New research from the University of Cambridge has shed new light on the changes that led ancient Europeans to take up farming.

New DNA analysis suggests that, unlike the rest of Europe, hunter-gatherers in the Baltic region were not overtaken by farming migrants from the Near-East. Instead, researchers say, these people probably acquired knowledge of farming and ceramics by sharing cultures and ideas rather than genes with outside communities.

Taking DNA from ancient remains (up to 8,300 years old) from the Ukraine and Latvia, has given scientists a better understanding of a period of human history in Europe that spans the Neolithic - the dawn of agriculture in Europe - when people abandoned the mobile hunter-gatherer lifestyle to become more settled farmers. Previous research has shown that much of Europe was settled by emigres from the fertile crescent in the Near-East; driven by their technological success, farmers brought cropping and pottery to the furthest reaches of Europe by the end of the Neolithic.

However, this appears not to have been the case in the Baltic, which researchers from Cambridge and Trinity College, Dublin said suggests local hunter-gatherers learned these skills through communication and cultural exchange with the migrating farmers.

This has changed the debate somewhat on what experts refer to as the ‘Neolithic package’ - a cluster of technologies such as domesticated livestock, cultivated cereals and ceramics, which revolutionised human existence across Europe during the late Stone Age. Though in other parts of Europe local populations mixed with, and were essentially overtaken by, the incoming farmers, in the Baltic this doesn’t appear to have taken place and as a result farming technologies developed more slowly there. This slow uptake of technologies reenforces researchers’ belief that they were taken up piecemeal by local populations, rather than imported by migrating agriculturalistts.

Andrea Manica, one of the study’s senior authors from the University of Cambridge, commented, “Almost all ancient DNA research up to now has suggested that technologies such as agriculture spread through people migrating and settling in new areas. However, in the Baltic, we find a very different picture, as there are no genetic traces of the farmers from the Levant and Anatolia who transmitted agriculture across the rest of Europe.”

“The findings suggest that indigenous hunter-gatherers adopted Neolithic ways of life through trade and contact, rather than being settled by external communities. Migrations are not the only model for technology acquisition in European prehistory.”

Interestingly, one sample from a stone-age cemetery in Latvia showed evidence of migration from the Pontic Steppe, which stretches from the north shores of the Black sea to the Caspian Sea. The age (5-7,000 years ago) fits with previous research estimating the development of the earliest Slavic languages, leading researchers to suggest that this is where the first forms of the language come from.

Andrea Manica said, “Our evidence of genetic continuity in the Baltic, coupled with the archaeological record showing a prolonged adoption of Neolithic technologies, would suggest the existence of trade networks with farming communities largely independent of interbreeding.

“It seems the hunter-gatherers of the Baltic likely acquired bits of the Neolithic package slowly over time through a ‘cultural diffusion’ of communication and trade, as there is no sign of the migratory wave that brought farming to the rest of Europe during this time.

“The Baltic hunter-gatherer genome remains remarkably untouched until the great migrations of the Bronze Age sweep in from the East.”

Find out more from the University of Cambridge here.