Men migrated more frequently than women during the Neolithic Transition, when populations switched from hunter-gatherer lifestyles to cultures based on agriculture, according to new research reported at the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences web site on October 31, 2011.
A study of the DNA of seven individuals excavated from Avellaner cave, an ancient funeral cave in Northeastern Spain, supports the researcher's conclusions.
Six of the seven people buried in this cave (burial chamber) were male. Only one specimen was female. Five of the men may have had the same paternal lineage. This information is based on a Y chromosome and mitichondrial DNA analysis. Y chromosome analysis is specific to men and mitchondrial DNA has special information about females and female parents.
The researchers also noted that their examination indicates the men took mates from the populations where they moved to during the Neolithic Transition. This discovery is substantiated by the fact that the single woman had a pre Neolithic geneome and the fact that similar burial sites in France (Treillescave) have generated the same conclusions.
Groups of men migrated more frequently without women from their original homes and began families with women in the territories that they migrated to during the Neolithic dissemination.
Paper
"Ancient DNA suggests the leading role played by men in the Neolithic dissemination"
Authors
Marie Lacan a,b,1, Christine Keyser b, François-Xavier Ricaut a, Nicolas Brucato c, Josep Tarrús d, Angel Bosch d, Jean Guilaine e, Eric Crubézy a, and Bertrand Ludes b
aLaboratoire d’Anthropologie Moléculaire et Imagerie de Synthèse, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Unité Mixte de Recherche 5288, 31073 Toulouse, France; bLaboratoire d’Anthropologie Moléculaire, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Unité Mixte de Recherche 5288, Institute of Legal Medicine, University of Strasbourg, 67085 Strasbourg, France; cLanguage and Genetics Department, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, 6525 XD, Nijmegen, The Netherlands; dMuseu Arqueològic Comarcal de Banyoles, 17820 Catalonia, Spain; and eCollège de France, Centre de Recherche sur la
Préhistoire et la Protohistoire de la Méditerranée, École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 31000 Toulouse, France
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