All these premises having, as I think, been clearly made out, it is impossible that the rulers now on earth should make any benefit, or derive any the least shadow of authority from that, which is held to be the fountain of all power, Adam's private dominion and paternal jurisdiction; so that he that will not give just occasion to think that all government in the world is the product only of force and violence, and that men live together by no other rules but that of beasts, where the strongest carries it, and so lay a foundation for perpetual disorder and mischief, tumult, sedition and rebellion, (things that the followers of that hypothesis so loudly cry out against) must of necessity find out another rise of government, another original of political power, and another way of designing and knowing the persons that have it, than what Sir Robert Filmer hath taught us.

Two Treatises of Government.

Population mixture is an important process in biology. We present a suite of methods for learning about population mixtures, implemented in a software package called ADMIXTOOLS, that support formal tests for whether mixture occurred and make it possible to infer proportions and dates of mixture. We also describe the development of a new single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) array consisting of 629,433 sites with clearly documented ascertainment that was specifically designed for population genetic analyses and that we genotyped in 934 individuals from 53 diverse populations. To illustrate the methods, we give a number of examples that provide new insights about the history of human admixture. The most striking finding is a clear signal of admixture into northern Europe, with one ancestral population related to present-day Basques and Sardinians and the other related to present-day populations of northeast Asia and the Americas. This likely reflects a history of admixture between Neolithic migrants and the indigenous Mesolithic population of Europe, consistent with recent analyses of ancient bones from Sweden and the sequencing of the genome of the Tyrolean "Iceman."

https://www.genetics.org/content/genetics/192/3/1065.full.pdf

Ancient Admixture in Human History

We generated genome-wide data from 69 Europeans who lived between 8,000-3,000 years ago by enriching ancient DNA libraries for a target set of almost 400,000 polymorphisms. Enrichment of these positions decreases the sequencing required for genome-wide ancient DNA analysis by a median of around 250-fold, allowing us to study an order of magnitude more individuals than previous studies and to obtain new insights about the past. We show that the populations of Western and Far Eastern Europe followed opposite trajectories between 8,000-5,000 years ago. At the beginning of the Neolithic period in Europe, ∼8,000-7,000 years ago, closely related groups of early farmers appeared in Germany, Hungary and Spain, different from indigenous hunter-gatherers, whereas Russia was inhabited by a distinctive population of hunter-gatherers with high affinity to a ∼24,000-year-old Siberian. By ∼6,000-5,000 years ago, farmers throughout much of Europe had more hunter-gatherer ancestry than their predecessors, but in Russia, the Yamnaya steppe herders of this time were descended not only from the preceding eastern European hunter-gatherers, but also from a population of Near Eastern ancestry. Western and Eastern Europe came into contact ∼4,500 years ago, as the Late Neolithic Corded Ware people from Germany traced ∼75% of their ancestry to the Yamnaya, documenting a massive migration into the heartland of Europe from its eastern periphery. This steppe ancestry persisted in all sampled central Europeans until at least ∼3,000 years ago, and is ubiquitous in present-day Europeans. These results provide support for a steppe origin of at least some of the Indo-European languages of Europe.

Massive migration from the steppe was a source for Indo-European languages in Europe

