DNA and the Origins of Europeans

Submitted by coldrum on Saturday, 19 June 2010 Page Views: 1714

Recent research into mtDNA haplogroup U5 and the Origins of Europeans. There’s a lot of circumstantial evidence that mtDNA haplogroup U5 was brought to Europe by the first anatomically modern populations. Though this haplogroup is extant around frequencies of ~10% in modern European populations, with the highest proportions in northern Fenno-Scandinavia and the east Baltic region, extractions of DNA from hunter-gatherer remains in northern Europe yield very high proportions of this lineage.

This is not totally surprising, in the early aughts Bryan Sykes wrote a book, The Seven Daughters of Eve, and correctly pointed out that the coalescence for the U5 lineages is very deep in Europe, suggesting that it has had a lot of time to diversify. Sykes’ main thesis though was that most of the genetic heritage of Europe predates the expansion of Neolithic farmers within the last 10,000 years. The rough implication was that ~80% of the ancestry of modern Europeans could be derived from people who were resident within the modern boundaries of the continent of Europe during the last Ice Age.

But Ancient DNA extractions and more thorough analyses of modern population variation are muddling the picture somewhat. Some of the lineages which were presumed to be Paleolithic, such as R1b, may not be so. But the fact remains that we do know that modern humans began to settle Europe within the last 40,000 years, and extirpated the Neandertals within 10,000 years of their initial arrival. Unless those initial populations were totally replaced, there has be a very ancient lineage which dates to the Paleolithic, and in particular the Ice Age. U5 is the mtDNA lineage which is the best candidate, and its frequencies within modern European populations may be a clue to who the real “aboriginals” are. For example, the Sami have very high frequencies of U5, which may be ironic in light of theses that the Finnic populations of the Baltic are hybrids between populations from eastern Eurasia and native Scandinavian groups (the other group which high frequencies of U5 are Basques).

In any case, that is why U5 is of some interest, though the “golden age” of mtDNA & Y studies is probably in the past. A new paper in PLoS one surveys central and eastern European groups, , The Peopling of Europe from the Mitochondrial Haplogroup U5 Perspective:

More at Discovery Magazine.

Contributor Bio for coldrum: Based in Milkyway, contributing since 2002. Favourite site: Avebury.

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