In the 7th millennium BCE, Anatolian farmers startet to settle in Southern Europe. The long-established hunters of the late Ice Age were still living there. Conflict, assimilation and genetic convergence followed. Genetically, present-day Europe traces back to these two groups — hunters and farmers. Hunter ancestry is more prevalent in Northern and Eastern Europeans, whereas farmer ancestry is more prevalent in Southern Europeans.

We deliberately do not use the Ancestry Components model here, because it takes the hunters from very early periods while taking the farmers from an already admixed, later stage. Instead, our analysis is simple and empirical, without models or cherry-picking. All known AADR individuals from Europe (as far as the Bosporus, Caucasus and Urals) whose dates overlap the 7th millennium BCE (between 7000 and 6000 BCE) are entered into a cluster analysis based on their genetic similarity (PMR, where it could be calculated). This produces two sharply separated genetic clusters with a remarkable genetic distance: the ancient European hunter cluster (n=76) and the new Anatolian farmer cluster (n=18).

The selected genome is compared directly with every usable individual in both clusters using the same YRI outgroup-f3 calculation and per-reference baseline correction as GeoGens. Individuals from the same find site are combined within the AUC so that every site has the same total weight (n=28 Hunter sites; n=13 Farmer sites). Two hunter-cluster entries are damage-restricted contamination-control callsets; they remain documented in the historical cluster but, like all such callsets in GeoGens, are not compared with modern genomes. The score is the site-balanced Mann–Whitney AUC on that corrected GeoGens comparison: 50 means no preference, while 65 means that a Hunter comparison outranks a Farmer comparison in 65 out of 100 pairings. The result is an affinity score resembling ancestry. Showing percentages would not be honest, as they heavily depend on the underlying individual references and don't take into account other dimensions of ancestry, such as the East-West gradient.

A find-site-clustered AUC interval reports reference-sample sensitivity. Comparisons with fewer than 50,000 jointly usable markers are excluded; fewer than ten usable find sites per cluster suppresses the numerical result.

The hunter on the left is based on a reconstructed skull (Bøgebakken near Vedbæk, Denmark) of a Mesolithic Ertebølle hunter. The reconstruction was made by hand (Instagram). According to the GWAS of Hysi, Morgan and Lona-Durazo, the hunters of this culture — and of Mesolithic western and northern Europe in general — show very high values for blond hair, according to Jacobs and Liu very light skin, and according to Lona-Durazo and Sulem very light eyes. Some, though not all, of Europe's hunter-gatherers thus possessed a distinctly proto-Nordic appearance, not unlike that of some robust modern-day Scandinavians. Other hunters of Europe, however, also had blue eyes and dark hair (above all in western Europe), or brown eyes and brown hair (hunters in Russia and the Balkans). The second hunter from the left is based on a reconstructed skull from the lower Dnieper (Vovnici) and was made by the same reconstructor (Instagram). His eye colour has been corrected to reflect the latest genetic results. Exact pigmentation signals can be found at geogens.eu. The hunters of the Mesolithic were consistently taller than the Neolithic farmers, on average by about 10 cm (Piontek/Vancata 2012 – Transition to Agriculture in Central Europe).

The farmers on the right are based on reconstructed skulls of the Danubian Linear Pottery culture in Vedrovice, Moravia (Instagram 1 and Instagram 2), that is, direct descendants of the first settlers of the 7th millennium. These early farmers of south-eastern Europe consistently show strong genetic signals for dark hair and eye colour, as well as slightly tanned skin. Men were on average 163 cm tall and thus considerably shorter than the Mesolithic people. They therefore had a typically Mediterranean appearance.

The female faces were each derived from the male ones using AI.

Cited pigmentation GWAS

• Hysi et al. 2018, Genome-wide association meta-analysis of individuals of European ancestry identifies new loci explaining a substantial fraction of hair color variation and heritability – doi.org/10.1038/s41588-018-0100-5
• Morgan et al. 2018, Genome-wide study of hair colour in UK Biobank explains most of the SNP heritability – doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-07691-z
• Lona-Durazo et al. 2021, CanPath hair-colour GWAS meta-analysis – doi.org/10.1038/s42003-021-02764-0
• Lona-Durazo et al. 2022, Investigating the genetic architecture of eye colour in a Canadian cohort – doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2022.104485
• Sulem et al. 2007, Genetic determinants of hair, eye and skin pigmentation in Europeans – doi.org/10.1038/ng.2007.13
• Jacobs et al. 2013, Comprehensive candidate gene study highlights UGT1A and BNC2 as new genes determining continuous skin color variation in Europeans – doi.org/10.1007/s00439-012-1232-9
• Liu et al. 2015, Genetics of skin color variation in Europeans – doi.org/10.1007/s00439-015-1559-0