Calay News
A study published in Nature reveals new data on the prehistory of Europe thanks to DNA extracted from the bones of more than 350 people who lived tens of thousands of years ago. Different groups of hunters and gatherers who lived before and after the last ice age, between 25,000 and 19,000 years ago, have been identified.
This catastrophe decimated human populations in Europe, leaving only small, isolated groups of about 50 people. The new study, which includes genetic data from 116 new individuals from 14 countries that had not previously been analyzed, covers the period from the arrival of the first Homo sapiens in Europe, some 45,000 years ago, until about 5,200 years ago, when the agricultural revolution and sedentary lifestyle triumphed across the continent.
The new work shows that before the glaciation, Europe was divided into two major lineages of sapiens descended from migratory waves following the first. Italy, Austria, and the Czech Republic were home to groups whose ancestors came from western Russia. Spain and France were dominated by other groups whose roots went back at least 35,000 years to present-day Belgium. It was previously thought that when glaciation began, humans migrated south en masse, but genetic data now show that in Italy, human populations died out completely.
A second study published in Nature Ecology and Evolution analyzes the remains of one of the only known survivors of the glaciation. This is an adult male, of whom archaeologists found a single tooth in the Malalmuerzo cave, in Granada, who survived the worst of the last glaciation. Analysis of these remains shows that his genetic legacy survived the ice age and is still present in today’s Europeans, although very diluted after millennia of mixing and remixing. The remains of two other survivors have been found in Asturias and southern France.
