Genetics rewrites European history

Thanks to genetics, we can trace all the migrations that have made today’s Europe. Enormous work carried out by a team of population geneticists. They gathered DNA samples from humans, found throughout Europe and western Asia, dating back 10,000 years to the Bronze Age, around 2700 years ago.

Mathilde Fontez, editor-in-chief of the scientific magazine Epsiloon, tells us today about a huge study which has just been published: 1600 genomes of our ancestors have been analyzed throughout Europe.

franceinfo: This study made it possible to trace the migrations, the mixtures which gave rise to our current population?

Mathilde Fontez: Yes, this is a gigantic job carried out by this team of population geneticists, led by a Danish researcher. They collected DNA samples from humans, found throughout Europe and western Asia, dating from more than 10,000 years ago, to the Bronze Age, around 2700 years ago.

It took four scientific publications to detail everything, hundreds of pages of supplements, qThey tell a new story of the settlement of Europe. How the different waves of population moved and settled. All this, from gene flow, genetic similarities between the different samples. “It’s the story of people who had babies together.”summed up Paul Verdu, at the National Museum of Natural History.

The story begins 8500 years ago?

Yes, this is the first major movement that emerges from this study: at that time, farmers left Anatolia – present-day Turkey – and began to advance towards the north. They arrived in Denmark 5900 years ago. The occasion of the first interbreeding with hunter-gathererswho were already installed for more than 30,000 years. While in the east, hunter-gatherer societies persisted for 3000 years.

And suddenly, 5000 years ago, this gap between the two populations dissolved: and pastoralists from the eastern steppes spread into Western Europe. This is when there is a lot of genetic mixing, the researchers analyze. It’s not a mass migration. It is not one wave that replaces the other, a population that arrives. But rather a great mix between these three populations.

Are these genes found in European populations today?

Yes, geneticists talk about the creation of a homogeneous genetic set, which changes little until today. All European peoples come from this mixture of ancestral populations: the hunter-gatherers of the west, the east, the Caucasus; the farmers of Anatolia; steppe shepherds. A unity on the scale of Europe, even if there remain regional specificities.

But here too, preconceived ideas fall away with this study. For example, the large size of the Scandinavians: it would be the result of this crossbreeding, and not of natural selection. Or even the blond hair: it comes from the farmers of Anatolia, and not from the ancestral peoples of the north of the west or the Caucasus.