal BC), the first full farming culture in this area. Skeletal remains of several dozen victims of this prehistoric warfare are known from different sites in Germany and Austria. Here we show that the mass grave of Halberstadt, Germany, a new mass fatality site from the same period, reveals further and so far unknown facets of Early Neolithic collective lethal violence. A highly selected, almost exclusively adult male and non-local population sample was killed by targeted blows to the back of the head, indicating a practice of systematic execution under largely controlled conditions followed by careless disposal of the bodies. This discovery significantly increases current knowledge about warfare-related violent behaviour in Early Neolithic Central Europe." - from "Early Neolithic Executions Indicated by Clustered Cranial Trauma in the Mass Grave of Halberstadt" by Meyer, et al

The LBK culture flourished from about 5,500 to 4,500 BC. The greatest evidence for this group is along the middle Danube, upper and middle Elbe and the upper and middle Rhine.

The burials at Derenburg Meerenstieg II in central Germany, tested as G2a2b2 (L141), are part of the LBK culture. They are dated to 5,500-5,000 BC. Genetic testing of ancient LBK remains shows they were 41.7% G2a, 16.7% F, 16.7% C1a2, 16.7% T1a, and 8% I1. Another Neolithic LBK site, at Karsdorf, Saxony-Anhalt, Germany (70 miles southeast of Derenburg) yielded 30 remains, dated 5,500-4,800 BC. This is south of Derenburg. 2 were T1, 22.2% were H2 from Derenburg and the remaining 55.6% were G2a from Halberstadt (just east of Derenburg) and Derenburg. All of these sites are in the north German plain.

See also, Linear Pottery (LBK) Culture at eupedia.com.

This culture, 4,100-2,650 BC, represented a merger of Linear Pottery culture derived agricultural and Mesolithic hunter-gatherer lifestyles. It stretched across the north European plain from the Netherlands to Poland, and into Scandinavia. The economy included small scale farming of wheat and barley, but was dominated by the raising of sheep, cattle, pigs and goats. The people lived in wooden longhouses inside fortified hill-top villages. During their period of dominance megalithic tombs and passage graves of the Atlantic Megalithic culture appeared, especially in the Netherlands.

Salzmunde was the name of a late group, related to the Funnel Beaker culture, who resided in central Germany, 3,400-3,000 BC.

"The analysis of two Funnelbeaker genomes from circa 3,000 BC using the Dodecad K12b calculator shows that they possessed over 60% of Atlantic_Med admxiture, more than any modern population except the Basques and the Sardinians, two populations with high Neolithic ancestry. This admixture is strongly reminiscent of the extent of the Atlantic Megalithic cultures." - from eupedia.com

See also, Funnel-beaker Culture at eupedia.com.

This pottery style gives its name to the main culture of the Mediterranean Neolithic.

"Cardium Pottery or Cardial Ware is a Neolithic decorative style that gets its name from the imprinting of the clay with the shell of the cockle, an edible marine mollusk, formerly Cardium edulis, now Cerastoderma edule. These forms of pottery are in turn used to define the Neolithic culture which produced and spread them." - from Wikipedia

The Avellaner cave burial site in Catalonia, Spain yielded G2a remains dated to about 5,000 BC. Genetic testing of other ancient Cardium culture remains shows they contained G2a, I2a1b1, E1b1b-V13, and R1b1c-V88.

The Late Neolithic Lagozza-Chassey, Chasseen-Lagozza, culture of France and northern Italy seems to have evolved from Cardium. These include the Treilles Group of southern France and the culture of Otzi, the frozen mummy of the Alps. Of 22 samples of ancient Y-DNA from Treilles 91% were G2a and 9% I2a.