It was thought that even our peninsula had been a refuge for the people with dark eyes and skin who populated it before the ice. After their retreat, light-skinned and light-eyed farmers arrived from Anatolia
Rewritten the genetic history of our ancestors during the most acute phase of the last ice age, which reached its maximum 20 thousand years ago. Under the advance of the ice, the populations that managed to move to the south of the Iberian peninsula, especially in the area of Granada, managed to survive. Those that remained in Italy did not manage to see the end of the ice age. the surprising result of a complex analysis carried out on 116 new genetic samples in addition to another 240 already known dating back to a period of time between 45,000 and 5,000 years ago. The international study, which was attended by numerous Italian scientists from the Universities of Bologna, Florence, Cagliari, Palermo, Padua, Pisa and Siena, was published in Science
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One way in Italy
The populations of hunter-gatherers present in Europe about 30 thousand years ago, belonging to the Gravettian culture, known for the statuettes of Venuses, probably goddesses of fertility, under the advance of the ice had to look for areas with a livable climate. The last Neanderthals were disappearing in Europe at that time or had recently become extinct after having mated in some cases with our direct ancestors (A wise man). To our surprise, the dark-skinned and dark-eyed Gravettian population that remained in Italy disappeared completely, said Cosimo Posth, a researcher at the University of Tübingen and coordinator of the study. Genetic analysis has shown that, after the end of the ice age, populations with light skin, blue eyes and Middle Eastern characteristics from the Balkans settled in Italy.
The survivors
The Gravettians, on the other hand, survived in Spain. Despite the non-ideal climatic conditions, we were able to extract collagen from the finds identified in caves in southern Spain and to carry out accurate dating thanks to radiocarbon, explained Sahra Talamo, professor at the Ciamician Chemistry department of the University of Bologna and director of Bravho 14C Lab (Bologna Radiocarbon laboratory devoted to Human Evolution), which took part in the research. The Gravettian genetic footprint can be traced in Spain to the arrival of the first farmers, who migrated from present-day Turkey, about 8,000 years ago, Posth explains. This new population Mr repopulated Europe from the Iberian Peninsula to Poland to the British Isles, dominating the continent for millennia. No modern population can claim origins from a single human group that first settled in Europe, commented Ludovic Orlando, of the Center for Anthropology and Genomics in Toulouse. It may be that the migration of early farmers to Europe triggered the retreat of hunter-gatherer populations to Europe’s northern fringes, concluded Johannes Krause of the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig.
March 2, 2023 (change March 2, 2023 | 10:42 am)
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