For a long time, scientists believed that one group of farmers – the first group of farmers – came up with this great new way of getting enough food, then slowly spread out and out-competed all the hunter gatherers they came across. But new genetic research says this is probably wrong. A genetic study looked at some of the world’s first farmers, in the Zagros region of Iran. And to the researcher’s surprise, they discovered that these first farmers were not related to the genomes of early farmers from the Aegean and Europe. In other words, these first farmers were not from a single, genetically homogeneous population, as had previously been believed. So what likely happened?
We know that farming first arose in a broad area. Plants and animals were domesticated in a region which stretched from eastern Turkey to Israel to northern Iran and northwestern Iran. Today we call this region the Fertile Crescent. Scientists aren’t sure where exactly in this broad region agriculture first developed. Previously it was theorized that one group developed farming then spread out and introduced their lifestyle to the rest of the Fertile Crescent. The new DNA evidence suggests that instead of one group with one type of farming, multiple populations within the Fertile Crescent adopted multiple types of agriculture, suited for their specific locations. These different populations didn’t intermarry much. The genetic research estimated that they separated, genetically, some 46,000 to 77,000 years ago. Early farmers from across Europe, and to some extent modern-day Europeans, can trace their DNA to early farmers living in the Aegean. But people living in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and India share considerably more chunks of DNA with early farmers in Iran.
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