Ice Age Europeans On Brink Of Extinction

Angela

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Dienekes alerts us to a new study about Paleolithic and Mesolithic Europeans:
http://www.dienekes.blogspot.com/2015/03/ice-age-europeans-on-brink-of-extinction.html

"In some cases, small bands of potentially as few as 20 to 30 people could have been moving over very large areas, over the whole of Europe as a single territory, according to Professor Ron Pinhasi, principal investigator on the EU-funded ADNABIOARC project.

Prof. Pinhasi’s team has found that the genomes sequenced from hunter-gatherers from Hungary and Switzerland between 14 000 to 7 500 years ago are very close to specimens from Denmark or Sweden from the same period.

These findings suggest that genetic diversity between inhabitants of most of western and central Europe after the ice age was very limited, indicating a major demographic bottleneck triggered by human isolation and extinction during the ice age. "

Also, "

This demographic model is based on new evidence that suggests populations were much smaller than is generally thought to be a stable size for healthy reproduction, usually around 500 people. Such small groupings may have led to reduced fitness and even extinctions. "

Was it in Loschbour that they found some real problems in terms of fitness?

Isn't there a major issue in the fact that there are no results from southeastern Europe? I know the Bean project was supposed to be doing this, but the only paper of which I'm aware is the Sandra Wilde paper on pigmentation. Do they have dibs on that area? Couldn't Reich and co get their hands on some specimens?
 
Mesolithic samples from southeastern Europe are completely absent right now. I also haven't seen a convincing analysis showing that any modern Y-DNA is likely to descend from Mesolithic southeastern Europeans. Testing samples from that time and place would definitely be one of the most valuable things that geneticists could do at the moment.
 
Haha; ironically, to change the subject a little; where Y-DNA Paleolithic/Mesolithic I2 is the most common in Europe (Sardinia/Bosnia and Herzegovina/Croatia) is ironically the locations in Europe that have some of the lowest; irreplaceable birth rates. Continental I, or I2; may eventually become obscure in Europe as a paternal lineage or die out in the future with the declining birth rate of Europe; and the re-population of R1a and R1b men.

This is probably what happened to even older European Y-DNA lineages like C or L.
 
It would be greatly surprising if there wasn't a bottle neck of population during Last Glacial Maximum in Europe.
 
So E-M81 is European too? It was not brought there by Berbers, Arabs, Moors or Levantine people? How old is E-M81? Did it evolve in Iberian peninsula with C6?

I always found the genetics of Spain to be quite unusual.

Apparently, this is the homeland of the first Neanderthals.
 
bottleneck, surely at the worst of the LGL but at mesolithic (immediatly with deglaciation we see in Western Central and even Northern Europe a multiplication of settlements and new human "modern" types seem arrived from far East so?
we lack serious samples fromeveywhere to say so affirmative things (it is not the first time we AND THE SCIENTIFIC COMMUNAUTY are laughed at by destiny!) -
the resurgence of apparently WHG autosomes among Europeans at Late Neolithic is something I think - and Mediterranea WHG are very badly known - I suppose exchanges existed at some scale about the 10000 >> 6000 BC in S-W Europe with more southern or southeastern lands - we have to handle with mtH1, mt-H3 and other things before to find vauable answers
 
bottleneck, surely at the worst of the LGL but at mesolithic (immediatly with deglaciation we see in Western Central and even Northern Europe a multiplication of settlements and new human "modern" types seem arrived from far East so?
we lack serious samples fromeveywhere to say so affirmative things (it is not the first time we AND THE SCIENTIFIC COMMUNAUTY are laughed at by destiny!) -
the resurgence of apparently WHG autosomes among Europeans at Late Neolithic is something I think - and Mediterranea WHG are very badly known - I suppose exchanges existed at some scale about the 10000 >> 6000 BC in S-W Europe with more southern or southeastern lands - we have to handle with mtH1, mt-H3 and other things before to find vauable answers

Has anyone ever checked for a correlation between those haplogroups and LP?
 
