Dual ancestries and ecologies of the Late Glacial Palaeolithic in Britain:
Genetic investigations of Upper Palaeolithic Europe have revealed a complex and transformative history of human population movements and ancestries, with evidence of several instances of genetic change across the European continent in the period following the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). Concurrent with these genetic shifts, the post-LGM period is characterized by a series of significant climatic changes, population expansions and cultural diversification. Britain lies at the extreme northwest corner of post-LGM expansion and its earliest Late Glacial human occupation remains unclear. Here we present genetic data from Palaeolithic human individuals in the United Kingdom and the oldest human DNA thus far obtained from Britain or Ireland. We determine that a Late Upper Palaeolithic individual from Gough’s Cave probably traced all its ancestry to Magdalenian-associated individuals closely related to those from sites such as El Mirón Cave, Spain, and Troisième Caverne in Goyet, Belgium. However, an individual from Kendrick’s Cave shows no evidence of having ancestry related to the Gough’s Cave individual. Instead, the Kendrick’s Cave individual traces its ancestry to groups who expanded across Europe during the Late Glacial and are represented at sites such as Villabruna, Italy. Furthermore, the individuals differ not only in their genetic ancestry profiles but also in their mortuary practices and their diets and ecologies, as evidenced through stable isotope analyses. This finding mirrors patterns of dual genetic ancestry and admixture previously detected in Iberia but may suggest a more drastic genetic turnover in northwestern Europe than in the southwest.
Cool paper that shows that the British can still get some things done. Basically, they found that genetically and culturally there were really two different populations in late Pleistocene Europe, and that the earlier post-Magdelenaian populations left some impact on the mostly Villabruna-descended populations like Cheddar Man.
So how divergent were the Goyet and Villabruna populations? Like French and Germans or like Finns and Arabs?
Was Villabruna “WHG”? Is WHG something different from both Goyet and Villabruna?
Did blue eyes crop up in any relatively pure Goyet samples?
Are there major morphological differences between Goyet and Villabruna? I vaguely remember/misremember something about Villabruna being dolichocephalic compared to most EEMH.
Sorry for the flurry of questions, and thanks.
more like finns and arabs. probably more divergent tbh. more like arabs and Chinese
i don’t think they checked eye color on goyet. WHG is mostly villabruna
@Philip Edwin:
1) Giving it too much thought, the best analogy might be something like Papuans and native Australians.
They’re both coming from this largely unmixed founding population that settled the region approx. 40-30 kya (probably although in both cases it’s hard to get dna to prove it 100%).
But they have extremely small population size and so the measured differentiation is going huge, while individuals within each population are also much more similar to each other than anyone in present day populations (though not necessarily much more long RoH and a potentially long period of purifying selection, so the health impacts may have been less than what we think of as recently inbred populations today).
Here’s a some maps of the shared f3:
A) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-022-01883-z/figures/3 – from the recent study
B) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03335-3/figures/6 – from an older study from 2021 that gives some context by providing a comparable measure for present-day Native American and East Asian individuals.
The shared f3 between Goyet-Q2 cluster is just collossal, and between Goyet-Q2 and WHG its somewhat comparable to between two separate groups of Native Americans (or somewhere between intra-Native American and Native American-East Asian).
(Levels within the post-glacial Jomon from Japan are here and also much higher than we find between present-day East Asians – https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.12.07.414037v3.full)
Probably lots of the world had this condition in the past, but glaciation in Europe (and Northeast Asia) would have both made this more extreme and then as glaciers retreated, allowed groups that maintained higher population sizes and/or more stable climatic conditions (first WHG then Anatolians?) to replace those that didn’t, so we have less/no sign of it today.
In Fst terms Arabs and Chinese might not be too bad, but I think something like the above analogy might be truer to the phylogenetic structure and the amount of time spent evolving separately.
2) I don’t think we have any means to know well about phenotypes given the small levels of sample size and relatively poor quality dna, though I would doubt the OCA2 variant. Might be surprised though.
Older phys anth people did I think speculate that the Magdalenians had some Inuit like cranial shape/face shape features. In the context of this, though clearly not gene flow between the two, that might represent a common adaptation to cold (perhaps in the case of Magdalenians without the “facial flatness” that Inuit get from their more southern East Asian ancestors). It’s hard to tell though as lots of the phys anth stuff can’t be confirmed. But that would fit with Goyet-Q2 being more the “On the habitable edge of the glacial tundra” group and the Villabruna cluster representing people who hunted small game and fished in the forests to the south, and then had a population boom and expansion all over as Europe deglaciated. Still a small population but more of them too.
Thanks Razib and Matt. That helps me wrap my brain around it.