Nature & Environment
Major Upheaval of Humans: End of the Last Ice Age
Catherine Griffin
First Posted: Feb 05, 2016 10:38 AM EST
There may have just been a major upheaval in Europe near the end of the last Ice Age. Scientists have found DNA evidence from the ancient bones and teeth of people who lived in Europe from the Late Pleistocene to the early Holocene that shows a major shift in the population about 14,500 years ago.
"We uncovered a completely unknown chapter of human history: a major population turnover in Europe at the end of the last Ice Age," said Johannes Krause, one of the researchers, in a news release.
In this latest study, the researchers reconstructed the mitochondrial genomes of 35 hunter-gatherer individuals who lived in Italy, Germany, Belgium, France, the Czech Republic, and Romania from 35,000 to 7,000 years ago. Mitochondria are organelles within cells that carry their own DNA and can be used to infer patterns of maternal ancestry.
The new data revealed that the mitochondrial DNA of three individuals who lived in present-day Belgium and France before the Last Glacial Maximum belonged to haploggroup M. This group is effectively absent in modern Europeans, but is extremely common in modern Asian, Australasian and Native American populations.
The absence of the M haplogroup and its presence in other parts of the world had previously led to the argument that non-African people dispersed on multiple occasions to spread across Eurasia and Australasia. This latest discovery, though, suggests that all non-African dispersed rapidly from a single population. Then at some later stage, the M haplogroup was lost from Europe.
Currently, the researchers hope to create a more comprehensive picture of what occurred in the ancient past. However, better techniques and more evidence is revealing more and more over time.
The findings are published in the journal Current Biology.
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First Posted: Feb 05, 2016 10:38 AM EST
There may have just been a major upheaval in Europe near the end of the last Ice Age. Scientists have found DNA evidence from the ancient bones and teeth of people who lived in Europe from the Late Pleistocene to the early Holocene that shows a major shift in the population about 14,500 years ago.
"We uncovered a completely unknown chapter of human history: a major population turnover in Europe at the end of the last Ice Age," said Johannes Krause, one of the researchers, in a news release.
In this latest study, the researchers reconstructed the mitochondrial genomes of 35 hunter-gatherer individuals who lived in Italy, Germany, Belgium, France, the Czech Republic, and Romania from 35,000 to 7,000 years ago. Mitochondria are organelles within cells that carry their own DNA and can be used to infer patterns of maternal ancestry.
The new data revealed that the mitochondrial DNA of three individuals who lived in present-day Belgium and France before the Last Glacial Maximum belonged to haploggroup M. This group is effectively absent in modern Europeans, but is extremely common in modern Asian, Australasian and Native American populations.
The absence of the M haplogroup and its presence in other parts of the world had previously led to the argument that non-African people dispersed on multiple occasions to spread across Eurasia and Australasia. This latest discovery, though, suggests that all non-African dispersed rapidly from a single population. Then at some later stage, the M haplogroup was lost from Europe.
Currently, the researchers hope to create a more comprehensive picture of what occurred in the ancient past. However, better techniques and more evidence is revealing more and more over time.
The findings are published in the journal Current Biology.
Related Articles
Prehistoric Humans Had a Taste for Roasted Tortoise
Neolithic Skulls Reveal the Life History of Ancient Humans
For more great science stories and general news, please visit our sister site, Headlines and Global News (HNGN).
See Now: NASA's Juno Spacecraft's Rendezvous With Jupiter's Mammoth Cyclone