* Astronomy

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RE: Europe's first farmers

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Seven centuries of ploughing in Ede: Dutch Celtic fields used continuously for centuries.

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New Excavations Indicate Use of Fertilisers 5,000 Years Ago

Researchers from the University of Gothenburg have spent many years studying the remains of a Stone Age community in Karleby outside the town of Falköping, Sweden. The researchers have for example tried to identify parts of the inhabitants' diet. Right now they are looking for evidence that fertilisers were used already during the Scandinavian Stone Age, and the results of their first analyses may be exactly what they are looking for.
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Cardiff university claims evidence of Stone Age 'inequality'

A study of more than 300 Neolithic skeletons suggests evidence of "hereditary inequality" among farmers 7,000 years ago, researchers claim.
Archaeologists from Cardiff University led a team who studied the skeletons from across Europe.
They say evidence suggests farmers buried with tools had access to better land than those buried without.
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UC Research Reveals One of the Earliest Farming Sites in Europe

University of Cincinnati research is revealing early farming in a former wetlands region that was largely cut off from Western researchers until recently. The UC collaboration with the Southern Albania Neolithic Archaeological Project (SANAP) will be presented April 20 at the annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology (SAA).
Susan Allen, a professor in the UC Department of Anthropology who co-directs SANAP, says she and co-director Ilirjan Gjipali of the Albanian Institute of Archaeology created the project in order to address a gap not only in Albanian archaeology, but in the archaeology in Eastern Europe as a whole, by focusing attention on the initial transition to farming in the region. Allen was awarded a $191,806 (BCS- 0917960) grant from the National Science Foundation to launch the project in 2010.
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Archaeologists uncover oldest evidence of ploughing in Czech lands

Archaeologists in Prague-Bubenec have uncovered a site with the oldest traces of ploughing and a field in the Czech Lands, that date back to the mid-4th millennium B.C., Archaeological Institute spokeswoman Jana Marikova has told CTK.
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Farming made no immediate impression on Baltic hunter-gatherer-potters, who still used their pots to cook fish

A team lead by Oliver Craig (BioArCh) and Carl Heron (Bradford) examined molecules extracted from 133 ceramic vessels and 100 burnt food crusts, dating to immediately before and after the first evidence of domesticated animals and plants in the Western Baltic. Some of the pottery was recovered from sites now inundated by the Baltic. Evidence for fish was found in one in five pots even after the transition to agriculture, supporting that the arrival of the first farmers did not have such as dramatic impact on the local hunter-gatherers than earlier evidence had lead some researchers to believe.
Source

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Farming in Europe did not just spread by word-of-mouth, but was introduced by migrants from the ancient Near East, a study suggests.
Scientists analysed DNA from the 8,000 year-old remains of early farmers found at an ancient graveyard in Germany.
They compared the genetic signatures to those of modern populations and found similarities with the DNA of people living in today's Turkey and Iraq.
The study appears in the journal PLoS Biology.
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DNA reveals origins of first European farmers

A team of international researchers led by ancient DNA experts from the University of Adelaide has resolved the longstanding issue of the origins of the people who introduced farming to Europe some 8000 years ago.
A detailed genetic study of one of the first farming communities in Europe, from central Germany, reveals marked similarities with populations living in the Ancient Near East (modern-day Turkey, Iraq and other countries) rather than those from Europe.
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Europe's first farmers replaced hunter-gatherers
Analysis of ancient DNA from skeletons suggests that Europe's first farmers were not the descendants of the people who settled in the area after the retreat of the ice sheets.
Instead, the early farmers probably migrated into major areas of central and Eastern Europe about 7,500 years ago, bringing domesticated plants and animals with them, according to new research from Mainz University, UCL and the University of Cambridge, published online in Science.

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