around 10,000 years ago, farmers from the Middle East carried civilisation with them to Europe, reveals a recent genetic analysis. It makes it clear that new agrarian technologies were not purely a spread of ideas, but a mass movement of people who settled and mixed with hunter-gatherers of Europe. The analysis also reveals that modern inhabitants of Paris, Athens and Berlin, on an average, share 50 per cent of their genes with people from Baghdad, Tehran, Ankara and Damascus.

In the past, archaeologists have found evidence that agriculture moved north-west through Europe at the speed of about one kilometre per year. But how this happened was not clear. Therefore, to solve the mystery, Lounes Chikhi from the uk-based University College London and his colleagues traced a genetic