Thanks to the fact that northern Europe is cool and archaeological research is rather well developed in the region due to quirks of history, there are lots of findings from ancient DNA which are answering long-standing questions. In particular Scandinavia is of special interest in regards to the transition of Europeans from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to an agricultural one. We know that hunting and gathering as dominant modes of economic production persisted relatively late in European history in this region, up to ~5,000 years before the present. From my cursory reading of the material on the spread of agriculture in northern Europe one dynamic which seems clear is that the rate of expansion was not always constant, and that at the northern fringes in particular social or ecological frontiers served to demarcate the limits to the expansion of farming groups, which often originated from the south and east. Additionally, on the maritime fringes of the North Sea and Baltic there seem to have been relatively dense agglomerations of hunter-gatherers which resisted or coexisted with farming populations for long periods of time (perhaps they were more accurately termed fisher-gatherers!).
This is where Anna Linderholm’s research comes into the picture. I’ve …