Characterisation of the biodiversity and biological affinities in the first farmers and last hunter-gatherers from northeast iberia by dental morphology analysis /

The main subject of this dissertation is the biological aspect of the human transition from Mesolithic (9,500 cal BCE – 5,500 cal BCE) to Neolithic (5,600 cal BCE – 2,200 cal BCE) in the Northeast of the Iberian Peninsula, and the biological relationships among the Neolithic populations of the same area. How this process, called Neolithisation, occurred in Western Europe, and concretely in the Iberian Peninsula, has produced a major debate within archaeologists and anthropologists during many decades. The methodology used to address this question has been the study of non-metric dental traits. The analysed sample comprises Mesolithic sites from along the Iberian Peninsula; Neolithic and Chalcolithic samples from the North and Northeast of the Peninsula, and Southern France; and Bronze Age samples from the North and Northeast of the Iberian Peninsula. In total, 100 sites have been analysed, where a minimum number of 1,391 individuals were recovered and 17,262 teeth analysed for this work. The results indicate that prehistoric populations from the Iberian Peninsula since the Mesolithic presented a dental morphological pattern that is compatible, for most traits, to the Eurodont dental pattern described for current Western European populations. Additionally, although it has been recorded that environmental factors might affect tooth formation and morphology in individual levels, this did not happen in a population scale. Thus, dental morphology proved to be stable enough to provide reliable information on the relationships between human populations in this concrete case. Moreover, it is observable that the Pre-Neolithic samples from the Upper-Palaeolithic and Mesolithic periods from the different areas of the Peninsula (Portuguese Atlantic coast, Cantabrian Fringe, and Eastern Mediterranean coast) were not biologically different between each other. In contrast, all of them were different from Italian samples from the same period. Regarding the Early- and Middle-Neolithic samples, the results show that there were significant differences between some of them. For example, the sample related to the Sepulcres de Fossa culture in the coastal and pre-coastal valleys from Catalonia, significantly diverged from the same period’s sample from the Solsonian region and Andorra (in the Catalan Pyrenees). These two groups diverged both in the geographical dispersion and the funerary practices. Moreover, both of them presented similar affinity values in relation to Early- and Middle-Neolithic samples from Navarre, in the Upper Ebro Valley. In addition, when the samples were compared to Farmer groups from Southern France, the results showed that while those samples from the Provence and Rhone Valley did not present differences with any of the Iberian samples, those from inland areas near the Pyreneans differed from the Navarrean and Sepulcres de Fossa groups. On the other hand, during the Chalcolithic and Bronze Age the differences between samples from the different areas of the Peninsula decreased, and in the Bronze Age there were no observable biological differences between the groups. Finally, in regards to the relationship between Hunter-Gatherer and Farmer populations in the Iberian Peninsula, the current results show that this was heterogeneous. The Neolithic samples that biologically were closer to the Hunter-Gatherers were those from the Upper Ebro valley, while the samples from the Pyrenean and Mediterranean areas diverge in different directions from them. During the Chalcolithic the samples resembled more to the Hunter-Gatherers than in previous periods, and the Bronze Age population showed strong affinities to the Upper-Palaeolithic and Mesolithic sample. Hence, the process of Neolithisation was heterogeneous, with different impacts of incoming populations in the various areas of the Peninsula. Furthermore, the results indicate that the influx might have two different origins, the Mediterranean coast and through the Pyreneans.