DNA from Early Europeans Sheds Light on Impact of Bronze Age

The Bronze Age was a significant era in Earth's early history, but how did it change Europe? New DNA analyses from the bones of early Europeans have attempted to answer just that question, showing that the demographic structure of present-day Europe and Asia is the result of widespread population migrations, and subsequent cultural changes that occurred during the Bronze Age.

Between 3000 BC and 1000 BC, new technologies and social tradition spread outward from the steppes between the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea into all of Europe and Central Asia (Eurasia), according to new findings published in the journal Nature.

The study was conducted to settle the long-standing debate about whether the cultural changes that led to modern Eurasia were born from a massive migration, or from a gradual evolution of ideas through pre-existing populations, researchers said.

"Both archaeologists and linguists have had theories about how cultures and languages have spread in our part of the world. We geneticists have now collaborated with them to publish an explanation based on a record amount of DNA-analyses of skeletons from the Bronze Age," Morten Allentoft, a geneticist from the Centre for GeoGenetics at the Natural History Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen, who led the research, said in a press release.

After analyzing more than 600 samples of Bronze Age (about 5,000-3,000 years ago) human remains, they found that the changes came about as a result of migrations.

"The driving force in our study was to understand the big economical and social changes that happened at the beginning of the third millennium BC, spanning the Urals to Scandinavia. The old Neolithic farming cultures were replaced by a completely new perception of family, property and personhood," explained researcher Kristian Kristiansen, of the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.