Human tooth recuperated from Cueva de Malalmuerzo. Credit: Pedro Cantalejo
After an organisms death, its DNA is just preserved for a specific amount of time and under beneficial climatic conditions. Extracting DNA from ancient remains from hot and dry climates is a substantial difficulty for researchers.
In Andalucía, in the south of contemporary Spain, weather conditions are comparable to those in North Africa– nevertheless, DNA has successfully been recuperated from 14,000-year-old human individuals from a cavern website in Morocco. The brand-new study fills essential temporal and spatial gaps.
Scientists can now directly investigate the role of the southern Iberian Peninsula as a haven for Ice Age populations and prospective population contacts throughout the Strait of Gibraltar throughout the last Ice Age, when water level were much lower than today.
In the best place at the right time
The genetic ancestry of people from central and southern Europe who lived before the Last Glacial Maximum (24,000 to 18,000 years before today) differs from the ones who recolonized Europe later.
Rock art from Cueva de Malalmuerzo. Credit: Pedro Cantalejo
The situation in western Europe has not been clear up until now due to a lack of genomic data from crucial time durations. When large parts of Europe were covered by huge ice sheets, the 23,000-year-old individual from Cueva del Malalmuerzo near Granada lastly adds data from the time. The research study describes a direct hereditary link in between a 35,000-year-old person from Belgium and the brand-new genome from Malalmuerzo.
” Thanks to the high quality of our data we were able to discover traces of among the first hereditary lineages that settled Eurasia 45,000 years earlier. Importantly, we found resemblances with a 35,000-year-old person from Belgium whose origins we can now trace further to the 23,000-year-old individual from southern Iberia,” explains first author Vanessa Villalba-Mouco of limit Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
The individual from Cueva del Malalmuerzo not only links to earlier periods of settlement however likewise to the hunter-gatherers of western and southern Europe who lived long after the last Ice Age.
It also validates the crucial role of the Iberian Peninsula as a sanctuary for human populations throughout the last Ice Age. From there, humans migrated northwards and eastwards as soon as the ice sheets had pulled back.
” With Malalmuerzo, we managed to discover the best location and the best time period to trace a Palaeolithic human group back to among the proposed Ice Age refugia. It is impressive to find such a long-lasting genetic legacy on the Iberian Peninsula, particularly given that this pre-Ice Age origins had actually long since vanished in other parts of Europe,” includes senior author Wolfgang Haak of limit Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
More puzzle pieces of human history
Interestingly, the authors did not find any hereditary link in between the southern Iberian Peninsula and North Africa– regardless of a distance of only 13 kilometers across the Mediterranean Sea, and parallels in the historical record.
” In Malalmuerzo, we discovered no evidence of a hereditary contribution from North African lineages, and on the other hand, there is no proof of a genetic contribution from southern Spain in the genomes of the 14,000-year-old individuals from the Taforalt collapse Morocco,” includes Gerd-Christian Weniger from the University of Cologne. “Why the Strait of Gibraltar was a barrier at the end of the last Ice Age is still among the unsettled concerns of archaeological research in the western Mediterranean region.”
The study also consists of a variety of more youthful individuals from the Neolithic, a time duration when the very first farmers got here in Europe from the Near East. The characteristic genetic ancestry of Anatolian Neolithic groups is indeed detectable in the individuals from Andalucía, suggesting that these early farmers topped big geographic distances.
” Neolithic individuals from southern Iberia, however, show a higher percentage of hunter-gatherer lineages. Hence, interaction between the last hunters and the first farmers may have been much closer than in other areas,” states co-author Jose Ramos-Muñoz from Universidad de Cádiz.
The Iberian Peninsulas unique role throughout the Ice Age still resonates countless years later.
” Surprisingly, the genetic heritage of Paleolithic hunter-gatherers is still detectable in early farmers from southern Iberia, indicating local admixture in between two population groups with really various lifestyles,” concludes Vanessa Villalba-Mouco.
Reference: “A 23,000-year-old southern Iberian person links human groups that lived in Western Europe prior to and after the Last Glacial Maximum” by Vanessa Villalba-Mouco, Marieke S. van de Loosdrecht, Adam B. Rohrlach, Helen Fewlass, Sahra Talamo, He Yu, Franziska Aron, Carles Lalueza-Fox, Lidia Cabello, Pedro Cantalejo Duarte, José Ramos-Muñoz, Cosimo Posth, Johannes Krause, Gerd-Christian Weniger and Wolfgang Haak, 1 March 2023, Nature Ecology & & Evolution.DOI: 10.1038/ s41559-023-01987-0.
The research study was funded by the Max Planck Society, Unión Europea-Next Generation EU, H2020 European Research Council, the German Research Foundation, and the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad.
Summary of Cueva de Malalmuerzo. Credit: Pedro Cantalejo
A genome of a human from the Ice Age sanctuary located in southern Spain.
A team of scientists from around the globe has studied ancient human DNA acquired from various historical sites in Andalucía in southern Spain. The findings of the research study consist of the earliest genome found to date from Cueva del Malalmuerzo in southern Spain, along with the genomes of early farmers from other prominent sites, such as Cueva de Ardales, that are dated between 7,000 and 5,000 years old.
The Iberian Peninsula plays a substantial function in the reconstruction of human population history. Liing in the southwestern part of Europe and acting as a geographic cul-de-sac, it functioned as a sanctuary throughout the last Ice Age with its severe temperature changes.
On the other hand, it might have been among the beginning points for the recolonization of Europe after the glacial optimum. Previous research studies had reported on the genomic profiles of 13,000 to 8,000-year-old hunter-gatherers from the Iberian Peninsula and supplied evidence for the survival and extension of a much older Palaeolithic family tree that has been replaced in other parts of Europe and is no longer noticeable.