Modern European genome traces back to 3 distinct ancient groups

Ancient European genomes reveal jumbled ancestry

Mysterious peoples from the north and Middle Easterners joined prehistoric locals.

Source: Nature.com

Newly released genome sequences from almost a dozen early human inhabitants of Europe suggest that the continent was once a melting pot in which brown-eyed farmers encountered blue-eyed hunter-gatherers.

The three groups the researchers suggest are:

• blue-eyed hunter-gatherers - from Africa, circa 40,000 years ago.
  
• brown-eyed farmers - from the Middle East (where Europeans gain their lactose tolerance), much more recently.
  
• and a third group, an ancient Eurasian group the team named the "ancient northern Eurasians."

This third group is the most intriguing, in that they are the group responsible for human migration into the Americas. They have been referred to as the Siberian/Alaskan population by other studies, a more recent one which claimed they stretched from Western Germany, across Siberia, and into North America. They were the bridge between Ancient Europeans and Paleoindians, connecting the two groups by DNA (Haplogroup X) and certain stone tool making traits (Denisovan and Clovis).

The more I read of these studies, it seems a fair certainty ancient Europeans did not have any direct contact with the Americas via the Atlantic (until much more recently), and that all those "European traits" among Paleoindians that have caused so much debate came via ancient "Eurasians" crossing Beringa.

reply to post by Blackmarketeer


This is really interesting. Also from your link:

"A second team, led by Carles Lalueza-Fox at the University Pompea Fabra in Barcelona, Spain, will soon publish the genome of a 7,000-year-old hunter-gatherer from northwest Spain, the palaeogenomicist said at a recent talk. In 2012, his team released preliminary genomic data from the same sample, suggesting that this hunter-gatherer bore little relationship to modern Spaniards 2 (sic). The two papers describe what are thought to be the oldest human genomes from Europe found so far."

This makes me think of the Basque population albeit they are now in the northeast of Spain. This kind of research could lead to discoveries about the rhesus neg blood type, too.

S&F

I must be one of the Eskimo type, I like winter for three months of the year. Trouble is it is six months around here.

Hey there blackmarketeer,
I saw that study on Dienekes anthropology blog,
it raises some interesting questions.
From Dienekes blog ,

A new preprint on the bioRxiv reports ancient DNA from a Mesolithic European hunter-gatherer from Luxembourg whose mtDNA was published a few years ago and a Neolithic European LBK farmer from Germany, as well as several Mesolithic hunter-gatherers from Sweden.

The Luxembourg sample is similar to the Iberian La Brana samples and the Swedish Mesolithic samples are similar to Swedish Neolithic hunter-gatherers. The LBK farmer is similar to Oetzi and a Swedish TRB farmer and to Sardinians. The authors also study the recently published Mal'ta Upper Paleolithic sample from Lake Baikal and find that it is part of an "Ancient North Eurasian" population that also admixed into West Eurasians on top of the Neolithic/Mesolithic mix.

The authors' proposed model and admixture estimates:

And

It seems that the estimates go all the way to "almost pure" Early European farmer ancestry but "West European Hunter-Gatherer" and "Ancient North Eurasian" ancestry isn't found unmixed in any modern populations. The model seems to agree with Raghavan et al. that Karitiana are "Mal'ta"-admixed but also finds the most basal Eurasian ancestry in the European Neolithic farmer. The authors write:
The successful model (Fig. 2A) also suggests 44 ± 10% “Basal Eurasian” admixture into the ancestors of Stuttgart: gene flow into their Near Eastern ancestors from a lineage that diverged prior to the separation of the ancestors of Loschbour and Onge. Such a scenario, while never suggested previously, is plausible given the early presence of modern humans in the Levant25, African-related tools made by modern humans in Arabia26, 27, and the geographic opportunity for continuous gene flow between the Near East and Africa28

The Swedish/Luxembourg Mesolithic hunter-gatherers are all mtDNA-haplogroup U and Y-chromosome haplogroup I, so again no R1a/R1b in early European samples.

An interesting finding is that the Luxembourg hunter-gatherer probably had blue eyes (like a Mesolithic La Brana Iberian, a paper on which seems to be in the works) but darker skin than the LBK farmer who had brown eyes but lighter skin. Raghavan et al. did not find light pigmentation in Mal'ta (but that was a very old sample), so with the exception of light eyes that seem established for Western European hunter-gatherers (and may have been "darker" in European steppe populations, but "lighter" in Bronze Age South Siberians?), the origin of depigmentation of many recent Europeans remains a mystery. Ancient DNA continues to surprise at every turn.

dienekes.blogspot.com...

Blackmarketeer
Ancient European genomes reveal jumbled ancestry

Mysterious peoples from the north and Middle Easterners joined prehistoric locals.

Source: Nature.com

Newly released genome sequences from almost a dozen early human inhabitants of Europe suggest that the continent was once a melting pot in which brown-eyed farmers encountered blue-eyed hunter-gatherers.

The three groups the researchers suggest are:

• blue-eyed hunter-gatherers - from Africa, circa 40,000 years ago.
  
• brown-eyed farmers - from the Middle East (where Europeans gain their lactose tolerance), much more recently.
  
• and a third group, an ancient Eurasian group the team named the "ancient northern Eurasians."

This third group is the most intriguing, in that they are the group responsible for human migration into the Americas. They have been referred to as the Siberian/Alaskan population by other studies, a more recent one which claimed they stretched from Western Germany, across Siberia, and into North America. They were the bridge between Ancient Europeans and Paleoindians, connecting the two groups by DNA (Haplogroup X) and certain stone tool making traits (Denisovan and Clovis).

The more I read of these studies, it seems a fair certainty ancient Europeans did not have any direct contact with the Americas via the Atlantic (until much more recently), and that all those "European traits" among Paleoindians that have caused so much debate came via ancient "Eurasians" crossing Beringa.

While the study is indeed interesting I believe two points of clarification should be made to the above post:

1) There are no blue-eyed hunter gatherers from Africa circa 40,000 years ago. In the Supplementary data provided with the main article it specifically states:

"The Loschbour forager is homozygous for the derived allele at rs12913832, indicating that this individual is likely to have had blue (52% probability) or intermediate iris color (27% probability). It has been suggested that this mutation arose within the last 6,000 to 10,000 years, and thus the Loschbour individual would have been a relatively early carrier (24)."

2) What is claimed of the third group is rather misleading. While movement of peoples from Siberia does indeed play a role in the migration into the Americas Siberia is not the only region that such comes into play nor is Haplogroup X the only such haplogroup involved. Current understanding of the available haplogroups that migrated into or were solely restricted to the Americas themselves include the following:

Mitochondrial (mtDNA) haplogroups:
A2*
A2a
A2b
B2
C1b
C1c
C1d*
C1d1
C4c
D1
D2a
D3
D4e1c
D4h3a
X2a
X2g

Y Chromosome DNA Haplogroups:
Q-M3
C-P39

Reconciling migration models to the Americas with the variation of North American native mitogenomes

cormac

reply to post by Blackmarketeer

All blue-eyed people can be traced back to one ancestor who lived 10,000 years ago near the Black Sea

www.dailymail.co.uk...

reply to post by LUXUS


That article is nearly six years old now and things have changed a little in the intervening years.
I belive the original study found the earliest example of the gene that caused blue eyes in an individual from the black sea area, not that all blue eyed people were decended from that individual.