https://anthropology.net/2014/11/07/kos ... -european/
I wonder what the current state of this research is. As you can see, it throws doubt on the Yamnaya invasion of Europe.
European genetic ancestry used to seem straightforward and in general is now understood as an admixture of three sources; indigenous European hunter-gatherers from 42,00 to 45,000 ago, Middle Easterners from the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago, and Central Asians who charged through Europe in the last 4,000 to 5,000 years. Last month, a paper in Nature, suggested at each entity entered Europe by way of a separate migrations and only coalesced in the last 5,000 years. A new study published in yesterday’s Science changes this suggestion.
This new study is based on ancient DNA extracted from the fossilized skeleton, Kostenki 14 or K-14, who once was a short, dark featured man from approx. 36,000 years ago who died along the Middle Don River in Kostenki-Borshchevo, Russia.
Link to the paper: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/e ... ce.aaa0114Analysis of his DNA shows he has genes from all three of those migratory groups and so was already “pure European,” by modern standards says evolutionary biologist Eske Willerslev of the Natural History Museum of Denmark at the University of Copenhagen, who led the analysis. K-14 shared genetic ancestry with hunter-gatherers in Europe—as well as with the early farmers, suggesting that his ancestors interbred with members of the same Middle Eastern population who later turned into farmers and came to Europe themselves. Finally, he also carried the signature of the shadowy western Asians, including a boy who lived 24,000 years ago at Mal’ta in central Siberia. If that finding holds up, the mysterious DNA from western Eurasia must be very ancient, and not solely from a wave of nomads that entered Europe 5,000 years ago or so, as proposed by researchers in September.
One more story about this find:
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/11/ ... 6000-years
What is surprising is this guy represents one of the earliest Europeans, but at the same time he basically contains all the genetic components that you find in contemporary Europeans—at 37,000 years ago,” Willerslev says.
“There was a really large met-population that probably stretched all the way from the Middle East into Europe and into Eurasia,” Willerslev says. These people interbred at the edges of their separate populations, keeping the entire complex network interconnected—and so giving the ancient Kostenki man genes from three different groups. “In principle, you just have sex with your neighbor and they have it with their next neighbor—you don’t need to have these armies of people moving around to spread the genes.”
But even if the man from Kostenki in Russia had all these elements 36,000 years ago, that doesn’t mean that other Europeans did, Reich says. His team’s DNA data and models suggest that Europeans in the west and north did not pick up DNA from the steppes until much later. He and Krause also think that Willerslev’s study needs to be confirmed with higher resolution sequencing to rule out contamination, and to have more population genetics modeling explain the distribution of these genetic types. The bottom line, researchers agree, is that European origins are “seem to be much more complex than most people thought,” Willerslev says.