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LiveScience
LiveScience
Patrick Pester

Why did Europe's hunter-gatherers disappear?

Primeval caveman wearing animal skin standing in his cave at night, holding torch with fire looking at drawings on the walls at night. Cave art with petroglyphs, rock paintings.

Hunter-gatherers lived across Europe for thousands of years and were the dominant human presence in the region for most of this time. So what happened to them all?

Researchers don't yet know the exact set of circumstances that drove Europe's hunter-gatherers to disappear, but their decline broadly coincided with the spread of farming in the region. Neolithic farmers arrived in Europe around 8,000 years ago and ultimately replaced hunter-gatherers after a period of sharing the continent with them.

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