scholarly journals Ancient genome-wide DNA from France highlights the complexity of interactions between Mesolithic hunter-gatherers and Neolithic farmers

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (22) ◽  
pp. eaaz5344 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maïté Rivollat ◽  
Choongwon Jeong ◽  
Stephan Schiffels ◽  
İşil Küçükkalıpçı ◽  
Marie-Hélène Pemonge ◽  
...  

Starting from 12,000 years ago in the Middle East, the Neolithic lifestyle spread across Europe via separate continental and Mediterranean routes. Genomes from early European farmers have shown a clear Near Eastern/Anatolian genetic affinity with limited contribution from hunter-gatherers. However, no genomic data are available from modern-day France, where both routes converged, as evidenced by a mosaic cultural pattern. Here, we present genome-wide data from 101 individuals from 12 sites covering today’s France and Germany from the Mesolithic (N = 3) to the Neolithic (N = 98) (7000–3000 BCE). Using the genetic substructure observed in European hunter-gatherers, we characterize diverse patterns of admixture in different regions, consistent with both routes of expansion. Early western European farmers show a higher proportion of distinctly western hunter-gatherer ancestry compared to central/southeastern farmers. Our data highlight the complexity of the biological interactions during the Neolithic expansion by revealing major regional variations.

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Selina Brace ◽  
Yoan Diekmann ◽  
Thomas J. Booth ◽  
Zuzana Faltyskova ◽  
Nadin Rohland ◽  
...  

The roles of migration, admixture and acculturation in the European transition to farming have been debated for over 100 years. Genome-wide ancient DNA studies indicate predominantly Anatolian ancestry for continental Neolithic farmers, but also variable admixture with local Mesolithic hunter-gatherers1–9. Neolithic cultures first appear in Britain c. 6000 years ago (kBP), a millennium after they appear in adjacent areas of northwestern continental Europe. However, the pattern and process of the British Neolithic transition remains unclear10–15. We assembled genome-wide data from six Mesolithic and 67 Neolithic individuals found in Britain, dating from 10.5-4.5 kBP, a dataset that includes 22 newly reported individuals and the first genomic data from British Mesolithic hunter-gatherers. Our analyses reveals persistent genetic affinities between Mesolithic British and Western European hunter-gatherers over a period spanning Britain’s separation from continental Europe. We find overwhelming support for agriculture being introduced by incoming continental farmers, with small and geographically structured levels of additional hunter-gatherer introgression. We find genetic affinity between British and Iberian Neolithic populations indicating that British Neolithic people derived much of their ancestry from Anatolian farmers who originally followed the Mediterranean route of dispersal and likely entered Britain from northwestern mainland Europe.


Science ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 363 (6432) ◽  
pp. 1230-1234 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iñigo Olalde ◽  
Swapan Mallick ◽  
Nick Patterson ◽  
Nadin Rohland ◽  
Vanessa Villalba-Mouco ◽  
...  

We assembled genome-wide data from 271 ancient Iberians, of whom 176 are from the largely unsampled period after 2000 BCE, thereby providing a high-resolution time transect of the Iberian Peninsula. We document high genetic substructure between northwestern and southeastern hunter-gatherers before the spread of farming. We reveal sporadic contacts between Iberia and North Africa by ~2500 BCE and, by ~2000 BCE, the replacement of 40% of Iberia’s ancestry and nearly 100% of its Y-chromosomes by people with Steppe ancestry. We show that, in the Iron Age, Steppe ancestry had spread not only into Indo-European–speaking regions but also into non-Indo-European–speaking ones, and we reveal that present-day Basques are best described as a typical Iron Age population without the admixture events that later affected the rest of Iberia. Additionally, we document how, beginning at least in the Roman period, the ancestry of the peninsula was transformed by gene flow from North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iosif Lazaridis ◽  
Anna Belfer-Cohen ◽  
Swapan Mallick ◽  
Nick Patterson ◽  
Olivia Cheronet ◽  
...  

