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

• Main Authors: Lipson, Mark (Contributor), Berger Leighton, Bonnie (Contributor)
• Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (Contributor), Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mathematics (Contributor)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Nature Publishing Group, 2017-06-22T22:21:00Z.
• Subjects: Article
• Online Access: Get fulltext

We sequenced the genomes of a ~7,000 year old farmer from Germany and eight ~8,000 year old hunter-gatherers from Luxembourg and Sweden. We analyzed these and other ancient genomes1-4 with 2,345 contemporary humans to show that most present 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) related to Upper Paleolithic Siberians3, who 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 ~44% ancestry from a "Basal Eurasian" population that split prior to the diversification of other non-African lineages.