Co-Workers:   Norbert Benecke,    Greger Larson,     Dan Bradley,     Jean Denis Vigne,     Mark Thomas

and many others

The early Neolithic of the Near East and Anatolia is characterized by the domestication of animals including goats, sheep, pigs and cattle, at the latest by 8,500 calBC. The transformation of wild forms of these four species into domestic animals is, alongside sedentism and crop agriculture, a characteristic of early Neolithic cultures. This transformation was most likely a long process and appears to have taken place in the core regions of the Near East and Anatolia, long before the spread of agriculture into western Anatolia and southeast Europe.

The best investigated species in Neolithic times is cattle. Initial studies on the mitochondrial variability of present-day cattle in the Near East, Anatolia,North Africa and Europe showed that the variability in the vicinity of the postulated Neolithic domestication process is higher than that in Europe and/or North Africa. Nevertheless, this dataset can be interpreted in a variety of ways e.g. the reduced variability in Europe could be the result of historical breeding practices. In order to further examine this question, we examined skeletal remains from the Neolithic period in central, north and south-east Europe.

It was found that the genetic variability of today’s cattle is similar to that of early Neolithic cattle. But a deeper understanding of these results requires assessment of whether European domesticated cattle were introduced into Europe from the Near East or were descended from wild European cattle.

Morphologically, European wild cattle (Bos primigenius), otherwise known as aurochs, differ from domestic cattle (Bos taurus), mainly in terms of the size of skeletal elements.

As most known wild cattle in central and northern Europe carry mitochondrial P-types or to a lesser extent E-types, the T- and Q-types aossciated with domestic cattle have been proposed to originate from outside Europe, i.e. from early Neolithic domesticates in Anatolia or the Near East.

Admixture between imported domestic cattle and indigenous European aurochs can, to a first-order approximation, be excluded in the case of central Europe, but this remains a plausible scenario for other parts of Europe like Italy and the Balkans.

With respect to pigs, it is very likely that progressive admixture between local wild boar and imported (domesticated) Anatolian pigs is responsible for the pattern observed in ancient and modern populations. However, as with the other domestic species – sheep and goat – more extensive coalescent modelling studies need to be performed to fully and explicitly examine models of the spread of these animals in Europe. Thus, there is evidence that both pig and cattle have been imported to south-east Europe and then spread over the continent within three millennia, with pigs being mixed with local wild boar and cattle remaining maternally almost unmixed with local aurochs.

With regards to sheep and goat, there is little doubt that they were imported from the Near East and/or Anatolia into Europe, as there are no wild progenitors of these species in Europe.

(text modified after Burger & Thomas 2011)