Gheorghe Stefanescu

Important gaps remain in our understanding of the spread of farming into Europe, due partly to apparent contradictions between studies of contemporary genetic variation and ancient DNA. It seems clear that farming was introduced into central, northern, and eastern Europe from the south by pioneer colonization. It is often argued that these dispersals originated in the Near East, where the potential source genetic pool resembles that of the early European farmers, but clear ancient DNA evidence from Mediterranean Europe is lacking, and there are suggestions that Mediterranean Europe may have resembled the Near East more than the rest of Europe in the Mesolithic. Here, we test this proposal by dating mitogenome founder lineages from the Near East in different regions of Europe. We find that whereas the lineages date mainly to the Neolithic in central Europe and Iberia, they largely date to the Late Glacial period in central/eastern Mediterranean Europe. This supports a scenario in which the genetic pool of Mediterranean Europe was partly a result of Late Glacial expansions from a Near Eastern refuge, and that this formed an important source pool for subsequent Neolithic expansions into the rest of Europe.

We report genome-wide ancient DNA from 44 ancient Near Easterners ranging in time between ~12,000 and 1,400 bc, from Natufian hunter–gatherers to Bronze Age farmers. We show that the earliest populations of the Near East derived around half their ancestry from a ‘Basal Eurasian’ lineage that had little if any Neanderthal admixture and that separated from other non-African lineages before their separation from each other. The first farmers of the southern Levant (Israel and Jordan) and Zagros Mountains (Iran) were strongly genetically differentiated, and each descended from local hunter–gatherers. By the time of the Bronze Age, these two populations and Anatolian-related farmers had mixed with each other and with the hunter–gatherers of Europe to greatly reduce genetic differentiation. The impact of the Near Eastern farmers extended beyond the Near East: farmers related to those of Anatolia spread westward into Europe; farmers related to those of the Levant spread southward into East Africa; farmers related to those of Iran spread northward into the Eurasian steppe; and people related to both the early farmers of Iran and to the pastoralists of the Eurasian steppe spread eastward into South Asia.

The European Journal of Human Genetics is the official Journal of the European Society of Human Genetics, publishing high-quality, original research papers, short reports, News and Commentary articles and reviews in the rapidly expanding field of human genetics and genomics.

This paper is included in a series aiming to contribute to the algebraic theory of distributed computation. The key problem in understanding Multi-Agent Systems is to find a theory which integrates the reactive part and the conrol part of such systems. To this end we use the calculus of flownomials. It is a polynomial-like calculus for representing flowgraphs and their behaviours. An 'additive' interpretation of the calculus was intensively developed to study control flowcharts and finite automata. For instance, regular algebra and iteration theories are included in a unified presentation. On the other hand, a 'multiplicative' interpretation of the calculus of flownomials was developed to study dataflow networks. The claim of this series of papers is that the mixture of the additive and multiplicative network algebras will contribute to the understanding of distributed computation. The role of this first paper is to present a few motivating examples. Key words: Multi-agent systems, parallel imperative programs, dataflow networks, parallelizing compilers, algebra, feedback, network algebra, flownomials.

We analyzed the polymorphism for the presence/absence of the YAP element in two male Romanian samples. Frequencies of 3.7% and 10.5% were found for the presence of the element in Maramures (North Romania) and Vrancea (East Romania).