North Vs South Europe: Early Neolithic Farmers

What's the difference between Northern Europeans and Southern Europeans and what does it have to do with the first ever farmers of the Neolithic? Well, make yourself a cup of tea because I'm about to enlighten you. Europe was populated by Western hunter-gatherers for tens of thousands of years. The same exact sort of people were living in much of Turkey as well, Western hunter-gatherers. There were other different types of hunter-gatherers in other parts of Eurasia and one group of hunter-gatherers that became particularly important was in the Levant. Around 23,000 years ago, the hunter-gatherers there had started collecting wild emmer wheat. Just by collecting these little grass seeds, essentially, they started off a process which changed the human race forever. Because eventually, these hunter-gatherers, by about 14,500 years ago, became the first ever farmers in human history. Although some people could argue that they were already farming because they were collecting wild wheat or whatever. And of course, over time, they start to realise that the grass seeds get bigger because they select those and they spread those seeds. What's different about these people in the Levant called the Natufians is that they actually were really cultivating the earth, deliberately staying put and planting species of grass to eat with the intention of processing them into food, to make bread and things like that. This was a real farming economy. And this revolutionary change spread with the Natufian people. The Natufian people kept their culture for thousands of years, up until about 11,500 years ago. Before then, they were spreading upwards and into Turkey. That's where, around 12,000 years ago, einkorn and emmer wheats were domesticated properly in Turkey. Göbekli Tepe, the first ever oldest temple in human history, was built around 11,000 years ago. But the people who built it weren't exactly Natufians because as the Natufians had spread into what's now Turkey, that was populated by Western hunter-gatherers like we're in Europe, they interbred and formed a new race of people which scientists now call Early European Farmers or Early Neolithic Farmers, ENF or EEF. And this is the group that was responsible for Göbekli Tepe. And this is the group also who, 10,500 years ago, domesticated the first ever cattle. And it was just about 80 aurochs. I mentioned aurochs before. They were a wild species of cattle, now extinct, that populated all of Europe. And yeah, so just from 80 aurochs, they managed to make cattle from which nearly every single cow in the world is descended from those. Although some in East Asia have also been descended from other types of cattle that were domesticated. This revolutionary new culture, which allowed people to group together in new ways that hunter-gatherers couldn't, spread into Europe. And it was these early, the EEF people, Early European Farmers moved from Turkey up through the Balkans and into Europe. In the Balkans, we might associate these Early European Farmer culture with an archaeological culture known as Starcevo. And as this movement of farming people from Anatolia into Europe happened, they were blending more and more with the Western hunter-gatherers around the different part of the continent. So they were bringing with them a new language, probably, we can't know what it was. And we know that they were racially different because the Early European Farmers had with them that Natufian element from the Middle East, whereas the Western hunter-gatherers didn't. So by about 8,500 years ago, they were moving into Europe. By 7,500 years ago, approximately, they had reached Central Europe. And by 6,000 years ago, 6,000 odd years ago, they were in Britain. And it was by about 4,500 years ago, roughly, that Stonehenge was built. And it was built by this people who were basically all of Europe now, at that time, from the North to the South, were populated by people who were combined, combinations of the original hunter-gatherers and these new farmers. But there wasn't an equal spread because Northern Europeans didn't get as much of the blood from the new people who instigated what's called the Neolithic Revolution, which changed human culture, as the Southern Europeans did. So Southern Europeans, they have, to this day, more of the component from these Early European Farmers. Later, you have the Proto-Indo-European people coming into Europe, and that adds another element in to the difference between North and South, because Northern Europeans got more of that invasion. But you can probably attribute a lot of the phenotypical differences between modern Europeans to these ancient migrations. But as I said, it's not that they have, one European part of Europe has something, the other doesn't. We all, all Europeans, are descended from these Early European Farmers. There is one part of Europe, which is very interesting, because it is not just that they have some of the DNA from these Early European Farmers, but they actually are almost exactly the same. They have hardly changed at all. It's the Sardinians. If you look at Sardinians on a principal component analysis chart, which measures the genetic distance between certain