I had not yet - can welink LP to a population practizing stock breeding but not too skillful concerning cheese and milk derived products? I cannot say more about the matter
 
Thank you Angela!

This population size estimate based on genetics is pretty much in agreement with population size estimate based on archaeology:

I've found estimates of population of prehistoric Europe between ca. 42,000 and ca. 13,000 years ago:

http://www.ohll.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/pages/documents_Aussois_2005/pdf/Jean-Pierre_Bocquet-Appel.pdf

http://leherensuge.blogspot.com/2009/07/how-many-people-lived-in-paleolithic.html

It says that in period from 42 to 13 thousand years ago entire Europe had no more than ca. 28,000 - 73,000 people at a time (and perhaps much fewer - even just a few thousand - in some periods). I'm surprised as I imagined something closer to 100,000 - 200,000. But it also depends on where does Europe end and Asia begin. There is a map which shows that the largest population was in Southern France and Northern Iberia. This map (the one from first link) surprisingly suggests that the Balkans were almost uninhabited. But it is based on archaeology, maybe there is a bias resulting from fact that some regions are less thoroughly excavated, others more.

Periods of European prehistory:

Pop_Europe_2.png


Estimated population of Europe:

Pop_Europe.png


==============================

And here some estimates on Eurasian populations of Neanderthals and Homo Erectus:

Neanderthals (2nd link suggests they never exceeded 21,000 at one time; but 3rd link says the peak was 70,000):

http://blog.23andme.com/23andme-and...ons-dwindled-in-the-face-of-expanding-humans/

https://anthrogenetics.wordpress.com/tag/neanderthal/

http://www.quora.com/Are-there-esti...d-other-proto-humans-during-prehistoric-times

Homo Erectus in eastern Asia (there were never more than 35,000 of them at once, according to this link):

http://dispatchesfromturtleisland.blogspot.com/2011/11/how-many-homo-erectus-in-asia.html
 
Map by J. P. Bocquet-Appel showing estimated population size in four areas of Europe in Gravettian period
(note the Eastern European part of Gravettian north of the Black Sea - the Mal'ta boy was among their descendants):


http://www.ohll.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/pages/documents_Aussois_2005/pdf/Jean-Pierre_Bocquet-Appel.pdf

Gravettian.png


===================================

And here is a nice Czech website (in several languages) describing those archaeological periods (Aurignacian, Gravettian, etc.):

http://www.anthropark.wz.cz/

http://www.anthropark.wz.cz/aagalery.htm

Maps of Gravettian period:

Early Gravettian - "The map shows the area of Gravettian at the beginning of the Upper Palaeolithic era. The circles indicate some archaeologically important areas:"

http://www.anthropark.wz.cz/gravetta.htm

gravett209.JPG


People from Sungir (eastern part of Gravettian - area north of the Black Sea in two maps posted above):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zh0dbbBSa-k


The Gravettian of eastern Europe:
A man from Sungir (an applied reconstructional transformation):

gravet52.jpg


Portraits of a man and children from Sungir made according to their skulls:

gravet43.jpg


A portrait of an elderly man from Sungir (a reconstructional portrait according to a skull):

gravet26.jpg


Portraits of the children from Sungir
(reconstructional portraits according to the skulls and the original unique material from the double burial of the children):

gravet27.jpg
gravet28.jpg


A man from Sungir (a reconstructional transformation of the unique grave):

gravet50.jpg


A reconstructional transformation of the unique children’s double burial of Sungir:


gravet106.jpg


==========================

Pavlovian branch of Gravettian:

