0000000000345217
AUTHOR
Susanne Nordenfelt
Massive migration from the steppe was a source for Indo-European languages in Europe
We generated genome-wide data from 69 Europeans who lived between 8,000-3,000 years ago by enriching ancient DNA libraries for a target set of almost four hundred thousand polymorphisms. Enrichment of these positions decreases the sequencing required for genome-wide ancient DNA analysis by a median of around 250-fold, allowing us to study an order of magnitude more individuals than previous studies and to obtain new insights about the past. We show that the populations of western and far eastern Europe followed opposite trajectories between 8,000-5,000 years ago. At the beginning of the Neolithic period in Europe, ~8,000-7,000 years ago, closely related groups of early farmers appeared in G…
Ancient human genomes suggest three ancestral populations for present-day Europeans
We sequenced the genomes of a ∼7,000-year-old farmer from Germany and eight ∼8,000-year-old hunter-gatherers from Luxembourg and Sweden. We analysed these and other ancient genomes1,2,3,4 with 2,345 contemporary humans to show that most present-day Europeans derive from at least three highly differentiated populations: west European hunter-gatherers, who contributed ancestry to all Europeans but not to Near Easterners; ancient north Eurasians related to Upper Palaeolithic Siberians3, who contributed to both Europeans and Near Easterners; and early European farmers, who were mainly of Near Eastern origin but also harboured west European hunter-gatherer related ancestry. We model these popula…
Parallel paleogenomic transects reveal complex genetic history of early European farmers
In European Neolithic populations, the arrival of farmers prompted admixture with local hunter-gatherers over many centuries, resulting in distinct signatures in each region due to a complex series of interactions. David Reich and colleagues analyse genome-wide data from 180 individuals from the Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods of Hungary, Germany and Spain to study the population dynamics of Neolithization in European prehistory. They examine how gene flow reshaped European populations during the Neolithic period, including pervasive admixture—the interbreeding between previously isolated populations—between groups with different ancestry profiles. In each region, they find that the arri…