The genetic history of Ice Age Europe

Abstract

Modern humans arrived in Europe ~45,000 years ago, but little is known about their genetic composition before the start of farming ~8,500 years ago. We analyze genome-wide data from 51 Eurasians from ~45,000-7,000 years ago. Over this time, the proportion of Neanderthal DNA decreased from 3–6% to around 2%, consistent with natural selection against Neanderthal variants in modern humans. Whereas the earliest modern humans in Europe did not contribute substantially to present-day Europeans, all individuals between ~37,000 and ~14,000 years ago descended from a single founder population which forms part of the ancestry of present-day Europeans. A ~35,000 year old individual from northwest Europe represents an early branch of this founder population which was then displaced across a broad region, before reappearing in southwest Europe during the Ice Age ~19,000 years ago. During the major warming period after ~14,000 years ago, a new genetic component related to present-day Near Easterners appears in Europe. These results document how population turnover and migration have been recurring themes of European pre-history.

The Evolutionary Origin and Genetic Makeup of Domestic Horses

“…In the near future, we expect that this approach will be superseded by target-enrichment methods coupled with high-throughput sequencing. In horses, such approaches have been applied to only a limited number of loci (Vilstrup et al 2013;Sarkissian et al 2015), but recent procedures enable genotyping millions of loci genome wide (Fu et al 2016), and even entire chromosomes (Fu et al 2013) and genomes (Carpenter et al 2013). This will likely facilitate the identification of the whole series of genetic modifications that have accompanied the recent evolutionary history of this family, domestication and extinction processes included.…”

Words for the Animal Elephant/Mammoth in Relation to the DNA Genealogy Data

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Population history in third-millennium-BC Europe: assessing the contribution of genetics

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