Why did Europe's hunter-gatherers disappear?

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.

"Farmers started to push into Europe from the Near East, bringing domesticated Animals and domesticated plants, and then there is a coexistence of farmers and hunter-gatherers until 5,000 years ago when the hunter-gatherers disappear," Cosimo Posth, a professor of archeo- and paleogenetics at the University of Tübingen in Germany, told Live Science.

Europe's hunter-gatherers weren't a single entity but a series of different human populations and cultures who survived by hunting animals and foraging for wild food.

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Hunter-gatherers came to Europe in waves and began establishing themselves on the continent around 45,000 years ago. Posth described this initial population as a "dead branch" because it mostly disappeared, as did earlier human explorers venturing into Europe. However, after those early unsuccessful migrations, at least some of the subsequent waves of hunter-gatherers thrived on the continent.

Posth noted that modern Europeans owe around 10% to 15% of their DNA to European hunter-gatherers, most of which comes from the final wave of hunter-gatherers who spread out from Italy around 14,000 years ago. So a portion of their genetic legacy lives on even though much of their Lifestyle is long gone.