Grange/Geigl Lab – Arrival of steppe-ancestry in the north of France observed in real-time explains the shaping of the European genome

The Grange/Geigl Lab published a new article in Science Advances:

Arrival of steppe-ancestry in the north of France observed in real-time explains the shaping of the European genome

 

The last major migratory wave that shaped the European genome was that of the populations from the steppes north of the Black Sea ~5,000 years. These steppe pastoralists admixed with the local Neolithic farmers in eastern and central Europe. The admixed descendants developed a new archaeological culture, the Corded Ware culture combining elements from both the steppe and Late Neolithic eastern European cultures, and started to bury their dead in single graves. The modeling of the admixture dynamics between the contemporaneous populations, performed by the “Epigenomics and Paleogenomics” group of the Institut Jacques Monod, Université Paris-Cité, CNRS, revealed that in eastern and central Europe the individuals of the admixed Neolithic-steppe population mated within their group rather than with local Neolithic farmers while east-west migrations. The team has identified wo principal periods of admixture separated by 300-400 years, the first ~4900 years ago in eastern Europe and the second ~4550 years ago in western Europe. Both admixture waves involved more migrating men than local women. The last migration and admixture wave was observed in real-time” by the researchers at the IJM owing to the analysis of seven individuals buried in a collective family grave in Bréviandes, Aube/Champagne, dated to ~4500 years ago. This admixture episode on the territory of present-day northern France would have been the result of admixture between small groups of mainly young men and local women. This encounter would have led to a cultural intermingling and the emergence of the Bell Beaker culture, as well as the constitution of the European genome that prevails up to now.

 

Reference:

Oğuzhan Parasayan^1,7, Christophe Laurelut², Christine Bôle^3§, Lola Bonnabel^2§, Alois Corona^4§, Cynthia Domenech-Jaulneau^5§, Cécile Paresys^6§, Isabelle Richard^6§, Thierry Grange^1*‡, Eva-Maria Geigl^1*‡ Late Neolithic collective burial reveals admixture dynamics during the third millennium BCE and the shaping of the European genome. Science Advances (2024)

¹Université Paris Cité, CNRS, Institut Jacques Monod, F-75013 Paris, France

²INRAP Grand Est – UMR 8215 Trajectoires (CNRS-University Paris I), France

³Genomics Core Facility, Institut Imagine-Structure Fédérative de Recherche Necker, INSERM U1163 et INSERM US24/CNRS UAR3633, Paris Descartes Sorbonne Université Paris Cité, Paris, France

⁴Service archéologique interdépartemental, 78180 Montigny-le-Bretonneux, France

⁵Service Régional, Direction Régionale des Affaires culturelles d’Île-de-France, UMR 8215 Trajectoires (CNRS-University Paris I), Paris, France

⁶Inrap Grand-Est, Châlons-en-Champagne, UMR 6472 CEPAM (CNRS- Nice University), France

⁷Present address: Institut Pasteur, Université Paris Cité, CNRS UMR2000, Human Evolutionary Genetics Unit, 75015 Paris, France

• alphabetical order

*co-senior authors

^‡corresponding authors: eva-maria.geigl@ijm.fr; thierry.grange@ijm.fr