An international team has created the largest study of genomic data from European hunter-gatherers. The study was led by the universities of Tübingen (Germany) and Beijing (China) and the prestigious German research institutes Senckenberg and Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in collaboration with more than a hundred researchers from around the world.
The study, which also includes distinguished researcher Javier Fernández López de Pablo from the University Archeology and Historical Heritage Research Institute (INAPH), affiliated with the University of Alicante (UA), has been published in the science journal Nature.
The team analyzed the genomes of 356 prehistoric hunter-gatherers from different archaeological cultures, including 116 new individuals from 14 European and Central Asian countries. “Our data reveal the existence of interaction processes between different hunter-gatherer populations that have lived in Western Eurasia since the last ice age,” says the UA researcher.
In particular, the University of Alicante participated in this ambitious study by taking samples and contextual analysis of human remains found at the Casa Corona de Villena site in 2008. “Now, thanks to this international study, we have been able to extract the fossil DNA. It’s a particularly difficult thing at these latitudes to better understand the location of these remains relative to the population dynamics observed in the rest of the Iberian Peninsula and across the Eurasian continent,” concludes the INAPH researcher.
Modern humans spread across Eurasia about 45,000 years ago: the first modern humans to reach Europe had previously been shown not to contribute genetically to later populations.
This study focuses on groups of people who lived between 35,000 and 5,000 years ago and were at least partially the ancestors of present-day West Eurasian inhabitants, including the genomes of individuals who first lived during the Last Maximum Ice Age (Last Glacial Maximum). , LGM, English), about 25,000 years ago, the coldest period of the well-known Ice Age.
Climate refuge or dead end?
Surprisingly, the research team found that populations associated with the Gravettian culture that spread across the European continent between 32,000 and 24,000 years ago were not closely related. They were united by the same archaeological culture: they used the same types of weapons and produced similar furniture art. However, genetically, populations of southwestern Europe (present-day France, Spain, and Portugal) differed from contemporary populations of central and southern Europe (present-day Czech Republic and Italy).
Hunter-gatherers of southwestern Europe showed genetic continuity over the last 20,000 years: descendants now associated with the Solutrean and Magdalenian cultures remained in this part of Europe during the coldest period of the last Ice Age (25,000 years ago). and 19,000 years) will then move in a northeasterly direction to the rest of Europe.
“Thanks to these findings, we are, for the first time, able to directly support the hypothesis that southwestern Europe offered more favorable climatic conditions during the coldest phase of the Ice Age and that human groups took refuge there,” says the study’s first author. Researcher Cosimo Posth of the University of Tübingen.