Forager country

The findings in this new paper at the Journal of Archaeological Science might help to explain the unusually high levels of Mesolithic ancestry amongst present-day Northeast Europeans.

Abstract: Pottery was adopted by hunter-gatherers in the Eastern Baltic at the end of the 6th millennium cal BC. To examine the motivations for this cultural and technological shift, here we report the organic residue analysis of ceramic vessels from the earliest pottery horizon (Narva) in this region. A combined approach using GC-MS, GC-C-IRMS and bulk IRMS of residues absorbed into the ceramic and charred surface deposits was employed. The results show that despite variable preservation, Narva ceramic vessels were preferentially used for processing aquatic products. We argue that pottery was part of a new Late Mesolithic subsistence strategy which included more intensive exploitation of aquatic foods and may have had important implications, such as increased sedentism and population growth.

Oras et al., The adoption of pottery by north-east European hunter-gatherers: Evidence from lipid residue analysis, Journal of Archaeological Science, Volume 78, February 2017, Pages 112–119 Related stuff…

Recent studies of ancient genomes have revealed two large-scale prehistoric population movements into Europe after the initial settlement by modern humans: A first expansion from the Near East that brought agricultural practices, also known as the Neolithic revolution; and a second migration from the East that was seen in a genetic component related to the Yamnaya pastoralists of the Pontic Steppe, which appears in Central Europe in people of the Late Neolithic Corded Ware and has been present in Europeans since then in a decreasing North-East to South-West gradient. This migration has been proposed to be the source of the majority of today’s Indo-European languages within Europe. In this paper we aim to show how these processes affected the Eastern Baltic region where the archeological record shows a drastically different picture than Central and Southern Europe. While agricultural subsistence strategies were commonplace in most of the latter by the Middle Neolithic, ceramic-producing hunter-gatherer cultures still persisted in the Eastern Baltic up until around 4000 BP and only adopted domesticated plants and animals at a late stage after which they disappeared into the widespread Corded Ware culture. We present the results of ancient DNA analyses of 81 individuals from the territory of today’s Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia that span from the Mesolithic to Bronze Age. Through study of the uniparentally inherited mtDNA and Y-chromosome as well as positions across the entire genome that are informative about ancient ancestry we reveal the dynamics of prehistoric population continuity and change within this understudied region and how they are reflected in today’s Baltic populations.

Mittnik et al., A genetic perspective on population dynamics of the pre-historic Eastern Baltic region, EAA 2016 presentation, TH4-11 Abstract 06 Source Eurogenes Blog