Ancient genomes reveal social and genetic structure of Late Neolithic Switzerland

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Abstract

Genetic studies of Neolithic and Bronze Age skeletons from Europe have provided evidence for strong population genetic changes at the beginning and the end of the Neolithic period. To further understand the implications of these in Southern Central Europe, we analyze 96 ancient genomes from Switzerland, Southern Germany, and the Alsace region in France, covering the Middle/Late Neolithic to Early Bronze Age. Similar to previously described genetic changes in other parts of Europe from the early 3rd millennium BCE, we detect an arrival of ancestry related to Late Neolithic pastoralists from the Pontic-Caspian steppe in Switzerland as early as 2860–2460 calBCE. Our analyses suggest that this genetic turnover was a complex process lasting almost 1000 years and involved highly genetically structured populations in this region.

Abstract

European populations underwent strong genetic changes during the Neolithic. Here, Furtwängler et al. provide ancient nuclear and mitochondrial genomic data from the region of Switzerland during the end of the Neolithic and the Early Bronze Age that reveal a complex genetic turnover during the arrival of steppe ancestry.

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Most cited references 26

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

Iosif Lazaridis, Nick Patterson, Nick Patterson … (2015)

We sequenced genomes from a $\sim$7,000 year old early farmer from Stuttgart in Germany, an $\sim$8,000 year old hunter-gatherer from Luxembourg, and seven $\sim$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 $\sim$44% ancestry from a "Basal Eurasian" lineage that split prior to the diversification of all other non-African lineages.

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Massive migration from the steppe was a source for Indo-European languages in Europe

Wolfgang Haak, Iosif Lazaridis, Nick Patterson … (2015)

We generated genome-wide data from 69 Europeans who lived between 8,000-3,000 years ago by enriching ancient DNA libraries for a target set of almost 400,000 polymorphisms. Enrichment of these positions decreases the sequencing required for genome-wide ancient DNA analysis by a median of around 250-fold, allowing us to study an order of magnitude more individuals than previous studies and to obtain new insights about the past. We show that the populations of Western and Far Eastern Europe followed opposite trajectories between 8,000-5,000 years ago. At the beginning of the Neolithic period in Europe, ∼8,000-7,000 years ago, closely related groups of early farmers appeared in Germany, Hungary and Spain, different from indigenous hunter-gatherers, whereas Russia was inhabited by a distinctive population of hunter-gatherers with high affinity to a ∼24,000-year-old Siberian. By ∼6,000-5,000 years ago, farmers throughout much of Europe had more hunter-gatherer ancestry than their predecessors, but in Russia, the Yamnaya steppe herders of this time were descended not only from the preceding eastern European hunter-gatherers, but also from a population of Near Eastern ancestry. Western and Eastern Europe came into contact ∼4,500 years ago, as the Late Neolithic Corded Ware people from Germany traced ∼75% of their ancestry to the Yamnaya, documenting a massive migration into the heartland of Europe from its eastern periphery. This steppe ancestry persisted in all sampled central Europeans until at least ∼3,000 years ago, and is ubiquitous in present-day Europeans. These results provide support for a steppe origin of at least some of the Indo-European languages of Europe.

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Genomic insights into the origin of farming in the ancient Near East

Iosif Lazaridis, Dani Nadel, Gary Rollefson … (2016)

We report genome-wide ancient DNA from 44 ancient Near Easterners ranging in time between ~12,000-1,400 BCE, from Natufian hunter-gatherers to Bronze Age farmers. We show that the earliest populations of the Near East derived around half their ancestry from a ‘Basal Eurasian’ lineage that had little if any Neanderthal admixture and that separated from other non-African lineages prior to their separation from each other. The first farmers of the southern Levant (Israel and Jordan) and Zagros Mountains (Iran) were strongly genetically differentiated, and each descended from local hunter-gatherers. By the time of the Bronze Age, these two populations and Anatolian-related farmers had mixed with each other and with the hunter-gatherers of Europe to drastically reduce genetic differentiation. The impact of the Near Eastern farmers extended beyond the Near East: farmers related to those of Anatolia spread westward into Europe; farmers related to those of the Levant spread southward into East Africa; farmers related to those from Iran spread northward into the Eurasian steppe; and people related to both the early farmers of Iran and to the pastoralists of the Eurasian steppe spread eastward into South Asia.

