Ice sheets expanded across much of northern Europe from around 25,000 to 19,000 years ago, making a huge expanse of land unlivable. That harsh event set in motion a previously unrecognized tale of two human populations that played out at opposite ends of the continent.
Western European hunter-gatherers outlasted the icy blast in the past. Easterners got replaced by migrations of newcomers.
That’s the implication of
the largest study to date of ancient Europeans’ DNA, covering a period before, during and after what’s known as the Last Glacial Maximum, paleogeneticist Cosimo Posth and colleagues report March 1 in
Nature.
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