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.
