Ancient human genomes suggest three ancestral populations for present-day Europeans
Abstract
We sequenced genomes from a ∼7,000 year old early farmer from Stuttgart in Germany, an ∼8,000 year old hunter-gatherer from Luxembourg, and seven ∼8,000 year old hunter-gatherers from southern Sweden. We analyzed these data together with other ancient genomes and 2,345 contemporary humans to show that the great majority of present-day Europeans derive from at least three highly differentiated populations: West European Hunter-Gatherers (WHG), who contributed ancestry to all Europeans but not to Near Easterners; Ancient North Eurasians (ANE), who were most closely related to Upper Paleolithic Siberians and contributed to both Europeans and Near Easterners; and Early European Farmers (EEF), who were mainly of Near Eastern origin but also harbored WHG-related ancestry. We model these populations’ deep relationships and show that EEF had ∼44% ancestry from a “Basal Eurasian” lineage that split prior to the diversification of all other non-African lineages.
Footnotes
↵† Co-senior authors
Subject Area
- Biochemistry (11703)
- Bioengineering (8718)
- Bioinformatics (29127)
- Biophysics (14930)
- Cancer Biology (12048)
- Cell Biology (17353)
- Clinical Trials (138)
- Developmental Biology (9406)
- Ecology (14143)
- Epidemiology (2067)
- Evolutionary Biology (18266)
- Genetics (12219)
- Genomics (16765)
- Immunology (11841)
- Microbiology (28003)
- Molecular Biology (11551)
- Neuroscience (60804)
- Paleontology (450)
- Pathology (1864)
- Pharmacology and Toxicology (3229)
- Physiology (4939)
- Plant Biology (10383)
- Synthetic Biology (2877)
- Systems Biology (7333)
- Zoology (1642)