Until now, scientist believed that there had been one unknown group of ancient people from Stone Age that introduced farming practices all over the world. However, ancient human remains collected from a site in the Zagros Mountains in present Iran suggested that they belonged to entirely different group that started farming in parts of South Asia at the same time when a group started agriculture in Anatolia, now Turkey.

Before the new findings on spread of farming practices, researchers thought that agriculture in the Middle East was introduced by a single group of hunter-gatherers around 10,000 years ago. As they migrated to Europe, Asia and Africa, they either replaced local population or mixed with them. They spread farming practices to all these regions. Thus it is believed that a single group was responsible for spreading farming across the world.

The research that concluded the latest findings was conducted by researchers from Europe, the United States and Iran. They analyzed the DNA of 9,000 to 10,000-year-old bone fragments discovered in a cave near Eslamabad, 600 kilometers (370 miles) southwest of the Iranian capital of Tehran. They discovered the bones belonged to a man with black hair, brown eyes and dark skin.

They threw light on man’s diet which gave evidence about presence of farming practices back then. The ancient man ate cereals, which was a sign indicating that he knew how to cultivate crops, according to Fereidoun Biglari of National Museum of Iran, who was also involved in the study.

"There was this idea that there'd been one group of genius inventors who developed agriculture. Now we can see there were genetically diverse groups”, said Joachim Burger, one of the authors of the study published online Thursday in the journal Science.

Burger said the Zagros people had very different genes than modern Europeans or their crop-planting ancestors in western Anatolia and Greece.

"Scientists say a previously unknown group of Stone Age farmers may have introduced agriculture to South Asia, challenging earlier theories that attributed the spread of farming to a different population," according to a news report published by CBS News.

But scientists who analyzed ancient human remains found in the Zagros mountains of present-day Iran say they belonged to a completely separate people who appear to have taken up farming around the same time as their cousins further west in Anatolia, now Turkey.

"There was this idea that there'd been one group of genius inventors who developed agriculture," said Joachim Burger, one of the authors of the study published online Thursday in the journal Science. "Now we can see there were genetically diverse groups."

Along with three other ancient genomes from the Zagros mountains, researchers were able to piece together a picture of a population whose closest modern relatives can be found in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and among members of Iran's Zoroastrian religious community, said Biglari.

According to a story published on the topic by Science Mag News, "Ancient DNA has a way of uncovering complexity in seemingly simple stories of our past. Most famously, it has shown that modern humans didn’t simply replace our archaic cousins as we spread across the world; we interbred with them along the way. Now, this method is adding nuance to the story of farming, long known to have originated in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East."

The research—a paper published online in Science this week and two studies posted last month on the bioRxiv server—can’t pin down whether agriculture spread quickly among diverse peoples or was independently invented more than once. But the diversity of the first farmers is “very surprising,” says statistical geneticist Garrett Hellenthal of University College London, a co-author of the Science paper. “These early farmers who lived pretty close to each other were completely different.”

Geneticists have been trying to track whether one group of people—or just their ideas—spread farming early on. A single group did carry farming to Europe: DNA from ancient farmers in western Anatolia shows that they were the direct ancestors of Europe’s first farmers, known as the Linear Pottery culture; present-day Sardinians share the most DNA with these ancient Anatolians.

But the ancient Iranian DNA was dramatically different from that of the western Anatolian farmers. The two groups of farmers, who lived about 2000 kilometers and 2000 years apart, must have descended from completely different groups of hunter-gatherers who separated 46,000 to 77,000 years ago, Burger says.

A report published in Science Daily News informed, "An international research team led by Mainz palaeogeneticists demonstrates that populations in the ancient Fertile Crescent are the ancestors of modern day South Asians but not of Europeans."

According to the team's previous study, Neolithic settlers from northern Greece and the Marmara Sea region of western Turkey reached central Europe via a Balkan route and the Iberian Peninsula via a Mediterranean route. These colonists brought sedentary life, agriculture, and domestic animals and plants to Europe.

Professor Joachim Burger, his Mainz palaeogeneticist team, and international collaborators have pioneered palaeogenetic research of the Neolithization process in Europe over the last decade. In 2005, they presented the first ancient DNA study on prehistoric European farmers, and in 2009 and 2013 they analyzed their complex interactions with hunter-gatherers. Now they demonstrate that the idea of "ex oriente lux" is true in cultural but not in genetic terms.

Marjan Mashkour, an Iranian archaeozoologist who works at the CNRS in Paris and initiated the study with Burger and Fereidoun Biglari, a prehistoric archaeologist at the National Museum of Iran, added: "The Neolithic way of life originates in the Fertile Crescent, maybe also some Neolithic pioneers started moving from there. But the majority of ancient Iranians did not move west as some would have thought."