Genetic Witnesses to European Prehistory

October 10, 2013 | A large study of ancient mitochondrial DNA, collecting samples from 364 individuals, is helping to reconstruct the migration patterns of Europeans during the transition from hunter-gatherer to agricultural lifestyles. By tracing the coming and going of distinct mitochondrial DNA lines in Central Europe over a period of 4,000 years, researchers were able to identify four distinct displacement or interbreeding events that contributed to the modern mix of European mitochondrial DNA. Taken together, these events seem to have produced a nearly-modern European genome by the end of the Neolithic Era. Science