Neolithic Echoes of Coastal Portugal

Along the muted coastline and river valleys of western Iberia, the Middle Neolithic unfolds as a slow, layered transformation between c. 4500 and 2305 BCE. Archaeological data indicates communities were practicing mixed farming—domesticated cereals and livestock—while continuing to exploit rich coastal and estuarine resources. Sites in the region display material culture affinities with broader Iberian Neolithic traditions: coarse and burnished pottery, polished stone tools, and localized funerary practices. At Lorga de Din and Lugar do Canto, human remains dating to this span offer direct biological traces of those lives.

The appearance of farming economies in Portugal is best seen as a palimpsest: incoming agriculturally-anchored populations carrying Anatolian-derived farmer ancestry interacted with long-standing Mesolithic groups. Limited evidence from these six samples suggests such interactions were ongoing and regionally variable. The archaeological record in western Iberia shows both continuity in coastal subsistence strategies and novel elements consistent with Neolithic lifeways. Given the small number of genomes, this picture remains provisional: these individuals are cinematic glimpses rather than a full panorama of Middle Neolithic demography.

Genome-scale analysis of six Middle Neolithic individuals from Portugal offers a rare molecular window into population dynamics at the Atlantic edge. Maternal lineages recorded include mtDNA H (two individuals), H3 (one), U8a (one), and U (one), a pattern that aligns with the broader Neolithic maternal diversity in Iberia where H and U subclades appear among farmer-descended and mixed-ancestry groups. These mtDNA haplogroups suggest continuity of maternal lineages that were common in Neolithic and late Mesolithic Europe.

On the paternal side, the small dataset reports Y haplogroups H (one) and I (one). Haplogroup I is frequently associated with European Mesolithic hunter-gatherers in many aDNA studies, whereas a single Y-H result is unexpected in the European context and must be treated with caution—low coverage, contamination risk, or rare local lineages can complicate interpretation. Autosomal ancestry in Middle Neolithic Iberia typically shows a major Anatolian farmer component mixed with varying Western Hunter-Gatherer (WHG) resurgence; these six individuals likely reflect that spectrum, but with only six samples the conclusions are preliminary. Limited sample count (<10) means that population-level claims (timing of admixture, sex-biased processes) remain tentative and will benefit from larger, contextualized datasets.