10-09-2023, 07:45 PM
Bronze Age descendants of a previously unknown population near the Lake Balaton - new archaeogenomic results
The primary aim of the whole genome study was to uncover the population history events that took place over a time span of almost thousand years. The results show that the genome of the earliest individual that belongs to the Somogyvár-Vinkovci culture, is the one-third mixture of the autochthonous population of southern Transdanubia, and two-third mixture of a previously uncharacterised branch of the presumably Indo-European speaking steppe populations, probably from the Baltic region. In genetic terms, the population represented by this individual was more similar to the modern communities in the Balkans, rather than to the one associated with the Kisapostag culture, which displaced them from the region sometime around 2200 BC. Based on a whole genome analysis of 11 remains, this newcomer population had an unprecedentedly high so-called ancient hunter-gatherer genetic ancestry compared to contemporaneous populations in Europe.
The history of hunter-gatherers goes back to pre-glacial times. They were the indigenous people of Europe before the spread of agriculture, who were gradually absorbed into the new farming groups arriving from the Middle East from the 7th millennium BC onwards. The last isolated communities are known to have disappeared from Europe by the beginning of the 4th millennium BC. However, genetic analysis on the Kisapostag associated population has radically extended their - genetic - survival. The analyzed population originates from a largely intact hunter-gatherer source in Eastern Europe prior to their appearance in Transdanubia. It is important to note that a recent, parallel study (Chylenski et al. 2023) also recognised the importance of this genetic component, based on the data from the Eastern European region, but they linked this source to the Baltic region, whereas present publication points to a previously unknown source in present-day western Ukraine/Moldova.
"By following the genetic traces, we have been able to detect several appearances of this very ancestry from contemporaneous populations and mostly outliers found in Germany, Czech Republic, Poland, Ukraine and the Baltic States. These results are going to help to resolve a number of archaeological and archaeogenetic discrepancies concerning European prehistory," emphasized Dániel Gerber.
The primary aim of the whole genome study was to uncover the population history events that took place over a time span of almost thousand years. The results show that the genome of the earliest individual that belongs to the Somogyvár-Vinkovci culture, is the one-third mixture of the autochthonous population of southern Transdanubia, and two-third mixture of a previously uncharacterised branch of the presumably Indo-European speaking steppe populations, probably from the Baltic region. In genetic terms, the population represented by this individual was more similar to the modern communities in the Balkans, rather than to the one associated with the Kisapostag culture, which displaced them from the region sometime around 2200 BC. Based on a whole genome analysis of 11 remains, this newcomer population had an unprecedentedly high so-called ancient hunter-gatherer genetic ancestry compared to contemporaneous populations in Europe.
The history of hunter-gatherers goes back to pre-glacial times. They were the indigenous people of Europe before the spread of agriculture, who were gradually absorbed into the new farming groups arriving from the Middle East from the 7th millennium BC onwards. The last isolated communities are known to have disappeared from Europe by the beginning of the 4th millennium BC. However, genetic analysis on the Kisapostag associated population has radically extended their - genetic - survival. The analyzed population originates from a largely intact hunter-gatherer source in Eastern Europe prior to their appearance in Transdanubia. It is important to note that a recent, parallel study (Chylenski et al. 2023) also recognised the importance of this genetic component, based on the data from the Eastern European region, but they linked this source to the Baltic region, whereas present publication points to a previously unknown source in present-day western Ukraine/Moldova.
"By following the genetic traces, we have been able to detect several appearances of this very ancestry from contemporaneous populations and mostly outliers found in Germany, Czech Republic, Poland, Ukraine and the Baltic States. These results are going to help to resolve a number of archaeological and archaeogenetic discrepancies concerning European prehistory," emphasized Dániel Gerber.