Johannes Krause, the head of Archaeogenetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and one of the paper’s co-authors, stated in the paper’s press communications: “We were very surprised to find no traces of Eastern European Steppe Herders in the most recent analysis of the Iceman genome.” He added that Ötzi’s ancestors “seem to have arrived directly from Anatolia without mixing with hunter-gatherer groups.”
—
## Who Were the Anatolian Early Farmers?
To understand what this finding means, it helps to understand who the Anatolian early farmers were and what their arrival in Europe represented.
The Neolithic transition — the shift from societies based primarily on hunting, gathering, and fishing to societies based primarily on cultivating domesticated plants and herding domesticated animals — did not spread across Europe primarily through the adoption of new practices by existing populations. The genetic and archaeological evidence, built up through two decades of ancient DNA research, now overwhelmingly supports a model in which the Neolithic was introduced to Europe mainly through the physical migration of people from Anatolia, beginning roughly eight thousand years ago.
These migrants — labeled Early European Farmers or Anatolian Neolithic people in the genetic literature — came from the Fertile Crescent region of the Near East and Anatolia (modern Turkey) with their cultivated wheat and barley, their domesticated sheep and goats and cattle and pigs, and a genetic profile that was distinct from the Western Hunter-Gatherers who had been living in Europe for tens of thousands of years before the farmers arrived.
The farmers moved west and north through the Aegean, into the Balkans, and then fanned out across the continent. They were not displacing the hunter-gatherers entirely; some mixing occurred. But the available genetic evidence shows that the initial expansion was primarily by migration, not cultural diffusion, and that the Anatolian farmers’ ancestry was dramatically reshaped in its new European contexts through mixing with local hunter-gatherers over subsequent generations.