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Abstract

Questions about how farming and the Neolithic way of life spread across Europe have been hotly debated topics in archaeology for decades. For a very long time, two models have dominated the discussion: migrations of farming groups from southwestern Asia versus diffusion of domesticates and new ideas through the existing networks of local forager populations. New strontium isotope data from the Danube Gorges in the north-central Balkans, an area characterized by a rich burial record spanning the Mesolithic–Neolithic transition, show a significant increase in nonlocal individuals from ∼6200 calibrated B.C., with several waves of migrants into this region. These results are further enhanced by dietary evidence based on carbon and nitrogen isotopes and an increasingly high chronological resolution obtained on a large sample of directly dated individuals. This dataset provides robust evidence for a brief period of coexistence between indigenous groups and early farmers before farming communities absorbed the foragers completely in the first half of the sixth millennium B.C.

Keywords: forager–farmer interaction, isotope analysis, the Balkans, Lepenski Vir, southeastern Europe

The chronological priority of southeastern Europe in the spread of the Neolithic way of life makes this region particularly important in building and evaluating models for understanding the initial spread of agriculture across Europe. At the same time, southeastern Europe is geographically adjacent to Asia, particularly the regions of central and western Anatolia, which have for a very long time been considered core areas for the Neolithic expansion into Europe. Although there are still differences among researchers as to what processes—demic diffusion, folk migration, leap-frog colonization, or acculturation of local forager populations to name the major models (1–4)—actually took place, most scholars today agree that the cultural origins of the southeast European Neolithic are in the Neolithic communities of Asia (5–10).

The traditional view of the Neolithic in the Balkan Peninsula involved the expansion of farmers out of the plains of Thessaly and northern Greece, moving up the natural corridors of the major river valleys with general northward and westward directions (11). However, more recent reevaluations of existing radiocarbon dates suggest that it is unlikely that Initial or Early Neolithic sites in Thessaly were established earlier than ∼6500/6400 calibrated (cal) B.C., many possibly later, between ∼6300 and ∼6100 cal B.C. (12, 13). Several recent accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) radiocarbon dates for Early Neolithic communities in the central and northern Balkans suggest a rapid spread of farming communities as early as ∼6300/6200 cal B.C. (14, 15). Resolution of various competing models strongly depends on evidence regarding human mobility in this region.

Our research focuses on human mobility and migration by measuring strontium (⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr) isotope ratios in tooth enamel from human burial remains coming from the Danube Gorges in the north-central Balkans between present-day Serbia and Romania (Fig. 1), where a number of sites are characterized by a continuous Mesolithic and Neolithic sequence (16–19) (Table 1 and SI Appendix, Table S1 and Fig. S1). Strontium comes from weathering rocks, waters, and soils and through the food chain enters the body. Because tooth enamel forms around the time of birth and early childhood, it does not change through life (20) and is also the densest tissue in the body, generally resistant to decomposition and contamination after death (21–24); as a result, it is routinely analyzed to obtain an averaged geographic signature that reflects an individual’s place of birth. Comparing this signature with locally bioavailable strontium, it is possible to establish nonlocal, migrant individuals in a burial sample of a particular region (25, 26).