Ancient DNA sheds light on the origin of Europeans

15 hours ago by David Lambert And Michael Westaway, The Conversation Ancient DNA can tell you a lot more than skull shape about the origins of the first Europeans. Credit: Flickr/Sebastian Dooris , CC BY

Much of the evidence of where the first Europeans came from was originally derived from comparisons of skulls but our work looking at ancient DNA is revealing new insight, with results published this month in Science.

Before we go any further, we need to look at what the skulls were telling us. Over a number of decades from the 1970s the US physical anthropologist William Howells recorded tens of thousands of human skulls held in museum collections across the world.

The patterns identified by Howells established that there were distinct correlations between geography and human biology, which provided insights into our understanding of the population history of the world.

In 1989 Howells included a number of fossil human skulls in this comparison to see if they could shed insights into the understanding of modern human dispersals.

Are the first Australians and Europeans related?

One of the patterns to emerge was that many of the earliest European modern human skulls from the last Ice Age, commonly referred to as the Cro-Magnon people, sat statistically very close to Aboriginal Australians and Papua New Guineans.

Did this reflect a close common origin between the first Europeans and the first Australians? Our research, led by Eske Willerslev from the University of Copenhagen, reveals the answer to this is "not really".

The genome recovered from an ancient skeleton, from a site known as Kostenki 14, has revealed an important story about the human history of Europe.

The remains there, found in 1954 at Kostenki, in south western Russia, were from a short, dark-skinned man who lived between 38,700 to 36,200 years ago.

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Ancient DNA sheds light on the origin of Europeans