Neolithic Immigration - How Middle East Milk Drinkers Conquered Europe

[pampango]

http://freeinternetpress.com/story.php?sid=27342

New research has revealed that agriculture came to Europe amid a wave of immigration from the Middle East during the Neolithic period. The newcomers won out over the locals because of their sophisticated culture, mastery of agriculture -- and their miracle food, milk.

New excavations in Turkey, as well as genetic analyses of domestic animals and Stone Age skeletons, paint a completely different picture:

-- At around 7000 BC, a mass migration of farmers began from the Middle East to Europe.

-- These ancient farmers brought along domesticated cattle and pigs.

-- There was no interbreeding between the intruders and the original population.

An unusual circumstance has made this research possible in the first place. Homo sapiens was originally unable to digest raw milk. Generally, the human body only produces an enzyme that can break down lactose in the small intestine during the first few years of life. Indeed, most adults in Asia and Africa react to cow's milk with nausea, flatulence and diarrhea.

But the situation is different in Europe, where many people carry a minute modification of chromosome 2 that enables them to digest lactose throughout their life without experiencing intestinal problems. The percentage of people with this modification is the highest among Britons and Scandinavians.
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The right in Europe won't like to hear this story about mass immigration from the Middle East to Europe. :)

[Turbineguy]

1. I hear teabagger heads exploding.

[madinmaryland]

6. Why would their heads be exploding? The world is only about 6,000 years old.

So that makes the whole story bogus.

Yeap.

[Turbineguy]

7. Silly me.

I didn't make that connection.

A while ago I had an Engineer tell me that Muslims had never contributed anything to civilization. He apparently never needed to do math.

[Teaser]

2. kewl...so I am descended from ancient X-men.

why the fuck can't I teleport?

[JCMach1]

3. White Europeans began in Central Asia...

that's a pretty broad definition of Middle-East.

[Gaedel]

4. Speakers of th Indo-European languages

Everybody began in Africa

Some moved to the Middle East and began agriculture.

Some of these moved into Europe.

Some moved from the Middle East to the Caucasus area and evolved proto-Indo-European as a language.

The Indo-Europeans finally expanded into Europe and South Asia and absorbed the earlier "Homo Sapiens" settlers.

[WingDinger]

5. Blessed be the cheese eaters, for they shall inheret the earth.

[leveymg]

8. That means that "Aryans" are actually Middle Eastern?

Give them the dreaded strawberry milkshake test. If they don't get gas, deport them back to Asia or Africa. :9

[Odin2005]

9. Nonsense, only 25% of the European gene pool is neolithic Near-Eastern in origin.

And the lactose tolerance mutation originated in either Europe or Central Asia, NOT the Near East. The highest percentages of lactose tolerance is in Scandinavia. Lactose tolerance develops in cattle cultures, the neolithic farmers were not cattle cultures.

[muriel_volestrangler]

10. They migrated from the Near East to central Europe, and then the tolerance developed there

The wording of the title is a bit misleading. It may be best to go the the original article from Der Speigel, which has a map: http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,723310,00.html

I'm not sure where your 25% figure comes from - this recent study says about 80% of male genetic lines come from the Near Eastern farming expansion, though mitochondrial DNA is mostly from the pre-farming European population.

Cattle were domesticated in the Near East, and taken to Europe: http://archaeology.about.com/od/domestications/qt/cattle.htm