As revealed by the recently published genomic sequences of a dozen early inhabitants of Europe, the continent was a melting pot in which locals mingled with both the Middle East and the mysterious northern peoples. Brown-eyed farmers and pastoralists shared offspring with blue-eyed hunters and gatherers.
The question of who our distant ancestors were is not only important for science, but also simply interesting. When there were no borders, no races and peoples, and there was only a natural attraction of a man to a woman, the northern Eurasians lived on Earth, whose descendants still inhabit both hemispheres.
The pedigree of today's Europeans, according to the Internet portal of the English-language edition of Nature, can be divided into three groups in various combinations: hunters and gatherers (some of whom are blue-eyed) who migrated from Africa more than 40 thousand years ago; farmers from the Middle East, who moved much later, and, finally, even later, mysterious inhabitants of Northern Europe and Siberia.
A group of researchers led by Johannes came to this conclusion after analyzing the genomes of hunters and gatherers who lived eight thousand years ago (one man found in the territory of modern Luxembourg, and seven individuals from Sweden), as well as the genome of a woman from Germany, aged 7500 years. Krause of the University of Tubingen and David Reich of Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts.
The second group, led by Carles Lalueza-Fox of the University of Barcelona Pompea Fabra, will soon present a study of the genome of a seven thousand-year-old representative of the hunter-gatherer society from northwestern Spain. In 2012, scientists from this team have already published preliminary information. At the same time it was reported that this individual did not resemble modern Spaniards. Both of the above scientific papers describe the oldest genomes of Europeans identified to date.
New research makes it possible to create a portrait of the first Europeans based on changes in DNA, which are known to be associated with the characteristics of modern humans. So, the Pro-Europeans from Luxembourg and Spain, despite their dark skin, probably had blue eyes and were hunters and gatherers. The German woman had brown eyes and lighter skin. Her ancestors were farmers from the Middle East. However, both the Luxembourgish hunter and the German farmer could not digest lactose (one of the complex sugars found in milk and all dairy products).
Failure to digest lactose is most commonly associated with a deficiency in the enzyme lactase. If in our time the congenital deficiency of the lactase enzyme is widespread mainly among the representatives of the Asian race, then our distant ancestors did not have it at all and the ability to assimilate lactose arose in the Middle East after the domestication of cattle.
Previous archaeological and genetic research has shown that most of today's Europeans are descended from marriages of newcomer Middle Eastern farmers with local hunter-gatherers. The new study added a few touches, and now it turns out that representatives of another population group took part in the formation of the gene pool of modern Europeans, which the authors call the ancient northern Eurasians, who may have lived several millennia ago in high latitudes between Europe and Siberia. Their traces were also found in the remains of a one-year-old boy from the St. Petersburg Hermitage.
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Recall that the analysis of the DNA of a boy who lived on the territory of the Siberian site of Malta about 24 thousand years ago allowed an international group of researchers to find out that from 14 to 38 percent of the genes of the indigenous inhabitants of America were inherited from Europeans. Now it turns out that the northern Eurasians contributed to the settlement of not only the Americas, but also the Old World.
Modern residents of different European countries are a "cocktail" of the three above-mentioned groups. With the difference that the Scots and Estonians, for example, have a closer ancestry with the northern Eurasians than any other inhabitants of modern Europe, while the islanders of Sardinia are closer to the farmers of the Middle East than other Europeans.
New studies of the genome of the primitive inhabitants of our planet also indicate their raids from Africa. According to Krause's group, the Middle Eastern tillers separated from their African ancestors earlier than their European and Asian relatives did. As a possible explanation, these farmers were the descendants of those who inhabited the territory of present-day Israel and the Arabian Peninsula 100-120 thousand years ago, although many researchers suggest that these ancient settlements serve as evidence of migrations from Africa that occurred less than 100 thousand years ago.
Danish paleogeneticist Eske Willerslev of Copenhagen University (who, by the way, took part in the study of the remains of a boy from the Hermitage Museum and studied the migration of the ancestors of Australian aborigines) believes that it will be rather difficult to prove such a relationship. “If this is true, it will be super interesting,” the professor from Denmark concludes.
The fact is that DNA is very poorly preserved in hot climates. Specialists will need not only modern technology, but also luck. Laluesa-Fox refuses to discuss the work of the group he leads and advises against drawing far-reaching conclusions about the settlement of Europe based on just a handful of genomes belonging to the same time period, because there were quite a lot of migrations and they were very different from each other. They have yet to be properly studied in the coming years.