Ancient human genomes suggest three ancestral populations for present-day Europeans

By Iosif Lazaridis, Nick Patterson, A. Mittnik, Gabriel Renaud, Swapan Mallick, Karola Kirsanow, Peter Sudmant, Joshua G. Schraiber, S. Castellano, Mark Lipson and 110 more. Nature, 2013

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We sequenced the genomes of a ∼7,000-year-old farmer from Germany and eight ∼8,000-year-old hunter-gatherers from Luxembourg and Sweden. We analysed these and other ancient genomes with 2,345 contemporary humans to show that most present-day Europeans derive from at least three highly differentiated populations: west European hunter-gatherers, who contributed ancestry to all Europeans but not to Near Easterners; ancient north Eurasians related to Upper Palaeolithic Siberians, who contributed to both Europeans and Near Easterners; and early European farmers, who were mainly of Near Eastern origin but also harboured west European hunter-gatherer related ancestry. We model these populations’ deep relationships and show that early European farmers had ∼44% ancestry from a ‘basal Eurasian’ population that split before the diversification of other non-African lineages.

Subfields: Genetics, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4e84bfd28a3f389e5783e7fd9cde2a6ee78ed27e

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Citations in the corpus

Genome flux and stasis in a five millennium transect of European prehistory (2014, neutral): “Nineteen of these samples are hunter-gatherers, while only two complete and four partial ancient farmers’ genomes (from Tyrol, Germany and Sweden) have been sequenced to date 2,5,6,8 .”
Spatial Population Genetics: It's About Time (2019, background): “…population movements or changes in human data sets that include ancient or historical samples (Skoglund et al. 2014, Pickrell & Reich 2014, Lazaridis et al. 2014, van den Haak et al. 2015, Joseph & Pe’er 2018), as well as in other species over recent timescales using museum specimens (Bi…”
Reduced signal for polygenic adaptation of height in UK Biobank (2018, methodology): “We used these loci to calculate average polygenic scores for each of a set of European population samples taken from the 1000 Genomes and Human Origins panels [26, 27] (see Section S2 for statistical details).”
EAGER: efficient ancient genome reconstruction (2016, methodology): “For this we simulated low coverage data with the full LBK/Stuttgart sample from Lazaridis et al. [19].”
Using the Neandertal genome to study the evolution of small insertions and deletions in modern humans (2017, background): “A subset of the indel variants segregating in non-African populations trace their ancestry back to Neandertals, through an admixture event between non-Africans and Neandertals 50–60 thousand years ago [34, 35].”
Ancient DNA and the rewriting of human history: be sparing with Occam’s razor (2016, background): “A more substantial revision of the demic diffusion model was introduced when several 7000–8000-year-old individuals from Western Europe [29] and a 24,000-yearold individual from Siberia [30] were sequenced.”
Massive migration from the steppe was a source for Indo-European languages in Europe (2015, neutral): “The ten new samples from Els Trocs (5) and La Mina (5) were pooled with the Epi-Cardial (CAR) and Middle Neolithic (MNS) data from Spain, respectively.”