Europe and the People without History

The History of Economic Analysis

Biomarker and stable isotopic analysis of lipid residues from perforated pottery vessels from sixth millennium bc Europe are consistent with these vessels having been used for making cheese, a low-lactose dairy product with digestion and storage advantages for the prehistoric lactose-intolerant farming communities. Dairying was an important innovation in early agriculture — despite the fact that the first dairy farmers were unable to metabolize lactose. One way of making milk more palatable to the lactose intolerant is to turn it into cheese, a process that involves straining the fat-rich curds from the lactose-containing whey. In this study Richard Evershed and colleagues report the presence of organic residues on pottery shards from enigmatic pottery vessels produced widely in settlements of the earliest farmers in northern Europe about 7,500 years ago. The vessels exhibit numerous millimetre-sized holes, which were postulated to be cheese strainers in 1984 by Peter Bogucki, a co-author on this current paper. That idea is now supported by the chemical evidence. The introduction of dairying was a critical step in early agriculture, with milk products being rapidly adopted as a major component of the diets of prehistoric farmers and pottery-using late hunter-gatherers1,2,3,4,5. The processing of milk, particularly the production of cheese, would have been a critical development because it not only allowed the preservation of milk products in a non-perishable and transportable form, but also it made milk a more digestible commodity for early prehistoric farmers6,7,8,9,10. The finding of abundant milk residues in pottery vessels from seventh millennium sites from north-western Anatolia provided the earliest evidence of milk processing, although the exact practice could not be explicitly defined1. Notably, the discovery of potsherds pierced with small holes appear at early Neolithic sites in temperate Europe in the sixth millennium bc and have been interpreted typologically as ‘cheese-strainers’10, although a direct association with milk processing has not yet been demonstrated. Organic residues preserved in pottery vessels have provided direct evidence for early milk use in the Neolithic period in the Near East and south-eastern Europe, north Africa, Denmark and the British Isles, based on the δ13C and Δ13C values of the major fatty acids in milk1,2,3,4. Here we apply the same approach to investigate the function of sieves/strainer vessels, providing direct chemical evidence for their use in milk processing. The presence of abundant milk fat in these specialized vessels, comparable in form to modern cheese strainers11, provides compelling evidence for the vessels having being used to separate fat-rich milk curds from the lactose-containing whey. This new evidence emphasizes the importance of pottery vessels in processing dairy products, particularly in the manufacture of reduced-lactose milk products among lactose-intolerant prehistoric farming communities6,7.

Earliest evidence for cheese making in the sixth millennium bc in northern Europe

The Spread of Early Farming in Europe

Drawing extensively on anthropological theory and ecological models of human adaptation, Forest Farmers and Stockherders explores the single most radical transformation in all European prehistory - the growth of a food-producing economy in the period 5000 3000 BC. Dr Bogucki seeks to develop a coherent view of the introduction of food production to north-central Europe, identifying new environmental zones being exploited for the first time and new ecological adaptations being adopted by both indigenous and colonizing populations. He lays particular emphasis on the strategies developed by Neolithic communities for coping with the environmental risks and uncertainties inherent in the introduction of new economic systems and the social implications of these strategies for the organization of human behaviour."

Forest Farmers and Stockherders: Early Agriculture and its Consequences in North-Central Europe

Summary. Fragments of ceramic sieves constitute a widespread, but littleknown element in the ceramic inventories of Linear Pottery sites in temperate Europe. These sieves appear to have functioned as strainers for separating curds from whey in cheese production, on the basis of parallels with later archaeological cultures and ethnographic examples. Archaeozoological data support the hypothesis that dairy production has a greater antiquity than has been hitherto accepted. The sieves played an important role in early dairy production, for the manufacture of cheese was an essential step in the exploitation of milk by populations who possibly had a high level of lactose intolerance.

Ceramic sieves of the linear pottery culture and their economic implications

List of Figures and Tables. Series Editor's Preface. Preface. A Note on Dating. 1. The Gateway to Human Prehistory. 2. The Earliest Human Societies. 3. The Human Diaspora. 4. After the Ice Age. 5. Seeds for Civilization. 6. Pathways to Inequality. 7. Elites and Commoners. 8. Early States and Chiefdoms in the Shadow of States. Bibliography. Index.

Peter Bogucki

Papers

Earliest evidence for cheese making in the sixth millennium bc in northern Europe

The Spread of Early Farming in Europe

Forest Farmers and Stockherders: Early Agriculture and its Consequences in North-Central Europe

Ceramic sieves of the linear pottery culture and their economic implications

The origins of human society