Ancient Hunter-Gatherers and Farmers Lived Peacefully for 2000 Years

It turns out that hunter-gatherers and farmers may have been able to live together peacefully--for 2,000 years. Using ancient DNA from skeletons, researchers have discovered that before hunter-gatherer communities died out or adopted the agricultural lifestyle, they existed alongside immigrant farmers.

Until about 7,500 years ago, all central Europeans were hunter-gatherers. These people were all descendants of the first anatomically modern humans to arrive in Europe around 45,000 years ago. This population of people survived the last Ice Age and the warming that started around 10,000 years ago. Yet previous genetic studies showed that agriculture and a sedentary lifestyle were brought to Central Europe around 7,500 years ago by immigrant farmers. Until now, scientists assumed that hunter-gatherers died out or were absorbed by the farming populations.

In order to learn a bit more about these populations of people, the researchers examined DNA from the bones of the "Blatterhohle" cave in Westphalia, which is currently being excavated. These bones are some of the rare pieces of evidence that reveal the continuing presence of forages over a period of about 5,000 years.

"It is commonly assumed that the Central European hunter-gatherers disappeared soon after the arrival of farmers," said Ruth Bollongino, one of the researchers, in a news release. "But our study shows that the descendants of Mesolithic Europeans maintained their hunter-gatherer way of life and lived in parallel with the immigrant farmers for at least 2,000 years. The hunter-gathering lifestyle thus only died out in Central Europe around 5,000 years ago, much later than previously thought."

The relationship between immigrant farmers and local hunter-gatherers has been poorly understood before now. Yet it turns out that the foragers probably stayed in close proximity to the farmers and even had contact with them for thousands of years. In fact, both groups buried their dead in the same cave. What is perhaps more interesting is the fact that hunter-gatherer women sometimes married into the farmer communities, but no farmer women married into the hunter-gatherer communities.

"This pattern of marriage is known from many studies of human populations in the modern world," said Joachim Burger, one of the researchers, in a news release. "Farmer women regarded marrying into hunter-gatherer groups as social anathema, maybe because of the higher birthrate among the farmers."

The findings reveal a little bit more about these ancient populations of people. In particular, they show how the hunter-gatherer lifestyle only died out in Central Europe about 5,000 years ago.

The findings are published in the journal Science.