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Author and article information

Contributors

Johannes Krause:

ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9144-3920

krause@shh.mpg.de

Journal

Journal ID (nlm-ta): Nat Commun

Journal ID (iso-abbrev): Nat Commun

Title: Nature Communications

Publisher: Nature Publishing Group UK (London )

ISSN (Electronic): 2041-1723

Publication date (Electronic): 20 April 2020

Publication date PMC-release: 20 April 2020

Publication date Collection: 2020

Volume: 11

Electronic Location Identifier: 1915

Affiliations

[1 ]ISNI 0000 0001 2190 1447, GRID grid.10392.39, Institute for Archaeological Sciences, Archaeo- and Palaeogenetics, , University of Tübingen, ; Tübingen, Germany

[2 ]ISNI 0000 0004 4914 1197, GRID grid.469873.7, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, ; Jena, Germany

[3 ]ISNI 0000 0004 1936 7304, GRID grid.1010.0, ARC Centre of Excellence for Mathematical and Statistical Frontiers, School of Mathematical Sciences, , The University of Adelaide, ; Adelaide, SA 5005 Australia

[4 ]ISNI 0000 0001 0726 5157, GRID grid.5734.5, Department of Physical Anthropology, Institute of Forensic Medicine, , University of Bern, ; Bern, Switzerland

[5 ]ISNI 0000 0001 0726 5157, GRID grid.5734.5, Institute of Archaeological Sciences, Prehistoric Archaeology, , University of Bern, ; Bern, Switzerland

[6 ]Archaeological Office of the District of Constance, Konstanz, Germany

[7 ]ISNI 0000 0001 2298 9313, GRID grid.5613.1, Department of history of arts and Archaeology, , University of Burgundy, ; Burgundy, France

[8 ]Museum of Archaeology Strasbourg, Strasbourg, France

[9 ]ISNI 0000 0001 2190 1447, GRID grid.10392.39, Institute for Archaeological Science, Palaeoanthropology, , Eberhard Karls University Tübingen, ; Tübingen, Germany

[10 ]State Office for Cultural Heritage Management Baden-Wuerttemberg, Konstanz, Germany

[11 ]Archaeological Service of the canton of Bern, Bern, Switzerland

[12 ]ISNI 0000 0001 2190 1447, GRID grid.10392.39, Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment, , University of Tübingen, ; Tübingen, Germany

[13 ]ISNI 0000 0004 1937 0650, GRID grid.7400.3, Institute of Evolutionary Medicine, , University of Zurich, ; Zurich, Switzerland

[14 ]ISNI 0000 0004 1936 973X, GRID grid.5252.0, Institut für Vor- und Frühgeschichtliche Archäologie und Provinzialrömische Archäologie, , Ludwig Maximilian University, ; Munich, Germany

[15 ]ISNI 0000 0001 0726 5157, GRID grid.5734.5, Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research, , University of Bern, ; Bern, Switzerland

Author information

A. B. Rohrlach http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4204-5018

Marianne Ramstein http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3101-7836

Philipp W. Stockhammer http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4702-9372

Albert Hafner http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2159-8569

Sandra Lösch http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3442-9764

Wolfgang Haak http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2475-2007

Stephan Schiffels http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1017-9150

Johannes Krause http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9144-3920

Article

Publisher ID: 15560

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-15560-x

PMC ID: 7171184

PubMed ID: 32313080

SO-VID: 9a910d5c-3ac2-4dd2-83e8-df3e3e9c0d28

License:

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

History

Date received : 12 August 2019

Date accepted : 13 March 2020

Funding

Funded by: FundRef https://doi.org/10.13039/501100004189, Max-Planck-Gesellschaft (Max Planck Society);

Funded by: FundRef https://doi.org/10.13039/501100001659, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation);

Award ID: KR 4015/4-1

Award Recipient : Johannes Krause

Funded by: FundRef https://doi.org/10.13039/100008661, Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften (Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities);

Award ID: Times of Upheaval

Award Recipient : Johannes Krause

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ScienceOpen disciplines: Uncategorized

Keywords: evolutionary genetics,population genetics,history

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ScienceOpen disciplines: Uncategorized

Keywords: evolutionary genetics, population genetics, history

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Ancient genomes reveal social and genetic structure of Late Neolithic Switzerland

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Most cited references 26

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

Massive migration from the steppe was a source for Indo-European languages in Europe

Genomic insights into the origin of farming in the ancient Near East

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Cited by 29

Most referenced authors 3,188