Polish Neolithic Genome Project - Homo sapiens Genome sequencing and assembly

The region of Kujawy in north-central Poland has a rich and thoroughly examined archaeological record of Neolithic and Early Bronze Age settlement. In that area, Neolithic transformation commenced with the arrival of farming communities of the Linear Pottery culture (LBK) in the second half of the 6th millennium BC. During the Early and Middle Neolithic, Kujawy was one of the northernmost and easternmost regions of central Europe with continuous early agricultural settlement associated with the Danubian Neolithic cultural tradition, bordering with the world of indigenous European Late Mesolithic and para-Neolithic hunter-gatherers. In the Middle Neolithic Kujawy was a major center of the eastern group of the Funnel Beaker culture. The third millennium BC brought to Kujawy, in succession, the Globular Amphora culture, Corded Ware culture, and, at the end of Neolithic period, the Bell Beaker Culture. Relics of all of those archaeological cultures, including inhumation graves, are often found at the same sites, offering a unique opportunity to track processes that shaped population development in central Europe. In this project, 17 ancient human genomes representing populations inhabiting a small area in Kujawy from the Middle Neolithic to the early Bronze Age were analyzed against other data for ancient and present-day Europeans. The main question is to what extent the frontier location of the studied region and its cultural and genetic ties along both north-south and east-west lines affected the population changes that shaped the genetic diversity of modern Europeans.