A 30,000-Year-Old Woman's DNA Points to Ice Age Genetic Links Across Europe

A woman who lived near the western end of the Pyrenees some 30,000 years ago carried in her genome a trace of people from far to the east. Most of her ancestry looked like that of western European hunter-gatherers. A smaller share tied her to populations associated with central and eastern Europe. That mix, reported in Science Advances by an international team led by the University of Vienna, suggests the Ice Age landscape was more connected than earlier genetic work had indicated.

The study concerns the Gravettian, an archaeological culture spread across Europe roughly 34,000 to 25,000 years ago. Similar tools, artworks and burial practices had long hinted at wide contacts. Earlier genomic studies, however, sorted Gravettian people into two broad ancestry groups: Fournol, dominant in western and southwestern Europe, and Věstonice, which included people from central Europe and Italy. Previous work had already found mixed ancestry in later individuals from Goyet Cave in Belgium, but evidence farther southwest was thin, partly because suitable human remains are scarce.

The woman came from Isturitz Cave in southwestern France, and her remains yielded what the team describes as the oldest genome-wide dataset from a modern human in southwestern Europe. Researchers recovered information at more than 454,000 variable positions in her DNA. Models placed her mainly in the western group, with an added contribution related to the ancestors of the Věstonice group. A reanalysis of an earlier individual from Ormesson, France, showed another mixed signal, extending the east-west connection beyond the Belgian pattern.

"Our results show that eastern and western European populations were not as genetically isolated as previously assumed," said first author Pere Gelabert of Vienna's Department of Evolutionary Anthropology. The finding concerns inherited ancestry, not proof that the woman herself traveled across Europe. The team estimated the mixing took place around 32,500 to 31,500 years ago, assuming a single pulse of gene flow. The comparable estimate for Ormesson did not reach statistical significance, so its timing is less secure. The researchers also allow that the eastern-related ancestry could be a deeper component already present in some western populations before the Gravettian; missing genomes from earlier southwestern Europeans keep them from settling the question. Isturitz, with its rich portable art and position near the Pyrenees, has long been read as a gathering place, but the genome cannot reconstruct particular meetings or routes.

The team also looked at an adult woman's tooth from Chufín Cave in northern Spain. Its DNA was badly degraded and gave far fewer usable markers, but it supported western-related ancestry in the region around 26,000 years ago.

At El Mirón Cave in Cantabria, researchers worked without bones at all. From sediment in a layer dated to about 22,000 years ago, they recovered traces of human nuclear DNA, which carries ancestry from both parents. Earlier sediment work at the cave had yielded only mitochondrial DNA, which follows maternal lines. For both the sediment and the Chufín tooth, the team kept only molecules showing characteristic ancient DNA damage, to screen out modern contamination. More than a billion sequencing reads ultimately produced 14,737 selected markers. Because the sediment held DNA from several people, the result is a mixed sample, not one person's genome. Senior author Ron Pinhasi said sedimentary DNA lets researchers recover genetic information from periods when human remains are missing and link archaeological layers to the ancestry of the people who occupied a site.

The El Mirón sample resembled other western European ancestry profiles. With the skeletal genomes and earlier research, it supports continuity of western ancestry from before 30,000 years ago into the Last Glacial Maximum, reinforcing the view that Iberia sheltered descendants of earlier western populations. That does not mean every community stayed put or held the same cave; continuity can survive movement, encounters and shifting contributions from different groups. Exchange, in other words, does not automatically mean a mass migration that replaced those already there.

In southern Italy, researchers also sequenced Ostuni1b, a male fetus identified as a first-degree relative of the previously studied woman Ostuni1, most likely her son. His father appears to have come from the same broad population as his mother, yet the genome showed no sign that his parents were closely related. That suggests partners were found within a population without close-kin mating, though it establishes no formal rules for Gravettian society.

The record remains sparse: only about 25 Gravettian-associated individuals informed the earlier genetic framework. Sediment samples could test for further episodes of mixing, and earlier deposits at Isturitz are especially promising for telling a Gravettian connection from a deeper inherited signal.