Farming has been thought to originate from a single population in Southwest Asia, which covers parts of the modern-day Middle East, and made its way to areas in Turkey, Greece, and eventually across Western Europe. Scientists have long debated how these populations have emerged and flowed throughout these regions, but now an international team of researchers have excavated a trove of new genetic information that may settle the debate. Their findings, presented May 12 in the journal Cell, show that the world’s first farmers did not originate from a single group as was previously thought but from the mixing of two groups of hunter-gatherers during a tumultuous time in which human settlements almost went extinct.
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Source: Phys.org