Modern Europeans descended from three groups of ancestors

19 Sep 2014, 11:15Jagran Post News Desk  Jagran Post Editorial   | Last Updated: 19 Sep 2014, 11:15

Hyderabad: A new study has shown that the present-day Europeans trace their ancestry to three and not two ancestral groups.

Representational picture

The first group is the indigenous hunter-gatherers; the second is Middle Eastern farmers who migrated to Europe around 7,500 years ago; and the third is a more mysterious population that spanned North Eurasia and which genetically connects Europeans and Native Americans, said the researchers from CSIR-Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) here.
   
"We find a major surprise: Europeans are a mixture of three ancient populations, not two," said David Reich from Harvard Medical School, one of the lead investigators.
   
The results were published in the prestigious science journal 'Nature' recently, CCMB said.

An international consortium led by researchers from the University of Tubingen and Harvard Medical School along with those from CCMB analyzed ancient human genomes from the bodies of a 7,000 year-old early farmer from the linearbandkeramik (LBK), a sedentary farming culture from Stuttgart in southern Germany; a 8,000 year old hunter-gatherer from the Loschbour rock shelter in Luxembourg, and seven 8,000 years old hunter-gatherers from Motala in Sweden.
   
To compare the ancient humans to the present-day people, the team also generated genome-wide data from about 2,400 humans from almost 200 diverse worldwide contemporary populations, including the enigmatic tribal population of Andaman and Nicobar Islands, said senior principal scientist at the CCMB Kumarasamy Thangaraj, one of the authors of the study.

The findings were published in the journal Nature.