"Moravia, northern Austria and southern Poland, about 29,000 – 25,000 years ago. t he era of the great European cultures of the Northern-type hunters:"

http://www.anthropark.wz.cz/pavlova.htm

pavlov93.JPG


The Mal'ta-Buret' culture (late Gravettian) and Mal'ta boy (Y-DNA haplogroup R*) times:

http://www.ancestraljourneys.org/palaeolithicdna.shtml

"The map represents the borders of Europe after the glacial moved more in the North after the glacial maximum. The dashed line borders the area of the late Gravettian, the circle indicates the Mezin locality and the arrows points in the center of Siberia, in the middle of Asia and symbolises the locality of Mal'ta and Bureť:"

http://www.anthropark.wz.cz/postgravet_a.htm

postgravet10.JPG


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mal'ta-Buret'_culture

http://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2013/11/first-genome-of-upper-paleolithic-human.html




 
Men of Sungir (early Eastern European Gravettian) were ancestors of the Mal'ta boy (Late Gravettian immigrants in Siberia).

And the late Eastern Gravettian Mal'ta boy was of R haplogroup.

So the early Eastern Gravettian people of Sungir were the ultimate ancestors of R1 (thus R1a and R1b) and R2 haplogroups.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sungir

Sungir (also spelled Sunghir) is an Upper Paleolithic archaeological site in Russia and one of the earliest records of modern Homo sapiens in Europe. It is situated about 200 km east of Moscow, on the outskirts of Vladimir, near the Klyazma River. It is dated by carbon analysis to between 28,000 and 30,000 years ago. (...)

More about this from Anthropark website (made by the Academy of Sciences in Brno in 2005):

http://www.anthropark.wz.cz/gravetta.htm

"A boy and a girl in clothing resembling the clothing found in the graves in Sungir. The circle in the background is the bonnet of the girl with belemnite beads. The work shows a very rich cultural pattern of the kostěnkovsko-strelecká culture of the Sungir type:"

gravet11.jpg


"A Sungir family standing in front of a big house. This picture reflects the fact, that not only men, but even women and children were wearing decorated clothes (here are clothes decorated with patterns known from some Sungir artefacts). The dwelling in the background has a size of a dwelling of indigenous peoples of North America and could give a shelter for several families. The dwellings had quadratic or rectangular groudfloor shapes, which are known for a long time in Paleolithic (as these in Plateau Parain, France, and other Upper Paleolithic settlements in the USA.) It was not possible to use stakes because of the frozen ground (permafrost), therefore the people built the dwelling out of horizontally laid stocks:"

gravet10.jpg


"In Sungir, the groundfloor of the dwellings were of a rectangular shape and built in pairs. The Upper Paleolithic builders used the qualities of the available materials to achieve the results of massive winter dwellings, that could last a long time. They used the jowls of the mamooths (Meziříčí), mamooths skulls (Mezin), stones with antlers (Malta in Sibirien) and long mamooths bones to build oval or circular dwellings and flat massive timber that could be easy chopped for quadrate buildings. From the ethnography of indigenous people in North America, we know, that the people did not need axes or saws; all they needed was lithic tools, wooden wedges and lump hammers. The solid planks were chopped right from the standing trees. The decoration of the dwellings was representative, as well as the decorative clothing. A tomb with Sungarian children skeletons was discovered in the middle of one of the dwellings; the man was buried later. Than, another human remains were found nearby, probably from older burials. Therefore, this place is considered as a burial- place. Two other dwellings were built probably later and farther from the graves:"

gravet12.jpg


Looks like those European hunters already 30,000 years ago built more solid houses than people build in some parts of the world today.

===============================

Apart from being ancestors of Indo-Europeans and Dravidians, eastern Gravettians were also among ancestors of Native Americans:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mal'ta-Buret'_culture#Relationship_to_American_Indians_and_Europeans

Research published in 2014 suggests that a Mal'ta like people were important genetic contributors to the American Indians, Europeans, and South Asians but did not contribute to and was not related to East Eurasians. Mal'ta had a type of R* y-dna that diverged before the hg R1 and R2 split and an unresolved clade of haplogroup U mtdna.[3] Between 14 and 38 percent of American Indian ancestry may originate from gene flow from the Mal'ta Buret people, which is essentially western Eurasian in a modern sense, while the other geneflow in the Native Americans appears to have an Eastern Eurasian origin [4]

