Human Migration in Early Neolithic Europe

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With National Science Foundation support Drs. T. Douglas Price and R. Alexander Bentley will continue their analysis of archaeological skeletons of the earliest farmers in Central Europe. They will attempt to distinguish between two hypotheses which account for the appearance of agriculture in Europe: the spread of actual populations vs. the spread of ideas across essentially immobile groups. Because agriculture appears suddenly in Central Europe and is accompanied by a suite of other cultural items such as distinctive ceramic styles, many archaeologists have accepted this as evidence of human migration. Other researchers however have noted that humans are adaptable, can accept new modes of behavior and that it may have been ideas rather than people which moved. To select between these options Drs Price and Bentley will continue their examination of isotope values in skeletons from relevant populations. The ratio of two isotopes of strontium in bones and teeth provides a record of the geological environment in which the person lived. Since bone tissue is replaced continually over an individual's lifetime while the competition of teeth is set at adolescence, a measured difference in the strontium isotope ratio between bones and teeth can identify an immigrant. The foreign signal in an immigrant's tooth can then be traced to a likely region of origin based on regional geology. In their research to date, analyses have indicated that a mixture of the two models best explains the skeletal data. These suggest that most likely a small number of migrants may have initially brought farming into Europe, but its adoption by indigenous Europeans also played a major role. To improve on these preliminary finding the team will expand the analysis to a larger number of skeletons. In order to create a baseline "map" of strontium and also lead isotope signatures, the researchers will analyze archaeological animal teeth collected from different geological provinces in regions adjacent to the study area in southwestern Germany and eastern France. On this basis they hope to identify immigrants' points of origin.This research is important for several reasons. It will provide insight into an important time period and seminal event in European prehistory. It will shed light on the basic processes which drive culture change and help to develop an analytic tool potentially applicable to a wide array of archaeological questions in many parts of the world