Ancient DNA Unveils Disparate Fates of Ice Age Hunter-gatherers in Europe
upstart writes:
A new study is the largest to date of ancient Europeans' DNA:
Ice sheets expanded across much of northern Europe from around 25,000 to 19,000 years ago, making a huge expanse of land unlivable. That harsh event set in motion a previously unrecognized tale of two human populations that played out at opposite ends of the continent.
Western European hunter-gatherers outlasted the icy blast in the past. Easterners got replaced by migrations of newcomers.
That's the implication of the largest study to date of ancient Europeans' DNA, covering a period before, during and after what's known as the Last Glacial Maximum, paleogeneticist Cosimo Posth and colleagues report March 1 in Nature.
As researchers have long thought, southwestern Europe provided refuge from the last Ice Age's big chill for hunter-gatherers based in and near that region, the scientists say. But it turns out that southeastern Europe, where Italy is now located, did not offer lasting respite from the cold for nearby groups, as previously assumed.
Instead, those people were replaced by genetically distinct hunter-gatherers who presumably had lived just to the east along the Balkan Peninsula. Those people, who carried ancestry from parts of southwestern Asia, began trekking into what's now northern Italy by about 17,000 years ago, as the Ice Age began to wane.
"If local [Ice Age] populations in Italy did not survive and were replaced by groups from the Balkans, this completely changes our interpretation of the archaeological record," says Posth, of the University of Tubingen in Germany.
C. Posth et al. Paleogenomics of Upper Paleolithic to Neolithic European hunter-gatherers. Nature. Published March 1, 2023. doi: 10.1038/s41586-023-05726-0.
V. Villalba-Mouco et al. A 23,000-year-old southern Iberian individual links human groups that lived in western Europe before and after the Last Glacial Maximum. Nature Ecology & Evolution. Published March 1, 2023. doi: 10.1038/s41559-023-01987-0.
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