Wagamaga OP t1_jbdzich wrote
Surprisingly, the research team found that populations from different regions associated with the Gravettian culture, which was widespread across the European continent between 32,000 and 24,000 years ago, were not closely related to each other. They were linked by a common archaeological culture: they used similar weapons and produced similar portable art. Genetically, however, the populations from western and southwestern Europe (today's France and Iberia) differed from contemporaneous populations from central and southern Europe (today's Czech Republic and Italy).
Furthermore, the gene pool of the western Gravettian populations is found continuously for at least 20,000 years: their descendants who are associated with the Solutrean and Magdalenian cultures stayed in southwestern Europe during the coldest period of the last Ice Age (between 25,000 and 19,000 years ago) and later spread north-eastward to the rest of Europe. "With these findings, we can for the first time directly support the hypothesis that during the Last Glacial Maximum people found refuge in the climatically more favourable region of southwestern Europe" says first author Cosimo Posth.
The Italian peninsula was previously considered to be another climatic refugium for humans during the LGM. However, the research team found no evidence for this, on the contrary: hunter-gatherer populations associated with the Gravettian culture and living in central and southern Europe are no longer genetically detectable after the LGM. People with a new gene pool settled in these areas, instead. "We find that individuals associated with a later culture, the Epigravettian, are genetically distinct from the area‘s previous inhabitants," says co-author He Yu. "Presumably, these people came from the Balkans, arrived first in northern Italy around the time of the glacial maximum and spread all the way south to Sicily."
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