The genetic findings at Mal'ta may also help account for the Caucasian characteristics of Kennewick Man, a 9,000 year old skeleton discovered in the state of Washington. Mal'ta suggests that the Upper Paleolithic population of western Eurasia may have spread into Siberia and contributed to the physical characteristics of some early American Indians who were different from the East Asians who contributed most of the genetic heritage of the indigenous people of the Americas.[5]
 
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Portraits of the children from Sungir
(reconstructional portraits according to the skulls and the original unique material from the double burial of the children):

gravet27.jpg
gravet28.jpg

These are two different phenotype or races. The one on the right looks really modern European, and has very vertical forehead which showed up in Neolithic with farmers. The one on the left has much flatter nose and protruding forward jaw and mouth, more archaic in Europe. I would be surprised to see them in one tribe.
 
Men of Sungir (early Eastern European Gravettian) were ancestors of the Mal'ta boy (Late Gravettian immigrants in Siberia).

And the late Eastern Gravettian Mal'ta boy was of R haplogroup.

So the early Eastern Gravettian people of Sungir were the ultimate ancestors of R1 (thus R1a and R1b) and R2 haplogroups.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sungir




gravet12.jpg


Looks like those European hunters already 30,000 years ago built more solid houses than people build in some parts of the world today.

===============================

Apart from being ancestors of Indo-Europeans and Dravidians, eastern Gravettians were also among ancestors of Native Americans:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mal'ta-Buret'_culture#Relationship_to_American_Indians_and_Europeans

Are you sure people knew how and had adequate tools to build log houses 30 ky ago?
 
Men of Sungir (early Eastern European Gravettian) were ancestors of the Mal'ta boy (Late Gravettian immigrants in Siberia).

And the late Eastern Gravettian Mal'ta boy was of R haplogroup.

So the early Eastern Gravettian people of Sungir were the ultimate ancestors of R1 (thus R1a and R1b) and R2 haplogroups.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sungir



More about this from Anthropark website (made by the Academy of Sciences in Brno in 2005):

http://www.anthropark.wz.cz/gravetta.htm

I know the site.
It is an artist who studied the artefacts found on archeological sites well.
But then he lets his fantasy flow and makes this kind of artwork which he sells.

There is no prove at all that Sungir is ancestral to Mal'ta, nor of any migration that far east.
Sungir is a Gravettian site.
Gravettian is I, and entered Europe 33000 years ago after crossing the Caucasus.
They expanded north and west and replaced Aurignacian, who were C-V20. La Brana was one of their latest survivers.
Gravettians were better hunters, but their main advantage was better clothing keeping them warm. (they had needles, which Aurignacians didn't have)
I'm sure Gravettian population was much denser than Aurignacian, but when the ice age came, population decreased again.
Gravettian was all over Europe, but only 7 tribes from ice age (at least 20.000 years old) still live today : I1, I2b/c, I2a2a, I2a2b, I2a1b, I2a1a1 and I2a1a2.
Of course, more than 7 tribes survived ice age, but many got extinct from competition amongst I tribes in the Mesolithic, and later with arrival of Neolithic farmers and of Indo-Europeans.
 
Gravettian was all over Europe, but only 7 tribes from ice age (at least 20.000 years old) still live today : I1, I2b/c, I2a2a, I2a2b, I2a1b, I2a1a1 and I2a1a2.

Mal'ta boy from Siberia was late Gravettian - haplogroup R. Ancestor of R1a, R1b and R2.

Are you sure people knew how and had adequate tools to build log houses 30 ky ago?

If not people then who built those houses found by archaeologists - maybe some Aliens ???