AbstractThe earliest ancient DNA data of modern humans from Europe dates to ∼40 thousand years ago1-4, but that from the Caucasus and the Near East to only ∼14 thousand years ago5,6, from populations who lived long after the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) ∼26.5-19 thousand years ago7. To address this imbalance and to better understand the relationship of Europeans and Near Easterners, we report genome-wide data from two ∼26 thousand year old individuals from Dzudzuana Cave in Georgia in the Caucasus from around the beginning of the LGM. Surprisingly, the Dzudzuana population was more closely related to early agriculturalists from western Anatolia ∼8 thousand years ago8 than to the hunter-gatherers of the Caucasus from the same region of western Georgia of ∼13-10 thousand years ago5. Most of the Dzudzuana population’s ancestry was deeply related to the post-glacial western European hunter-gatherers of the ‘Villabruna cluster’3, but it also had ancestry from a lineage that had separated from the great majority of non-African populations before they separated from each other, proving that such ‘Basal Eurasians’6,9 were present in West Eurasia twice as early as previously recorded5,6. We document major population turnover in the Near East after the time of Dzudzuana, showing that the highly differentiated Holocene populations of the region6 were formed by ‘Ancient North Eurasian’3,9,10 admixture into the Caucasus and Iran and North African11,12 admixture into the Natufians of the Levant. We finally show that the Dzudzuana population contributed the majority of the ancestry of post-Ice Age people in the Near East, North Africa, and even parts of Europe, thereby becoming the largest single contributor of ancestry of all present-day West Eurasians.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dhriti Sengupta ◽  
◽  
Ananyo Choudhury ◽  
Cesar Fortes-Lima ◽  
Shaun Aron ◽  
...  

AbstractSouth Eastern Bantu-speaking (SEB) groups constitute more than 80% of the population in South Africa. Despite clear linguistic and geographic diversity, the genetic differences between these groups have not been systematically investigated. Based on genome-wide data of over 5000 individuals, representing eight major SEB groups, we provide strong evidence for fine-scale population structure that broadly aligns with geographic distribution and is also congruent with linguistic phylogeny (separation of Nguni, Sotho-Tswana and Tsonga speakers). Although differential Khoe-San admixture plays a key role, the structure persists after Khoe-San ancestry-masking. The timing of admixture, levels of sex-biased gene flow and population size dynamics also highlight differences in the demographic histories of individual groups. The comparisons with five Iron Age farmer genomes further support genetic continuity over ~400 years in certain regions of the country. Simulated trait genome-wide association studies further show that the observed population structure could have major implications for biomedical genomics research in South Africa.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefania Salvatore ◽  
Knut Dagestad Rand ◽  
Ivar Grytten ◽  
Egil Ferkingstad ◽  
Diana Domanska ◽  
...  

AbstractBackgroundThe generation and systematic collection of genome-wide data is ever-increasing. This vast amount of data has enabled researchers to study relations between a variety of genomic and epigenomic features, including genetic variation, gene regulation, and phenotypic traits. Such relations are typically investigated by comparatively assessing genomic co-occurrence. Technically, this corresponds to assessing the similarity of pairs of genome-wide binary vectors. A variety of metrics have been proposed for this problem in other fields like ecology. However, while several of these metrics have been employed for assessing genomic co-occurrence, their appropriateness for the genomic setting has never been investigated.ResultsWe show that the choice of metric may strongly influence results and propose two alternative modelling assumptions that can be used to guide this choice. On both simulated and real genomic data, the Jaccard index is strongly affected by dataset size and should be used with caution. The Forbes coefficient (fold change) and tetrachoric correlation are less affected by dataset size, but one should be aware of increased variance for small datasets.AvailabilityAll results on simulated and real data can be inspected and reproduced athttps://hyperbrowser.uio.no/sim-measure


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dhriti Sengupta ◽  
Ananyo Choudhury ◽  
Cesar Fortes-Lima ◽  
Shaun Aron ◽  
Gavin Whitelaw ◽  
...  

AbstractSouth Eastern Bantu-speaking (SEB) groups constitute more than 80% of the population in South Africa. Despite clear linguistic and geographic diversity, the genetic differences between these groups have not been systematically investigated. Based on genome-wide data of over 5000 individuals, representing eight major SEB groups, we provide strong evidence for fine-scale population structure that broadly aligns with geographic distribution and is also congruent with linguistic phylogeny (separation of Nguni, Sotho-Tswana and Tsonga speakers). Although differential Khoe-San admixture plays a key role, the structure persists after Khoe-San ancestry-masking. The timing of admixture, levels of sex-biased gene flow and population size dynamics also highlight differences in the demographic histories of individual groups. The comparisons with five Iron Age farmer genomes further support genetic continuity over ∼400 years in certain regions of the country. Simulated trait genome-wide association studies further show that the observed population structure could have major implications for biomedical genomics research in South Africa.