populations according to the proportions of ancient DNA populations within their samples from that group, you can see how the Sardinians still cluster in an exact line along that group of Ancient Europeans before the Indo-European invasions. So you can see Sardinians are exactly between the Early European Farmers and the Western hunter-gatherers. On the left hand side of this triangle are all the populations of Europe prior to the Indo-European invasions. The higher up ones represent those who have more of the Western hunter-gatherer DNA and the ones lower down are the original European Neolithic Farmers who invaded. So as they got more of that hunter-gatherer DNA they go further up and as they get Indo-European DNA they go further to the right. This is a more complex PCA and you can see here on the right hand side the Natufians. To the left of them is another cluster called the Levantine Neolithic and then to the left of them you get European people. As you can see up above are the Indo-Europeans represented by the Yamnaya and related groups and then Modern Europeans are all clustering between the European Neolithic Farmers from Anatolia and the Indo-European peoples like the Yamnaya because we have a mixture of those two things and you can also see that the early European Farmers are equidistant between what modern Europeans are like and what the ancient Natufians were like. Now here's another PCA. This long line of groupings on the right hand side represents the great diversity of Middle Eastern and North African peoples. They are all very diverse from each other but they're also all clustering in one line and at the top of them you have the Caucasian peoples from Georgia, Armenia and the Turks kind of in between the Middle Easterners and the Caucasians. Jewish people are in between the Europeans and the Middle Easterners and the closest of all those to Europeans is the Ashkenazi Jews who are European Jews. Southern Europeans overlap somewhat with these Jews and then Northern Europeans are separate here. So as you can see there's a clear distinction between Northern and Southern Europeans. Southern Europeans are between Middle Easterners and Northern Europeans. This distinction is basically due to the differing amounts of DNA from the early European Farmers. We might speculate that Sardinians are pretty much what the first European Farmers looked like. However, phenotypes don't just come from the ancient components they can also develop over time so it's possible that Sardinians don't look exactly the same as the ancient European Farmers do even though Sardinians are genetically pretty much identical to those ancient European Farmers. There was a paper in 2016 called Early Farmers from Across Europe directly descended from Neolithic Aegeans and that showed that the Farmers that were coming into Europe were not only a different culture but they were different racially and they would have looked different to the Western Undergathers and they would have probably had a different language. The Neolithic Revolution has always been a confusing thing for historians and archaeologists because they weren't sure what exactly was causing it and whether it was migrations. Now we know that the Neolithic is typified by two great migrations into Europe. One was the first one which I'm talking about now the early European Farmers and then the other at the end of the Neolithic is the Indo-Europeans and each of them brought different elements into Europe which changed it. We can say that the European Farmers would have brought organized civilizations, societies such that could build Gobekli Tepe. Pre-Indo-European cultures in Europe such as the Etruscans and the Minoans had very little Indo-European DNA and also the culture in Britain that had built Stonehenge demonstrate how advanced the early European Farmers were. They obviously farmed cattle and other livestock and they had great fields of wheat that they had cultivated. The Indo-Europeans simply added a more martial, patriarchal culture later on. I think it's interesting that Sardinia is so unique in Europe that it's preserved this pre-Indo-European gene pool of Europeans and also Sardinian culture is so quite wonderful because they have all these seemingly old pagan kind of customs and these beautiful style of singing that they use which is a type of throat singing which people associate with Mongolians but it shows that it must have been very ancient in Europe as well. And you also see these beautiful folk costumes in Sardinia and the people themselves we can look at them and think what all Europeans we have something like this in us. Now some of us such as Spanish and Italians look a lot more like these Sardinians than others do while we in Northern Europe look different because we have other genetic components. We also have to remember that we're partly that and we're partly something else but some people think that I don't like Southern Europeans for some reason which is odd because I've never said that and that I don't think that they're as good as culturally but I don't think that either. So this is just a video to show you that I recognise and appreciate the contribution of the early European farmers to all European heritage.