{"id":37537,"date":"2015-03-03T10:05:15","date_gmt":"2015-03-03T10:05:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.massarate.ma\/?p=37537"},"modified":"2015-03-03T10:05:47","modified_gmt":"2015-03-03T10:05:47","slug":"dna-recovered-from-underwater-british-site-may-rewrite-history-of-farming-in-europe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.massarate.ma\/dna-recovered-from-underwater-british-site-may-rewrite-history-of-farming-in-europe.html","title":{"rendered":"DNA recovered from underwater British site may rewrite history of farming in Europe"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Hunter-gatherers may have brought agricultural products to the British Isles by trading wheat and other grains with early farmers from the European mainland. That\u2019s the intriguing conclusion of a new study of ancient DNA from a now submerged hunter-gatherer camp off the British coast. If true, the find suggests that wheat made its way to the far edge of Western Europe 2000 years before farming was thought to have taken hold in Britain.<\/p>\n
The work confronts archaeologists \u201cwith the challenge of fitting this into our worldview,\u201d says Dorian Fuller, an archaeobotanist at University College London who was not involved in the work.<\/p>\n
For decades, archaeologists had thought that incoming farmers from the Middle East moved into Europe beginning about 10,500 years ago and replaced or transformed hunter-gatherer populations as they moved west, not reaching Britain until about 6000 years ago. But that worldview had already undergone some modifications. Recent discoveries, for example, have shown some incoming farmers coexisted with the hunter-gatherers already living in Europe rather than quickly replacing them. In 2013, researchers reported that, beginning about 6000 years ago, farmers and hunter-gatherers had both buried their dead in the same cave in Germany and continued to do so for 800 years, suggesting that the two groups were in close contact. \u00a0More controversially, researchers claimed that about 6500 years ago hunter-gatherers in Germany and Scandinavia may have acquired domesticated pigs from nearby farmers.<\/p>\n
The new findings promise to further upset the scenario that farming steadily marched from east to west. A team led by Robin Allaby, a plant geneticist at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom, was looking for the earliest evidence of domesticated plants in the British Isles. The researchers decided to take a gander at an underwater site called Bouldnor Cliff, 250 meters offshore from the hamlet of Bouldnor in the northwest corner of the Isle of Wight. (The island is in the English Channel just off Britain\u2019s southern coast.)<\/p>\n