Western European Neolithic Mosaic

Across river valleys and chalk plains, the Western European Neolithic emerges in archaeological layers as a slow, layered transformation rather than a single thunderclap. Radiocarbon-dated contexts in this dataset span from 5479 BCE (early farming horizons) to 200 BCE (late Neolithic and local continuities). Key sites such as Mont-Aimé hypogée I and II (Marne, France), Trumpington Meadows (Cambridgeshire, UK) and Atapuerca El Portalón (Burgos, Spain) record long sequences of burial, monument-building and settlement.

Material evidence — polished axes, pottery styles, and hypogea architecture — suggests regional interaction networks stretching from the Seine basin into the Iberian interior and across the Channel. Archaeological data indicates that early farmers brought domestic plants and animals and new burial practices; limited evidence of continuity with preceding Mesolithic lifeways appears in some coastal and upland locales.

Genomic data in this collection supports an origin story of farmer-descended ancestry derived largely from early Near Eastern/Anatolian-derived lineages that spread into Western Europe during the 6th–4th millennia BCE, mixing over generations with local hunter-gatherer groups. Spatial patterns in material culture and DNA together imply a mosaic of adoption, migration and regional adaptation rather than homogeneous replacement. Ongoing excavation and denser sampling will refine the tempo of these processes.

This assemblage of 324 ancient genomes provides a robust window into population structure across Western Europe during the Neolithic. Y-chromosome haplogroup G is the most frequent (100/324; ~31%), consistent with Neolithic farmer-associated paternal lineages originating from Anatolia and the Near East. Haplogroup I (42/324; ~13%) appears in many contexts and likely reflects local hunter-gatherer paternal ancestry that persisted and admixed with incoming farmers. Smaller counts of H (12), H2 (7) and R (5) are present; these low-frequency lineages hint at diverse paternal inputs, including rare survival of pre-farming lineages and later influxes in some regions.

Mitochondrial diversity is high: haplogroup K (81; ~25%) is frequent and characteristic of early farming maternal lineages, while U (44), J (42), H (37) and H1 (27) underscore mixed maternal ancestries. These mtDNA patterns align with autosomal signals of substantial Anatolian-derived farmer ancestry combined to varying degrees with European hunter-gatherer ancestry. Spatially, western coastal and highland sites sometimes show higher hunter-gatherer ancestry proportions than large river-basin settlements, although local sampling biases remain a caveat.

Because sample coverage is broad (324 individuals across France, Iberia, Britain, Germany and the Low Countries), conclusions about major ancestry components are robust; however, fine-scale demographic events, especially short-lived migrations or sex-biased processes, require denser localized sampling and contextual archaeological correlation. Limited but intriguing evidence suggests regionally variable admixture dynamics and occasional gene flow from steppe-associated groups in later Neolithic contexts.