2019 ◽  
Vol 36 (9) ◽  
pp. 1849-1861 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mário Vicente ◽  
Mattias Jakobsson ◽  
Peter Ebbesen ◽  
Carina M Schlebusch

Abstract Southern African indigenous groups, traditionally hunter-gatherers (San) and herders (Khoekhoe), are commonly referred to as “Khoe-San” populations and have a long history in southern Africa. Their ancestors were largely isolated up until ∼2,000 years ago before the arrival of pastoralists and farmers in southern Africa. Assessing relationships among regional Khoe-San groups has been challenging due to admixture with immigrant populations that obscure past population affinities and gene flow among these autochthonous communities. We re-evaluate a combined genome-wide data set of previously published southern Africa Khoe-San populations in conjunction with novel data from Khoe-San individuals collected in Xade (Central Kalahari Game Reserve, Botswana) prior to their resettlement outside the reserve. After excluding regions in the genome that trace their ancestry to recent migrant groups, the genetic diversity of 20 Khoe-San groups fitted an isolation-by-distance model. Even though isolation-by-distance explained most genetic affinities between the different autochthonous groups, additional signals of contact between Khoe-San groups could be detected. For instance, we found stronger genetic affinities, than what would be explained by isolation-by-distance gene flow, between the two geographically separated Khoe-San groups, who speak branches of the Kx’a-language family (ǂHoan and Ju). We also scanned the genome-wide data for signals of adaptive gene flow from farmers/herders into Khoe-San groups and identified a number of genomic regions potentially introduced by the arrival of the new groups. This study provides a comprehensive picture of affinities among Khoe-San groups, prior to the arrival of recent migrants, and found that these affinities are primarily determined by the geographic landscape.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. eabd9036
Author(s):  
Sara Saez-Atienzar ◽  
Sara Bandres-Ciga ◽  
Rebekah G. Langston ◽  
Jonggeol J. Kim ◽  
Shing Wan Choi ◽  
...  

Despite the considerable progress in unraveling the genetic causes of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), we do not fully understand the molecular mechanisms underlying the disease. We analyzed genome-wide data involving 78,500 individuals using a polygenic risk score approach to identify the biological pathways and cell types involved in ALS. This data-driven approach identified multiple aspects of the biology underlying the disease that resolved into broader themes, namely, neuron projection morphogenesis, membrane trafficking, and signal transduction mediated by ribonucleotides. We also found that genomic risk in ALS maps consistently to GABAergic interneurons and oligodendrocytes, as confirmed in human single-nucleus RNA-seq data. Using two-sample Mendelian randomization, we nominated six differentially expressed genes (ATG16L2, ACSL5, MAP1LC3A, MAPKAPK3, PLXNB2, and SCFD1) within the significant pathways as relevant to ALS. We conclude that the disparate genetic etiologies of this fatal neurological disease converge on a smaller number of final common pathways and cell types.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (13) ◽  
pp. eabe4414
Author(s):  
Guido Alberto Gnecchi-Ruscone ◽  
Elmira Khussainova ◽  
Nurzhibek Kahbatkyzy ◽  
Lyazzat Musralina ◽  
Maria A. Spyrou ◽  
...  

The Scythians were a multitude of horse-warrior nomad cultures dwelling in the Eurasian steppe during the first millennium BCE. Because of the lack of first-hand written records, little is known about the origins and relations among the different cultures. To address these questions, we produced genome-wide data for 111 ancient individuals retrieved from 39 archaeological sites from the first millennia BCE and CE across the Central Asian Steppe. We uncovered major admixture events in the Late Bronze Age forming the genetic substratum for two main Iron Age gene-pools emerging around the Altai and the Urals respectively. Their demise was mirrored by new genetic turnovers, linked to the spread of the eastern nomad empires in the first centuries CE. Compared to the high genetic heterogeneity of the past, the homogenization of the present-day Kazakhs gene pool is notable, likely a result of 400 years of strict exogamous social rules.


GigaScience ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Taras K Oleksyk ◽  
Walter W Wolfsberger ◽  
Alexandra M Weber ◽  
Khrystyna Shchubelka ◽  
Olga T Oleksyk ◽  
...  

Abstract Background The main goal of this collaborative effort is to provide genome-wide data for the previously underrepresented population in Eastern Europe, and to provide cross-validation of the data from genome sequences and genotypes of the same individuals acquired by different technologies. We collected 97 genome-grade DNA samples from consented individuals representing major regions of Ukraine that were consented for public data release. BGISEQ-500 sequence data and genotypes by an Illumina GWAS chip were cross-validated on multiple samples and additionally referenced to 1 sample that has been resequenced by Illumina NovaSeq6000 S4 at high coverage. Results The genome data have been searched for genomic variation represented in this population, and a number of variants have been reported: large structural variants, indels, copy number variations, single-nucletide polymorphisms, and microsatellites. To our knowledge, this study provides the largest to-date survey of genetic variation in Ukraine, creating a public reference resource aiming to provide data for medical research in a large understudied population. Conclusions Our results indicate that the genetic diversity of the Ukrainian population is uniquely shaped by evolutionary and demographic forces and cannot be ignored in future genetic and biomedical studies. These data will contribute a wealth of new information bringing forth a wealth of novel, endemic and medically related alleles.


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