An international team has conducted the largest genomic study of European hunter-gatherers to date. The project was led by researchers from the University of Tübingen in Germany and Beijing in China, with major contributions from Senckenberg and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. More than a hundred scholars from around the world collaborated to complete this work.
The study, which also features distinguished researcher Javier Fernández López de Pablo from an archaeological heritage research institute affiliated with the University of Alicante, has been published in a leading science journal.
The team analyzed the genomes of 356 prehistoric hunter-gatherers from diverse archaeological cultures, including 116 newly analyzed individuals from 14 European and Central Asian regions. The researchers highlight that the data reveal interactive processes among hunter-gatherer populations across Western Eurasia since the last ice age.
Part of the Alicante contribution involved sampling and contextual analysis of human remains found at the Casa Corona de Villena site in 2008. The international effort has now enabled fossil DNA extraction from these remains, providing clearer context for population dynamics across the Iberian Peninsula and beyond into the broader Eurasian landscape.
Modern humans dispersed across Eurasia roughly 45,000 years ago. The earliest European arrivals did not contribute genetically to later populations, yet they left a lasting legacy in the region’s genetic makeup.
The study centers on groups living between 35,000 and 5,000 years ago, many of whom are ancestral to present-day West Eurasians. This includes individuals who existed during the Last Maximum Ice Age, around 25,000 years ago, when the ice sheet reached its peak and temperatures plummeted.
Climate refuge or dead end?
Unexpectedly, researchers found that Gravettian populations that spread across Europe between 32,000 and 24,000 years ago were not closely related genetically, despite sharing a common archaeological culture and similar tool-making techniques and furnishings. Genomic evidence shows that groups in southwestern Europe (modern-day France, Spain, and Portugal) differed from those in central and southern Europe (today the Czech Republic and Italy).
Genetic continuity is evident in hunter-gatherers from southwestern Europe over the last 20,000 years, with descendants linked to the Solutrean and Magdalenian cultures remaining in that region during the coldest stretches of the last Ice Age. At the same time, some groups appear to have migrated northeastward, contributing to the genetic mosaic of the rest of Europe as populations shifted and reconnected over time.
One of the study’s early contributors noted that the evidence supports a view of southwestern Europe as a climatic refuge during the harshest phase of the Ice Age. This implies that the region offered relatively favorable conditions that helped human groups endure and later repopulate wider areas as the climate warmed and landscapes transformed.
Cosimo Posth, a lead author from the University of Tübingen, summarized the significance: the findings provide direct support for the refuge hypothesis and illuminate ancient human movement patterns across western Eurasia, revealing how climatic forces shaped genetic lineages across broad geographic spaces.