Update:Just watch this movie. No time to write about it now, but check Science Magazine this afternoon (in a few hours from this posting) for a major paper on ancient mtDNA, and the striking correlation between changes in lineage frequencies and cultures that they discovered. Turns out that when you peel back the palimpsest it is much more complicated and surprising than we'd have thought. National Geographic, which funded the project, already has a post out on it:
What they found was that the shift in the frequency of DNA lineages closely matched the changes and appearances of new Central European cultures across time. In other words, the people who lived in Central Europe 7,000 years ago had different DNA lineages than those that lived there 5,000 years ago, and again different to those that lived 3,500 years ago. Central Europe was dynamic place during the Bronze age, and the genetic composition of the people that lived there demonstrates that there was nothing static about European prehistory. Genographic Project Director and National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence, Spencer Wells expounds: “spanning a period from the dawn of farming during the Neolithic period through to the Bronze Age, the [genetic] data from the archaeological remains reveals successive waves of migration and population replacement- genetic ‘revolutions’ that combined to create the genetic patterns we see today.”
I hope this doesn't lead to a new simplicity to replace the old one of no migration.
