Study: Central Europe’s First Farmers Lived in Equality 8,000 Years Ago

The Linear Pottery Culture (Linearbandkeramik, LBK) communities, which were the first to spread farming across large parts of Europe, showed no signs of population stratification, according to new research led by University of Vienna and Harvard University scientists.

“The expansion of agriculture in Central Europe took place in the 6th millennium BCE,” said Dr. Pere Gelabert from the University of Vienna and colleagues.

“Within a few generations, farmers from the Balkan region expanded down the Danube valley into present-day France and eastward into present-day Hungary and Ukraine.”

“The cultural traces of the farmers are homogeneous across this area, spanning thousands of km — but the lack of genetic data from multiple families makes it difficult to understand whether these communities lived in social equality, or to assess which individuals were the ones who migrated across the continent.”

In their research, Dr. Gelabert and co-authors sequenced and analyzed the genomes of 250 LBK individuals as well as other extensive datasets.

“The LBK people expanded over hundreds of km in just a few generations,” Dr. Gelabert said.

“We found distant relatives in Slovakia and others in Western Germany, more than 800 km away.”

“In this study, we report for the first time that families at the study sites of Nitra in Slovakia and Polgár-Ferenci-hát in Hungary do not differ in terms of the foods they consumed,” said Dr. Ron Pinhasi, a researcher at the University of Vienna.

“This suggests that the people living in these Neolithic sites were not stratified on the basis of family or biological sex, and we do not detect signs of inequality, understood as differential access to resources or space.”

The LBK culture came to an end around 5000 BCE, and various hypotheses have been proposed regarding its collapse.

Some suggest that it was a period of social and economic crisis, often associated with episodes of widespread violence.

“One of the most famous events is the Massacre of Asparn-Schletz in Lower Austria, where over 100 individuals were recovered from a ditch system,” the researchers said.

“Along with Herxheim in Germany, this site represents one of the largest known assemblages of violently killed individuals during the Early Neolithic, with skeletons showing signs of violence and multiple fractures.”

“Our meticulous genetic study of the Asparn-Schletz individuals showed that less than 10 were genetically related, which challenges the hypothesis that the massacre represented a single population,” Dr. Gelabert said.

“Previous anthropological studies noted a lack of young women, and the new data further confirm a complete absence of relatives.”

“The presence of many children among the victims opens the door to multiple interpretations of this remarkable event of Neolithic violence.”

The findings were published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.

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P. Gelabert et al. Social and genetic diversity in first farmers of central Europe. Nat Hum Behav, published online November 29, 2024; doi: 10.1038/s41562-024-02034-z