Five-thousand-year-old DNA gives insight into the spread of agriculture across Europe. Neolithic Swedish hunter-gatherers had DNA like that of modern Scandinavians — but a farmer whose genome has been sequenced came from elsewhere. Geneticists analysing DNA from Neolithic burial sites in Sweden have made a surprising discovery. The genetic make-up of one individual — a female farmer known as Gök4 — bears a startling similarity to that of modern-day Mediterraneans. And the woman's genome provides clues as to how agriculture spread across Europe. “The farmer is most genetically similar to people living in Cyprus and Sardinia today,” says Pontus Skoglund, an evolutionary geneticist at Uppsala University in Sweden and the lead author of the study, which is published today in Science1. Gök4's 5,000-year-old remains were found in Gökhem parish, southern Sweden. The discovery of her ancestry feeds into a long-running debate over the transition from foraging to farming in prehistoric Europe, a process that archaeologists refer to as Neolithization. It is well established that agriculture had its origins in the near east, but there are still plenty of questions about how it spread. In particular, did resident hunter-gatherers independently hit on the idea of agriculture, learn about it through word of mouth or become introduced to it through the movement of people with farming know-how from south to north? Efforts to address this question by sequencing the mitochondrial DNA and Y-chromosomes of modern Europeans have proved inconclusive2. In recent years, researchers have also been studying mitochondrial DNA from prehistoric specimens3–5. They have found tentative support for the idea that agriculture spread across Europe through migration rather than word of mouth, but their conclusions are based on analyses of only a single piece of DNA from each specimen, so they are open to question. To get a more reliable snapshot, Skoglund and his colleagues sequenced almost 250 million base pairs from the skeletal remains of four individuals: Gök4 and three hunter-gatherers from around the same period, whose burial sites were located less than 400 kilometres from Västergötland, on the island of Gotland. The hunter-gatherers show the greatest similarity to modern-day Finns, says Skoglund. “It was a surprise that the farmer and hunter-gatherers were so different. Scandinavia was clearly home to people of very different genetic backgrounds even 5,000 years ago,” he says. more-- http://www.nature.com/news/ancient-swedish-farmer-came-from-the-mediterranean-1.10541