Humans escaped Europe’s deep freeze
The Genomic Make-Up of a Forest in Greenland Revealed by Ancient DNA in the Goyet Cave System
Instead, a landmark 2016 study3 identified a genetic signature in 35,000-year-old remains from the Goyet cave system in Belgium, which persisted in hunter-gatherer populations that lived tens of thousands of years later. Aurignacian artefacts are a Europe wide material culture known for its elaborate cave-wall art and figurines.
Two million years ago, a snapshot emerged of Kap Kbenhavn, when the team matched these sequences to databases of genomes from modern plants and animals. The researchers did not expect to find forests of wood at lower latitudes, such as those of yew and poplar trees, and shrubs such as sedges, when they studied the genetic make-up of the trees in Greenland.
The detailed animal life of Kap Kbenhavn included animals from reindeer and mastodons, extinct relatives of elephants, as well as rodents, geese and rabbits. According to Willerslev, the paleontologists think that deer shouldn’t have existed at that time. Mastodons were thought to have lived in North American forests, and their remains have never been found in Greenland.
“It’s pretty awesome,” adds Love Dalén, a palaeogeneticist at the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm who was not involved in the study. “Not in a million years would you expect a mastodon up there.”
“You would have expected such gigantic animals to be hard to miss in the fossil record,” says Ludovic Orlando, an ancient-DNA specialist at the Centre for Anthropobiology and Genomics of Toulouse in France. There are findings which show the potential of ancientDNA to reveal insights about the past.
As it turned out, some of those samples had been sitting in a freezer in Copenhagen since 2006, when Willerslev visited northern Greenland looking for ancient human remains. While there, the team collected sediment from the region’s Kap København Formation, a 100-metre-thick deposit of frozen mud and sand that built up around 2 million years ago.
A Big Empty Spot on the Iberian Peninsula Wasn’t a Refuge for Hunter-Gaterers in Europe
Willerslev thinks the work his team is doing could point out how climate change will affect future ecosystems. He says that in these organisms our ability to adapt in composition and range is not something we can predict.
The two studies suggest that the Iberian Peninsula was a refuge for hunter-gatherers as the climate cooled and glaciers ensconced northern Europe. The same genetic signature that was found in Goyet 35,000 years ago still shows up after Europe’s climate warmed.
A man from a site in southern Spain was found to have Goyet ancestry, as reported by Nature Ecology and Evolution2 on March 1.
The genealogy was traced back to sites in northern Spain and southwestern France. These sites are linked to another culture called the Solutrean.
Instead, they descend from people who saw out the coldest periods in southeastern Europe, probably in the Balkans, says Posth. There is currently no ancient DNA from this period to confirm that hunch, he adds, leaving a “big empty spot on the map”.
Colin Wren, an archaeologist at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs, says those findings confirm his own work, suggesting that ice-age Italy was less hospitable to humans than was Iberia4. Italy was once connected to Croatia by a now-submerged plain, so it makes sense that eastern hunter-gatherers moved in, he adds.
The studies paint a dynamic picture of European hunter-gatherer populations, which don’t always line up with cultural shifts, says Natasha Reynolds, a palaeolithic archaeologist at the University of Bordeaux, France. They also show that, for parts of Europe at least, the coldest period of the ice age wasn’t as inhospitable as it’s often made out to be. She states that people weren’t just huddling in caves waiting for the glaciers to retreat.
