Published in

Nature Research, Nature, 7518(513), p. 409-413, 2014

DOI: 10.1038/nature13673

Links

Tools

Export citation

Search in Google Scholar

Ancient human genomes suggest three ancestral populations for present-day Europeans

Journal article published in 2014 by Iosif Lazaridis, Nick Patterson, Alissa Mittnik, Gabriel Renaud, Swapan Mallick, Karola Kirsanow, Peter H. Sudmant, Joshua G. Schraiber, Sergi Castellano, Mark Lipson, Bonnie Berger, Christos Economou, Ruth Bollongino, Qiaomei Fu, Kirsten I. Bos and other authors.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

Full text: Download

Green circle
Preprint: archiving allowed
Upload
Orange circle
Postprint: archiving restricted
Upload
Red circle
Published version: archiving forbidden
Policy details
Data provided by SHERPA/RoMEO

Abstract

We sequenced genomes from a $∼$7,000 year old early farmer from Stuttgart in Germany, an $∼$8,000 year old hunter-gatherer from Luxembourg, and seven $∼$8,000 year old hunter-gatherers from southern Sweden. We analyzed these data together with other ancient genomes and 2,345 contemporary humans to show that the great majority of present-day Europeans derive from at least three highly differentiated populations: West European Hunter-Gatherers (WHG), who contributed ancestry to all Europeans but not to Near Easterners; Ancient North Eurasians (ANE), who were most closely related to Upper Paleolithic Siberians and contributed to both Europeans and Near Easterners; and Early European Farmers (EEF), who were mainly of Near Eastern origin but also harbored WHG-related ancestry. We model these populations' deep relationships and show that EEF had $∼$44% ancestry from a "Basal Eurasian" lineage that split prior to the diversification of all other non-African lineages.