The European hunter-gatherer immigration crisis: A landmark study of Goyet ancestry in the medieval Iberian peninsula
The two studies suggest that the Iberian Peninsula was a refuge for hunter-gatherers as the climate cooled and glaciers ensconced northern Europe. The genetic signature — the same one found in Goyet 35,000 years ago — later pops up across western Europe and even into Poland after Europe’s climate warmed.
Ancient genomes from this period are scarce, so “even adding one data point is really important”, says Mateja Hajdinjak, a molecular biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, who was not involved in either study.
A landmark 2016 study identified a genetic signature in 35,000-year old remains from the Goyet cave system, which persisted in hunter-gatherer populations that lived tens of thousands of years later. The Goyet remains were associated with Aurignacian artefacts, a Europe-wide material culture known for its elaborate cave-wall art and ‘Venus’ figurines.
The 2016 study raised a lot of questions. After a 20,000-year period the Goyet ancestry was not present in remains until later in the hunter-gatherers of western Europe. At the University of Tbingen, Cosimo Posth is a palaeogeneticist.
The researchers traced this ancestry to 21,000- and 23,000-year-old individuals from sites in northern Spain and southwestern France, respectively. The sites are connected to the Solutrean culture.
Instead, they descend from people who saw out the coldest periods in southeastern Europe, probably in the Balkans, says Posth. There is currently no ancient DNA from this period to confirm that hunch, he adds, leaving a “big empty spot on the map”.
Colin Wren, an archaeologist at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs, says those findings confirm his own work, suggesting that ice-age Italy was less hospitable to humans than was Iberia4. It makes sense that the hunter-gatherers moved in because Italy was once connected to Croatia.
The studies paint a dynamic picture of European hunter-gatherer populations, which don’t always line up with cultural shifts, says Natasha Reynolds, a palaeolithic archaeologist at the University of Bordeaux, France. They show that, for parts of Europe at least, it was not as tough as people think. She says that people were waiting for the glaciers to retreat andhuddling in caves.
Analysis of the genomes reveals that the ancient occupants of the Tibetan Plateau have strong genetic links to the Tibetan, Sherpa and Qiang ethnic groups that live on or near the plateau today. The ancestors of modern Tibetans could have arrived from the east according to comparisons of the oldest genomes with living people across Asia. Immigrants from central Asia and eastern Eurasia made up the bulk of India’s population.
But when people established a permanent presence on the plateau — and where they came from — has been a matter of debate, says Qiaomei Fu, an evolutionary geneticist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, who led the study.
The historical records are from 2,500 years ago. Dating of sediments with human hand- and footprints in the central plateau indicated that people might have lived there permanently as long as 7,400 years ago3.
“It’s very exciting that we are getting ancient DNA from this geographical region,” says Vagheesh Narasimhan, a computational genomics researcher at the University of Texas at Austin.
“There’s a continuity,” says Irene Gallego Romero, a genomics researcher at the University of Melbourne in Australia, “but there is also consistent movement of influences in and out of the region.”
Evidence of these interactions has existed in the form of pottery and other artefacts, but this is the first definitive sign that populations were exchanging more than their culture and knowledge, says Fu.
The high-altitude EPAS1 variant first appeared on the plateau, or when the old remains were discovered at high altitudes?
It is not clear when the high-altitude EPAS1 variant first appeared. It would be interesting to know how far back that goes. Fu is keen to answer this question by sequencing genomes of older remains, if they are discovered on the plateau.