More Genetic Data on Neolithic Europeans

The news from France:

Scientists analyzed DNA extracted from the bones of 53 people buried in Cave I of the Treilles, located in the Grands Causses region at Saint-Jean-et-Saint-Paul, Aveyron in France. They were able to get useful information from 29 of those samples, 22 men, two women ad five for whom it was impossible to determine sex. Most of them appeared to be closely related, with two of them having a 99.9979% probability of being father and son and two others having a 99.9985% probability of being siblings.

The researchers were able to deduce from their findings that the peoples in this region of France were of a genetic type more closely related to Basque and Spanish populations than current western European populations. They were also more closely related to peoples in Cyprus, Portugal, Turkey, Italy and Lebanon.

Note, once again, the weak genetic link between Europe's neolithic pioneers and the modern inhabitants. The investigators also searched for the genes that give modern European adults the ability to digest milk and cheese, but did not find them:

None of them carried the gene for lactase persistence that is believed to have first evolved around 5,500 BC in Central Europe and which allowed humans to drink fresh milk after they are weaned.

As an aside, I hate those ridiculously precise numbers for the probability of relatedness, because there is surely at least a 0.1% chance that the whole thing is a laboratory error.