Deep dive Ancient DNA reveals history of hunter-gatherers in Europe

In the 1800s, archaeologists began reconstructing the deep history of Europe from the bones of ancient hunter-gatherers and the iconic art they left behind, like cave paintings, fertility figurines and “lion-man” statues. Over the past decade, geneticists have added a new dimension to that history by extracting DNA from teeth and bones. And now, in a pair of studies published on Wednesday‌, researchers have produced the most robust analysis yet of the genetic record of prehistoric Europe.

Looking at DNA gleaned from the remains of 357 ancient Europeans, researchers discovered that several waves of hunter-gatherers migrated into Europe. The studies identified at least eight populations, some more genetically distinct from each other than modern-day Europeans and Asians. They coexisted in Europe for thousands of years, apparently trading tools and sharing cultures. Some groups survived the Ice Age, while others vanished, perhaps wiped out by other groups. “We are finally understanding the dynamics of European hunter-gatherers,” said Vanessa Villalba-Mouco, a paleogeneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and an author of both studies.

The new genetic analysis suggests that when farmers arrived in Europe about 8,000 years ago, they encountered the descendants of this long history, with light-skinned, dark-eyed people to the east, and possibly dark-skinned and blue-eyed people to the west.

Dr. Villalba-Mouco and her colleagues have given these peoples a list of new names that can be as hard to memorize as the kingdoms of Westeros: the Fournol, the Vestonice, the GoyetQ2, the Villabruna, the Obserkassel and the Sidelkino, among others. But the scientists are only just beginning to understand how so many different groups emerged 45,000 to 5,000 years ago.

“I didn’t expect these amounts of replacements and changes in ancestry,” said Carles Lalueza-Fox, the director of the Natural Sciences Museum in Barcelona and an author of one of the new papers. “We lack still an understanding of why these movements were triggered. What happened here, why it happened — it’s strange.” Modern humans arose in Africa and expanded to other continents about 60,000 years ago. Last year, archaeologists reported what might be the oldest evidence of those humans reaching Europe: a set of 54,000-year-old teeth in a French cave. When these groups arrived in Europe, Neanderthals had already been living across the continent for more than 100,000 years. The Neanderthals disappeared about 40,000 years ago, perhaps because modern humans outcompeted them with superior tools.

But the oldest DNA of modern humans in Europe, dating back 45,000 years, undermines such a simple story. It comes from people who belonged to a lost branch of the human family tree. Their ancestors were part of the expansion out of Africa, but they split off on their own before the ancestors of living Europeans and Asians split apart. These early Europeans have almost no genetic link to younger remains of hunter-gatherers. It appears that the first modern humans in Europe may have disappeared along with the Neanderthals, said Cosimo Posth, a paleogeneticist at the University of Tübingen in Germany and an author on the two papers published Wednesday.