LEICESTER, England, Jan. 26 (UPI) -- A British study suggests most European men are descended from the first farmers to migrate from the Near East about 10,000 years ago.
University of Leicester scientists said there's been some controversy about whether the westerly spread of agriculture from the Near East was driven by farmers actually migrating, or by the transfer of ideas and technologies to indigenous hunter-gatherers.
The researchers said they studied the genetic diversity of the Y chromosome that's passed from father to son.
"We focused on the commonest Y-chromosome lineage in Europe, carried by about 110 million men -- it follows a gradient from south-east to north-west, reaching almost 100 percent frequency in Ireland," said genetics Professor Mark Jobling, who led the research. "We looked at how the lineage is distributed, how diverse it is in different parts of Europe, and how old it is."
He said the results suggest the lineage spread together with farming from the Near East.
"In total, this means more than 80 percent of European Y chromosomes descend from incoming farmers," Patricia Balaresque, the study's first author, added. "In contrast, most maternal genetic lineages seem to descend from hunter-gatherers. To us, this suggests a reproductive advantage for farming males over indigenous hunter-gatherer males during the switch from hunting and gathering, to farming."
The study is reported in the Jan. 19 issue of the journal PLoS Biology.
