A 30,000-year-old genome recovered from Isturitz Cave in France reveals that eastern and western European hunter-gatherers maintained genetic connections long before the Last Glacial Maximum, challenging long-held assumptions of continental isolation.
Isturitz Cave Yields Southwestern Europe’s Oldest Genome-Wide Dataset
A long bone excavated in the 1950s from a cave in the French Basque Country has provided the oldest genome-wide dataset from a modern human in southwestern Europe. Stored for decades at the Institut de Paléontologie Humaine in Paris before being sampled in 2013, the remains belonged to an adult woman who lived around 30,000 years ago near the Pyrenees.
Her genetic profile upends a longstanding paleontological mismatch. While the Gravettian culture—which spanned Europe from approximately 34,000 to 25,000 years ago—shared consistent tools and portable art across the continent, earlier genetic studies indicated that eastern and western populations lived in relative isolation from one another.
Most of the woman’s DNA aligned with western European hunter-gatherers, specifically the Fournol lineage. However, sophisticated genetic modeling revealed a distinct component tied to the ancestry of the Věstonice cluster from central and eastern Europe. Researchers calculated that this intermixing event occurred roughly between 32,500 and 31,500 years ago across the Ice Age landscape.
Our results show that eastern and western European populations were not as genetically isolated as previously assumed.
Pere Gelabert, researcher in the university’s Department of Evolutionary Anthropology
Gene flow across such large distances adds a new dimension to our understanding of how Gravettian populations were connected.
Pere Gelabert, researcher in the university’s Department of Evolutionary Anthropology
Reassessing Ice Age Mobility and Meeting Places in Western Europe
An international research team led by the University of Vienna published these findings in Science Advances, combining new genomic data from three individuals with previously published genomes and environmental DNA pulled from cave sediments. Beyond the Isturitz sample, reanalysis of a previously studied individual from Ormesson, France, revealed a similar mixed-ancestry signal that challenged existing models.
Archaeologists suggest that Isturitz Cave may have functioned as a meeting place for different groups. Its geographic position at the western gateway of the Pyrenees point to a gathering place where disparate groups exchanged goods, information, and social partners over many generations.
At the same time, regional ancestry held remarkably steady in certain areas. Genetic data extracted from a tooth at Chufín Cave in northern Spain demonstrated that local western lineages persisted in the region for millennia without total population replacement.
Sedimentary DNA Unlocks Genetic Secrets Where Human Bones Are Missing
When physical skeletal remains are absent, paleogeneticists are increasingly turning to cave dirt. At El Mirón Cave in Cantabria, Spain, researchers bypassed the need for teeth or bones entirely, extracting human nuclear DNA directly from a sediment layer dated to roughly 22,000 years ago.
Recovering usable signals from environmental samples required rigorous filtering and sequencing to isolate about 14,000 genetic markers. This genetic material matched the Fournol lineage, proving that this western population survived the severe climate pressures of the Last Glacial Maximum and supporting the theory that the Iberian Peninsula served as a refuge during those years.
Sedimentary DNA allows us to recover genetic information from periods where human remains are missing,
Ron Pinhasi, senior author, Vienna’s Department of Evolutionary Anthropology
This gives us a way to connect archaeological layers with the genetic ancestry of the people who occupied a site.
Ron Pinhasi, senior author, Vienna’s Department of Evolutionary Anthropology