Emily Chan
Near the French town of Troyes, the remains of a group of individuals were unburied from a 4,500-year-old tomb at Bréviandes-les-Pointes.
After a DNA analysis was conducted on the bones, researchers learned more about ancient human interbreeding. They discovered that the formation of the European genome is still found in Europeans today.
The genome of today’s Europeans was formed over the course of about 40,000 years due to periods of migrations and the mixing of various populations. It is made up of the hunter-gatherers who lived in Europe until people from the Anatolia and the Aegean regions arrived around 8,000 years ago.
These people descended from the inventors of agriculture and animal domestication in the Fertile Crescent. They interbred with the hunter-gatherers, creating a significant part of Europeans’ genome.
At the end of the Neolithic period, nomadic populations from the Pontic steppes north of the Black Sea traveled to Europe and contributed to a third of the genomic components that are part of present-day Europeans. The remains of ancient skeletons are tough to analyze since there are only a few fragmented bones left.
But, a team of researchers from the Institute Jacques Monod in Paris decided to tackle the challenge. They studied the genomes of seven individuals from the Bréviandes tomb.
The individuals were a woman who was older than age 60 at the time of her death; her son, who was between the ages of 20 and 39; her grandson, aged around four to eight; and the grandson’s mother, aged 20 to 39.
There was also a young woman aged 20 to 39, her newborn baby, and a child who was six to 10 years old. These last three individuals were not related to the others buried in the grave. The last child did not share any relation to the others at all.
The female individuals carried traits that were characteristic of populations from southern France and southwestern Europe, which could explain why they were buried together. In addition, the adult man’s genome was a mixture of the genome of nomadic steppe peoples from his father and French Neolithic origins from his mother.
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