Scandinavians are the earliest Europeans - Deconstructing the "Melting pot" Propaganda Behind Recent DNA Finds

The origin of contemporary Europeans remains contentious. We obtain a genome sequence from Kostenki 14 in European Russia dating to 38,700 to 36,200 years ago, one of the oldest fossils of Anatomically Modern Humans from Europe. We find that K14 shares a close ancestry with the 24,000-year-old Mal’ta boy from central Siberia, European Mesolithic hunter-gatherers, some contemporary western Siberians, and many Europeans, but not eastern Asians. Additionally, the Kostenki 14 genome shows evidence of shared ancestry with a population basal to all Eurasians that also relates to later European Neolithic farmers. We find that Kostenki 14 contains more Neandertal DNA that is contained in longer tracts than present Europeans. Our findings reveal the timing of divergence of western Eurasians and East Asians to be more than 36,200 years ago and that European genomic structure today dates back to the Upper Paleolithic and derives from a meta-population that at times stretched from Europe to central Asia.

“From a genetic point of view he’s an European,” says Professor Eske Willerslev, Director of the Centre for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen, who was involved in the new study, and adds:

“Actually, he is closer to Danes, Swedes, Finns and Russians than to Frenchmen, Spaniards and Germans”.

Split happened within a 8.000 year gap

The new results reveal that the man is the oldest that we know of so far to genetically represent a separate line from the forebears of present-day Asians. This is decisive when it comes to dating one of the most important events in history.

“We can now date the separation time between Asians and Europeans,” says Professor Rasmus Nielsen from the University of Copenhagen and the University of California, Berkeley, who was also involved in the study.

He points out that the Kostenki genome sets a line 37,000 years ago. Here the lines must have split, while the 45,000-year-old genome from the recently discovered Ust’ Ishim in Siberia sets the limit in the other direction.

This gives the answer to one of the biggest questions in the history of mankind; scientists now know that it is within the 8000 year gap that Europeans and Asians went their separate ways.

It turns out that Scandinavians are more closely related to the Kostenki man than any other now-living population. This means that Scandinavians are the earliest Europeans.

However, the genome also indicates that many European traits, including those from the Middle East, were already present in the first Europeans.

So from a genetic point of view it makes no sense to categorise the Scandinavians as a separate people.

Tale of Migrations

Archaeologists and geneticists have long debated who the ancestors of modern Europeans are—and how, and when, they arrived. It’s typically been a tale of migration and invasion, of people moving into Europe in waves that left distinct genetic signatures behind.

First, the thinking goes, there were groups of hunter-gatherers, moving from Africa into Europe beginning about 40,000 years ago. Much later, a separate group of farmers and herders from the Middle East made their way north, eventually out-competing the hunter-gatherer locals and forming the basis for the European genome we see today.

The introduction of agriculture by this second wave of people—the so-called Neolithic Revolution—was such a pivotal moment in prehistory that it can be seen in both artifacts and genes.

The new results add a surprising wrinkle.

What other geneticists have identified as separate hunter-gatherer and farmer genes are all present in the Kostenki find. “You wouldn’t predict if you go back to one of our earliest individuals, all the components of modern Europeans were already there,” Willerslev says. (Related: “Discovery of Oldest DNA Scrambles Human Origins Picture.”)

Genes once thought to have arrived with the first farmers, for instance, now seem to have been around much earlier. “Until now, it seemed clear this was something that came into Europe during the Neolithic,” says Pontus Skoglund, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School. “It’s an extremely interesting suggestion that they have.”

The complex mixture of DNA in such an old specimen, Willerslev says, suggests that Stone Age Europe was a lively place. Instead of separate groups colliding and occasionally mingling, Willerslev argues there was a single, genetically similar population sprawling across the continent, from Russia to the Middle East to northern Europe. (Related: “Blue-Eyed Hunter-Gatherers Roamed Prehistoric Europe, Gene Map Reveals.“)

“Rather than separate populations moving into each others’ areas and having sex with each other,” he says, “there was a single ‘meta-population’ having sex—or exchanging genes—in a complex and heterogeneous way.”

The new find complicates a picture of Europe’s deep past that geneticists thought was becoming clearer. “We all thought you could sequence these bones and come up with a simple story. This paper really shows things are not as simple as people thought they were,” Willerslev says. “Europe has always been a melting pot.”

Kostenki 14 and his doppelganger nemesis Israel Zangwill

Why does the headline tell us one thing, and the body of the article tell us exactly the opposite? Is the idea of a long-term, stable European identity just not permissible under the ruling intellectual paradigm?

The new paper shows that K14 was definitely European (or more correctly West Eurasian or Caucasoid), as it was more similar to modern Europeans than to East Asians or other non-West Eurasian populations. Thus, the morphological description of the sample as “Australoid” by some early anthropologists did not reflect its ancestral makeup. Also, this proves that Caucasoids existed 37,000 years ago

most present-day Europeans derive from at least three highly differentiated populations: west European hunter-gatherers, who contributed ancestry to all Europeans but not to Near Easterners; ancient north Eurasians related to Upper Palaeolithic Siberians, who contributed to both Europeans and Near Easterners; and early European farmers, who were mainly of Near Eastern origin but also harboured west European hunter-gatherer related ancestry.

Modern humans received their Neanderthal admixture when they were just spreading out of Africa some 54,000 years ago.

When our ancestors spread farther north into Europe, some 45,000 to 42,000 years ago, they could have interbred directly with Neanderthals, but they didn’t. Perhaps the two groups were just too different. They seem to have intermixed only via a third party that was neither fully modern nor fully archaic.

The European phenotype came later

Kostenki Man was dark-skinned, dark-eyed, and rather short. These details, curiously enough, appear not in the paper but in a review of the paper, published by the same journal, as well as in an interview with one of the authors (Associated Press, 2014; Gibbons, 2014).

So we now have an upper bound for the emergence of the European phenotype, i.e., light skin and a diverse palette of hair and eye colors. The lower bound has been set by the remains of a Swedish hunter-gatherer, dated to 8,000 years ago, who had the “European” allele for light skin at the gene SLC24A5 (Skoglund et al., 2014).

By retrieving ancient DNA from an early modern human, we have made a key advance in human paleogenetics, perhaps more so than by sequencing the Neanderthal genome. We again see that evolution did not slow down with the emergence of anatomically and behaviorally modern humans some 60,000 years ago. It actually began to speed up, as humans began to enter not only new natural environments but also new cultural environments of their own making.

Upper Paleolithic Man

For roughly 20,000 years during the closing chapter of the Ice Ages — the period known to archaeologists as the Upper Paleolithic, or “late old stone age” — our ancestors lived as big-game hunters in Europe, ranging from the Mediterranean coast to the edge of the ice in the north. Their physical remains and those of their artifacts are relatively plentiful, giving us a great deal of information about them and their lifestyle. One of the most striking things about the Upper Paleolithic inhabitants of Europe was their physical homogeneity. Measurements made on their skeletal remains indicate a population more racially homogeneous than that of any European country today — and this population was spread over an enormous area throughout a span of time very long compared to that of all recorded human history.