FARMING is given scant attention in most Western societies today, but new genetic detection work indicates that most European men are descended from early farmers who led arguably the most important cultural change in the history of humanity.
A team at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom tracked back the male Y chromosome, passed down from father to son, and found that the most common Y chromosome in Europe mirrored the spread of farming about 10,000 years ago.
Dr Patricia Balaresque, first author of the study, said that 80 per cent of European Y chromosomes had their ancestry in farmers who pushed into Europe from the "Fertile Crescent", the region extending from the eastern Mediterranean coast to the Persian Gulf, where cereal cropping was thought to have originated.
The Near East farmers' genetics appear to have been spread at the expense of the earlier European hunter-gatherer communities, whose genetics dominated maternal lineages.
The researchers were unable to say whether farmer genetics spread through force or plain old sexiness, merely commenting that the patterns "could arise from an increased and transmitted reproductive success for male farmers compared with indigenous hunter-gatherers, without a corresponding difference between females from the two groups".
About 110 million European men carried the Y chromosome under scrutiny, which had a frequency approaching nearly 100 per cent in Ireland.
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