A recent genetic analysis linked eight Stone Age farmer remains to modern day Basques. The findings reveal similar groups that migrated to northern and central Europe first brought farming to Iberia and mixed with local hunter-gather groups for two millennia.
Past studies have focused on the early days of central and northern Europe, but Iberia has been largely overlooked. To make these new findings a team of researchers looked at eight human remains from the El Portalón cave Anthropological site Atapuerca in northern Spain, Uppsala University reported.
"The El Portalon cave is a fantastic site with amazing preservation of [artifact] material," said Cristina Valdiosera of Uppsala University and La Trobe University, one of the lead authors. "Every year we find human and animal bones and artifacts, including stone tools, ceramics, bone [artifacts] and metal objects, it is like a detailed book of the last 10,000 years, providing a wonderful understanding of this period. The preservation of organic remains is great and this has enabled us to study the genetic material complementing the archaeology."
The ancient individuals looked at in the study likely walked the Earth between 3,500 and 5,500 years ago and shared a "similar story" with ancient farmers from central and northern Europe. Both originated from a southern wave of expansion and reproduced with hunter-gatherers while spreading their agricultural practices across the regions they migrated to. Despite these dramatic similarities, the groups of migrating farmers also had a few important differences.
"We show that the hunter-gatherer genetic component increases with time during several millennia, which means that later farmers were genetically more similar to hunter-gatherers than their forefathers who brought farming to Europe," said Torsten Günther of Uppsala University and one of the lead authors.
"We also see that different farmers mixed with different hunter-gatherer groups across Europe, for example, Iberian farmers mixed with Iberian hunter-gatherers and Scandinavian farmers mixed with Scandinavian hunter-gatherers." Valdiosera added.
The findings showed the El Portalón remains are genetically most similar to modern-day Basques, which helps explain the origins of their non-Indo-European language and unique genetic makeup.
"Our results show that the Basques trace their ancestry to early farming groups from Iberia, which contradicts previous views of them being a remnant population that trace their ancestry to Mesolithic hunter-gatherer groups," said Mattias Jakobsson of Uppsala University, who headed the study.
The findings were published in a recent edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
