AncientPages.com - An international study based on DNA from Anatolian remains and coordinated from Stockholm shows importance of the role Anatolia played, when farming spread throughout Europe some 8000 years ago.
Human material from the Anatolian site Kumtepe, excavated in 1994, was used in the study conducted by the doctorate student Ayca Omrak and her colleagues at the Archaeological Research Laboratory, Stockholm University.
However, she admits that the DNA material was heavily degraded.
Kumtepe år 1994. Foto: Project Troia, Peter Jablonka.
“I have never worked with a more complicated material. But it was worth every hour in the laboratory. I could use the DNA from the Kumtepe material to trace the European farmers back to Anatolia.
It is also fun to have worked with this material from the site Kumtepe, as this is the precursor to Troy”, Ayca Omrak says.
The results confirm Anatolia’s importance to Europe’s cultural history.
The major part of the results come from grave 6, Kumtepe. Photo: Project Troia, Peter Jablonka.
“It is complicated to work with material from this region, it is hot and the DNA is degraded,” says Jan Storå, associate professor in osteoarchaeology and co-author to the study.
“But if we want to understand how the process that led from a hunter-gatherer society proceeded to a farming society, it is this material we need to exhaust.”
“Our results stress the importance Anatolia has had on Europe’s prehistory. But to fully understand how the agricultural development proceeded we need to dive deeper down into material from the Levant. Jan is right about that,” says Anders Götherstörm who heads the archaeogenetic research at the Archaeological Research Laboratory.
AncientPages.com
source: Stockholm University
