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Late Neolithic/Early Eneolithic Vinča culture is marked by permanent, long-living settlements, increased production of different craft goods and early metallurgical activities. Economic activities were rich and diverse, and included not only strictly subsistence related ones, but also production of luxurious, prestige, "special" objects, such as figurines, personal ornaments, and many more. Furthermore, some studies also suggest that we may note the beginning of craft specialisation in the widest sense within the Vinča culture. On a regional scale, differences in economic activities may be observed among different settlements and also in presence/absence of some artefact types. This may reflect a certain level of functional differentiation and possibly specialisation between different settlements, as noted, for example, among the Neolithic communities in Greece. In this paper, we will focus on the analyses of everyday lithic and osseous tools, in order to examine the differences in everyday activities, raw material management and craft production among different settlements. Through comparative analysis, we will examine the possible presence of a functional differentiation between different Vinča culture settlements and its extent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present the first ancient DNA data from the Pre-Pottery Neolithic of Mesopotamia (Southeastern Turkey and Northern Iraq), Cyprus, and the Northwestern Zagros, along with the first data from Neolithic Armenia. We show that these and neighboring populations were formed through admixture of pre-Neolithic sources related to Anatolian, Caucasus, and Levantine hunter-gatherers, forming a Neolithic continuum of ancestry mirroring the geography of West Asia. By analyzing Pre-Pottery and Pottery Neolithic populations of Anatolia, we show that the former were derived from admixture between Mesopotamian-related and local Epipaleolithic-related sources, but the latter experienced additional Levantine-related gene flow, thus documenting at least two pulses of migration from the Fertile Crescent heartland to the early farmers of Anatolia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literary and archaeological sources have preserved a rich history of Southern Europe and West Asia since the Bronze Age that can be complemented by genetics. Mycenaean period elites in Greece did not differ from the general population and included both people with some steppe ancestry and others, like the Griffin Warrior, without it. Similarly, people in the central area of the Urartian Kingdom around Lake Van lacked the steppe ancestry characteristic of the kingdomÕs northern provinces. Anatolia exhibited extraordinary continuity down to the Roman and Byzantine periods, with its people serving as the demographic core of much of the Roman Empire, including the city of Rome itself. During medieval times, migrations associated with Slavic and Turkic speakers profoundly affected the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Forager focus on wild cereal plants has been documented in the core zone of domestication in southwestern Asia, while evidence for forager use of wild grass grains remains sporadic elsewhere. In this paper, we present starch grain and phytolith analyses of dental calculus from 60 Mesolithic and Early Neolithic individuals from five sites in the Danube Gorges of the central Balkans. This zone was inhabited by likely complex Holocene foragers for several millennia before the appearance of the first farmers ~6200 cal BC. We also analyzed forager ground stone tools (GSTs) for evidence of plant processing. Our results based on the study of dental calculus show that certain species of Poaceae (species of the genus Aegilops) were used since the Early Mesolithic, while GSTs exhibit traces of a developed grass grain processing technology. The adoption of domesticated plants in this region after ~6500 cal BC might have been eased by the existing familiarity with wild cereals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Archaeological dental calculus, or mineralized plaque, is a key tool to track the evolution of oral microbiota across time in response to processes that impacted our culture and biology, such as the rise of farming during the Neolithic. However, the extent to which the human oral flora changed from prehistory until present has remained elusive due to the scarcity of data on the microbiomes of prehistoric humans. Here, we present our reconstruction of oral microbiomes via shotgun metagenomics of dental calculus in 44 ancient foragers and farmers from two regions playing a pivotal role in the spread of farming across Europe--the Balkans and the Italian Peninsula. We show that the introduction of farming in Southern Europe did not alter significantly the oral microbiomes of local forager groups, and it was in particular associated with a higher abundance of the species Olsenella sp. oral taxon 807. The human oral environment in prehistory was dominated by a microbial species, Anaerolineaceae bacterium oral taxon 439, that diversified geographically. A Near Eastern lineage of this bacterial commensal dispersed with Neolithic farmers and replaced the variant present in the local foragers. Our findings also illustrate that major taxonomic shifts in human oral microbiome composition occurred after the Neolithic and that the functional profile of modern humans evolved in recent times to develop peculiar mechanisms of antibiotic resistance that were previously absent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent excavations (2006-2009) at the Mesolithic-Neolithic site of Vlasac in the Danube Gorges region of the north-central Balkans have focused on a reevaluation of previous conclusions about site formation processes, stratigraphy, chronology, and the nature of occupation. Mostly Late Mesolithic remains had been encountered in the preserved portion of the site, but, for the first time, in a restricted zone of the excavated area, vertical stratification of burial and occupation features yielded evidence about the use of the site in the period that is contemporaneous with Phase l-ll at Lepenski Vir, the Mesolithic-Neolithic transition phase in this region, ca. 6200-5900 cal b.c. Various strands of archaeological evidence show both continuities and discontinuities in Late Mesolithic forager life- and deathways at the start of the Neolithic in the central Balkans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]