Lets face it who would you rather shag a farmer or hunter gatherer ?

I'm not sure that's quite right, Moth. My understanding is that our indigenous hunter/gatherer genes are very much with us and I read somewhere that 80% of us in Britain are direct descendents of those original post ice age people. Ideas rather than people came into Britain and farming was one life changing idea along with metal working techniques later. The old notion that middle east farmers swept across Europe and then into Britain en masse is no longer accepted, but then (as always ) an extreme opposite view is now preached ie no one moved anywhere and everything was done by trade and the exchange of ideas .

None of our domestic farm animals, with the possible exception of the pig, are indigenous to Britain. So how did they get here if farmers didn't bring them as well as the required skills which the indigenous hunters would then have learned? The alternative is too ridiculous - that would be that Britons went over to Europe and brought back the livestock and somehow just turned themselves into farmers. There is an explanation in the often ignored fact that there is a transition between hunting and agriculture ie pastoralism. Gradually wild animals were herded rather than chased eg reindeer which were indigenous to Britain.

Sorting out the DNA threads is not going to be simple and extreme views are nearly always wrong. It seems likely to me that the indigenous population gradually changed and learned from a smaller number of newcomers. The idea of agriculture spread from the middle east and I understand that there is DNA evidence in modern British genes of a certain amount of immigration - but not massive people replacement. I would suggest that pastoralism itself was a natural evolution from hunting and would not need to be learned from incomers.