of wheat, and probably herding small flocks of
sheep and goats, some 10,300 years ago, near the
dawn of the Neolithic period.
Within a thousand years the Neolithic revolu-
tion, as it’s called, spread north through Anatolia
and into southeastern Europe. By about 6,000
years ago, there were farmers and herders all
across Europe.
It has long been clear that Europe acquired
the practice of farming from Turkey or the
Levant, but did it acquire farmers from the same
places? The answer isn’t obvious. For decades,
many archaeologists thought a whole suite of
innovations—farming, but also ceramic pottery,
polished stone axes capable of clearing forests,
and complicated settlements—was carried into
Europe not by migrants but by trade and word
of mouth, from one valley to the next, as hunter-
gatherers who already lived there adopted the
new tools and way of life.
But DNA evidence from Boncuklu has helped
show that migration had a lot more to do with
it. The farmers of Boncuklu kept their dead
close, burying them in the fetal position under
the floors of their houses. Beginning in 2014,
Baird sent samples of DNA extracted from skull
fragments and teeth from more than a dozen
burials to DNA labs in Sweden, Turkey, the U.K.,
and Germany.
Many of the samples were too badly degraded
after spending millennia in the heat of the Konya
Plain to yield much DNA. But then Johannes
Krause and his team at Germany’s Max Planck
Institute for the Science of Human History tested
the samples from a handful of petrous bones.
The petrous bone is a tiny part of the inner ear,
not much bigger than a pinkie tip; it’s also about
the densest bone in the body. Researchers have
found that it preserves genetic information long
after usable DNA has been baked out of the restA woman harvests
wheat by hand near
Konya, Turkey. Farmers
from Anatolia brought
agriculture to Europe
starting nearly 9,000
years ago. Within a few
millennia, farmers and
herders dominated
most of the continent.106 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC