Gregory's ServerIn response to this claim, let’s take a look back to the spread of agriculture into Europe starting about 9,000 years ago. Most of Western Europe was, at that time, populated by a community that geneticists have creatively dubbed “Western Hunter Gatherers.” These people—dark skinned and light-eyed—hunted and fished and foraged, preferring woodlands and the edges of wetlands and bodies of water.
Archeologists wondered for a long time if agriculture spread by adoption—if these foragers took up farming. But, thanks to genetic studies, we now know that agriculture spread into Europe mostly by migration as early farmers from Anatolia migrated first into what is now Greece and then into the rest of the continent.
These Neolithic farmers brought with them cereal crops, like wheat, and domesticated animals, like cattle, that had originated in the ancient Near East. They resembled modern Sardinians, the modern community with the highest percentage of these Neolithic farmers among their ancestors.
(Basically, if you have ancestors from Europe, your ancestors almost certainly included people from both of these foragers and these farmers.)
These two communities, rather than clashing, co-existed with each other throughout Europe for thousands of years. They sometimes interbred, but for the most part they left each other alone, each preferring very different environments.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/ancient-face-cheddar-man-reconstructed-dna-spd
3/12
At the Blätterhöhle cave in what is now Germany, researchers found the remains of three different ancient communities.
The first were hunter-gatherers, based on both their genomes and the stable isotopes in their teeth and bones, which revealed a diet of wild game. The second group also belonged to the same genetic population as the first, but ate a diet heavy in freshwater fish. And the third were agriculturalists, descended primarily from those Anatolian farmers but with some hunter-gatherer ancestors as well. This last group ate a diet heavy in domesticated animals.
So three very different communities, with different but overlapping ancestries and very different ways of life, lived side-by-side, sometimes intermarrying, and using the same cave to bury their dead. And, based on radiocarbon dating, they continued to do so for 2,000 years after the arrival of agriculture.
It’s hard to square 2,000 years of co-existence with Diamond’s Just So story about the inexorable and mechanical expansion of farming at the expense of hunter-gatherers.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/257648697_2000_Years_of_Parallel_Societies_in_Stone_Age_Central_Europe
4/12
At the Blätterhöhle cave in what is now Germany, researchers found the remains of three different ancient communities.
The first were hunter-gatherers, based on both their genomes and the stable isotopes in their teeth and bones, which revealed a diet of wild game. The second group also belonged to the same genetic population as the first, but ate a diet heavy in freshwater fish. And the third were agriculturalists, descended primarily from those Anatolian farmers but with some hunter-gatherer ancestors...