The arrival of Ice Age hunter-gatherers in Western Europe over 30,000 years as they sought warmer climes has been revealed in “astonishing” detail for the first time.
Researchers analyzed the genomes of 356 prehistoric hunter-gatherers from different archaeological cultures – including new details of 116 individuals from 14 different European and Central Asian countries.
The team explained that modern humans began to spread across Eurasia around 45,000 years ago, but previous research showed that the first modern humans that arrived in Europe did not contribute to later populations.
The new study focuses on the people who lived between 35,000 and 5,000 years ago and that are – at least partially – the ancestors of the present-day population of Western Eurasia, including – for the first time – the genomes of people who lived during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), the coldest phase of the last Ice Age, around 25,000 years ago.
The researchers were surprised to discover that populations from different regions associated with the Gravettian culture, which was widespread across Europe between 32,000 and 24,000 years ago, were not closely related to each other.
They were linked by a common archaeological culture: the use of similar weapons and they also produced similar portable art.
However, genetically, the populations from western and south-western Europe – today’s France and Iberia – differed from the then populations from central and southern Europe: today’s Czech Republic and Italy.
The gene pool of the western Gravettian populations is found continuously for at least 20,000 years: their descendants who are associated with the Solutrean and Magdalenian cultures stayed in south-western Europe during the coldest part of the last Ice Age -between 25,000 and 19,000 years ago – and later spread north-eastward to the rest of Europe.
Study first author Professor Cosimo Posth said: “With these findings, we can for the first time directly support the hypothesis that during the Last Glacial Maximum people found refuge in the climatically more favorable region of south-western Europe”
He explained that the Italian peninsula was previously considered to be another climatic refuge for humans during the LGM.
However, the research team found no evidence of this. In fact, hunter-gatherer populations associated with the Gravettian culture and living in central and southern Europe are no longer genetically detectable after the LGM.
People with a new gene pool settled in these areas instead, according to the research team.
Co-author Professor He Yu, of Peking University in China, said: “We find that individuals associated with a later culture, the Epigravettian, are genetically distinct from the area‘s previous inhabitants.
“Presumably, these people came from the Balkans, arrived first in northern Italy around the time of the glacial maximum and spread all the way south to Sicily.”
The analyzed genomes also show that the descendants of the Epigravettian inhabitants of the Italian peninsula spread across the rest of Europe around 14,000 years ago, replacing populations associated with the Magdalenian culture.
The research team describes a large-scale genetic replacement that may have been caused, in part, by climatic changes that forced people to migrate.
Study senior author Professor Johannes Krause said: “At that time, the climate warmed up quickly and considerably and forests spread across the European continent.
“This may have prompted people from the south to expand their habitat.
“The previous inhabitants may have migrated to the north as their habitat, the ‘mammoth’ steppe, dwindled.”
The findings, published in the journal Nature, show that there had been no genetic exchange between contemporaneous hunter-gatherer populations in western and eastern Europe for more than 6,000 years.
Interactions between people from central and eastern Europe can only be detected again from 8,000 years ago.
Prof Yu said: “At that time, hunter-gatherers with distinct ancestries and appearances started to mix with each other.
“They were different in many aspects, including their skin and eye color.”
The researchers say that, during that time, agriculture and a sedentary lifestyle spread from Anatolia to Europe.
Prof Krause, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, said: “It is possible that the migration of early farmers into Europe triggered the retreat of hunter-gatherer populations to the northern edge of Europe.
“At the same time, these two groups started mixing with each other, and continued to do so for around 3,000 years.”
Prof Posth, of the University of Tübingen in Germany, added: “The data we gained from this study provides us with astonishingly detailed insights into the developments and encounters of West Eurasian hunter-gatherer groups.
“Further interdisciplinary research will clarify which exact processes were responsible for the genetic replacements of entire Ice Age populations.”
Produced in association with SWNS Talker
