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 Tübingen 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.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by shrewdsheep on Saturday March 04, @05:33PM (5 children)
I have some trouble with the time-frames involved. IIRC the out-of-Africa event is put somewhere around 40k yrs ago, leaving roughly 2k generations for things to happen. In this timeframe humans have colonized everything to China, Australia and eventually America, still beign Neandertals, Denivosians and in a second wave Sapiens probably only 1k gens back. Then Sapiens spread out again, came back seemingly not leaving any room to settle down somewhere. Agriculture seems to have developed ~300-500 gens back, so an awful lot has happened during quite few gens.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 04, @09:00PM
Then came the bureaucrats to speed up the process of slowing everything down.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Reziac on Sunday March 05, @03:57AM (2 children)
And the ape ancestral track goes back to gibbons, which are native to southeast Asia.
I find it interesting that gibbon skulls and skeletons are more similar to human, while the supposedly-more-related chimps and gorillas are quite different.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 05, @09:52AM (1 child)
That's because Gibbons are Funky.
(Score: 3, Funny) by nostyle on Sunday March 05, @12:31PM
Absolutely! Here is undeniable proof [wikipedia.org].
--
-ZZ Top, Jesus Just Left Chicago
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 05, @09:15AM
Yeah, there are some problems with that timeline. They keep pushing the Aborigine dating back in Oz. It's up to 50K years now, with some claiming 60K. This one says 80K https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/jul/19/dig-finds-evidence-of-aboriginal-habitation-up-to-80000-years-ago [theguardian.com]