The importance of Neolithic expansion in Central Europe - an assessment of phylogenetic age of mtDNA haplogroups in the Czech population.

Agriculture, with different Neolithic cultures, starts in the Near East more than 10,000 years ago. This new way of life has very different archaeological manifestations that previous Mesolithic. After its Near Eastern emergence, the farming practices rapidly penetrated into southeastern Europe and the first signs of Neolithic in Central Europe are already 7,000 years old. It is being considered that the cultural innovations influenced demographic growth of the populations that have taken part in the Neolithic spread. In such situation, new mutations would have to fix and could form new specific haplogroups for Europe with ancestral ties to the Near East. Phylogeographic studies such as founder analysis of European and Near Eastern mtDNA sequences found that the European Neolithic component was enriched mainly by haplogroups J and T1, and that the genetic contribution of farming economy in European gene pool is about 10 - 20%. However, studies like these have not been yet realized in particular parts of Europe. The aim of this thesis is to disentangle the internal variability of Central European haplogroups J and T1 thought to be involved in the Neolithic demic diffusion. We classified these haplogroups from the HVS-I mtDNA sequences of 281 samples of the recent population of the Czech Republic. We..