Here is description:

"In Sungir, the groundfloor of the dwellings were of a rectangular shape and built in pairs. The Upper Paleolithic builders used the qualities of the available materials to achieve the results of massive winter dwellings, that could last a long time. They used the jowls of the mamooths (Meziříčí), mamooths skulls (Mezin), stones with antlers (Malta in Sibirien) and long mamooths bones to build oval or circular dwellings and flat massive timber that could be easy chopped for quadrate buildings. From the ethnography of indigenous people in North America, we know, that the people did not need axes or saws; all they needed was lithic tools, wooden wedges and lump hammers. The solid planks were chopped right from the standing trees. The decoration of the dwellings was representative, as well as the decorative clothing. A tomb with Sungarian children skeletons was discovered in the middle of one of the dwellings; the man was buried later. Than, another human remains were found nearby, probably from older burials. Therefore, this place is considered as a burial- place. Two other dwellings were built probably later and farther from the graves:"
 
There is no prove at all that Sungir is ancestral to Mal'ta, nor of any migration that far east.
Sungir is a Gravettian site.

Mal'ta is also a Gravettian site, only late Gravettian.

nor of any migration that far east.

Of course there is prove of that migration - read again:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mal'ta-Buret'_culture#Relationship_to_American_Indians_and_Europeans

"Research published in 2014 suggests that a Mal'ta like people were important genetic contributors to the American Indians, Europeans, and South Asians but did not contribute to and was not related to East Eurasians. Mal'ta had a type of R* y-dna that diverged before the hg R1 and R2 split and an unresolved clade of haplogroup U mtdna.[3] Between 14 and 38 percent of American Indian ancestry may originate from gene flow from the Mal'ta Buret people, which is essentially western Eurasian in a modern sense, while the other geneflow in the Native Americans appears to have an Eastern Eurasian origin [4]

The genetic findings at Mal'ta may also help account for the Caucasian characteristics of Kennewick Man, a 9,000 year old skeleton discovered in the state of Washington. Mal'ta suggests that the Upper Paleolithic population of western Eurasia may have spread into Siberia and contributed to the physical characteristics of some early American Indians who were different from the East Asians who contributed most of the genetic heritage of the indigenous people of the Americas.[5]"

Gravettian is I, and entered Europe 33000 years ago after crossing the Caucasus.

Haplogroup I is only between 25,000 and 30,000 years old, therefore it could NOT "enter Europe" 33,000 years ago:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_I-M170

33,000 years ago haplogroup I did not exist, at that time there was only IJ which is ancestral to both I and J:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_IJ
 
and later with arrival of Neolithic farmers and of Indo-Europeans.

Indo-Europeans did not "arrive". They emerged in eastern regions of Europe from its indigenous hunters.

New linguistic evidence is clear that homeland of Proto-IE language was near homeland of Proto-Uralic language:

http://historum.com/european-histor...y-europe-before-indo-european-expansions.html

Check also this - Proto-Nostratic was ancestral to both Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Uralic and Proto-Altaic:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostratic_languages
 
These are two different phenotype or races. The one on the right looks really modern European, and has very vertical forehead which showed up in Neolithic with farmers. The one on the left has much flatter nose and protruding forward jaw and mouth, more archaic in Europe. I would be surprised to see them in one tribe.

But they were members of one tribe - they could be even siblings (brother and sister).

Our modern views on phenotypes result from the fact that people with certain phenotypes propagated in certain geographic areas. But Paleolithic people did not cluster according to modern phenotypes, they had their own phenotypes which later further evolved:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...er_Paleolithic:_50.2C000_-_10.2C000_years_old

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hofmeyr_Skull

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hofmeyr_Skull#Analysis

"The Hofmeyr fossil was compared with skulls from Sub-Saharan Africa, including those of the KhoeSan, who are geographically close to the site of the find. Using 3-dimensional measurement and mapping techniques, the study found that the Hofmeyr Skull is rather distinct from those of recent Sub-Saharan Africans, and that its closest affinities were with the people who lived in Eurasia in the Upper Paleolithic period, at the same time as the Hofmeyr skull. Alan Morris said that the skull's owner "would not look like modern Africans or like modern Europeans, or like modern Khoisan people, but he is definitely a modern human being".[1] The skull demonstrates that humans in Africa 36,000 years ago resembled those in Eurasia."
 

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