Dual ancestries and ecologies of the Late Glacial Palaeolithic in Britain

Abstract

Genetic investigations of Upper Palaeolithic Europe have revealed a complex and transformative history of human population movements and ancestries, with evidence of several instances of genetic change across the European continent in the period following the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). Concurrent with these genetic shifts, the post-LGM period is characterized by a series of significant climatic changes, population expansions and cultural diversification. Britain lies at the extreme northwest corner of post-LGM expansion and its earliest Late Glacial human occupation remains unclear. Here we present genetic data from Palaeolithic human individuals in the United Kingdom and the oldest human DNA thus far obtained from Britain or Ireland. We determine that a Late Upper Palaeolithic individual from Gough's Cave probably traced all its ancestry to Magdalenian-associated individuals closely related to those from sites such as El Mirón Cave, Spain, and Troisième Caverne in Goyet, Belgium. However, an individual from Kendrick's Cave shows no evidence of having ancestry related to the Gough's Cave individual. Instead, the Kendrick's Cave individual traces its ancestry to groups who expanded across Europe during the Late Glacial and are represented at sites such as Villabruna, Italy. Furthermore, the individuals differ not only in their genetic ancestry profiles but also in their mortuary practices and their diets and ecologies, as evidenced through stable isotope analyses. This finding mirrors patterns of dual genetic ancestry and admixture previously detected in Iberia but may suggest a more drastic genetic turnover in northwestern Europe than in the southwest.

Fig. 1. Location, genetic ancestry and AMS date of individuals discussed within the text.

a, Map indicating the location of Pleistocene sites discussed within the text and the genetic ancestry of individuals analysed from them. b, NGRIP ice core δ¹⁸O values and INTIMATE event stratigraphy (North Greenland Ice Core Project members 2004; ref. ), genetic ancestry and date of individuals (IntCal20, 95% confidence interval of calibrated radiocarbon dates for directly dated humans). The Gough’s Cave and Höhle Fels specimens are not directly dated and therefore for Höhle Fels specimen the age range shown is the 95% confidence interval of calibrated radiocarbon dates from bones recovered from the same area/context. For the Gough’s Cave specimen, the age range shown is the Bayesian modelled site occupation start and end dates based on AMS dating of the human remains and humanly modified faunal remains (Supplementary Table 7).

Fig. 2. Principal component analysis (PCA) of ancient individuals.

PCA of 1,087 present-day West Eurasians genotyped on 597,573 SNPs (grey points) with 168 ancient hunter gatherers (Supplementary Table 3) from West Eurasia and North Africa older than ~7,000 cal. bp and with more than 30,000 SNPs projected onto the plane. PC1, principal component one; PC2, principal component two.

Fig. 3. Genetic clustering of ancient individuals, including Gough’s Cave and Kendrick’s Cave individuals, calculated as f₃(ancient1, ancient2; Mbuti).

Lighter colours correspond to higher f₃ values and indicate a higher shared genetic drift between pairs of ancient individuals/populations. The X-axis corresponds to ancient1 and the Y-axis to ancient2 individuals for the calculation f₃(ancient 1, ancient 2; Mbuti). The order of individuals is based on the hierarchical clustering of f₃ values, and ancient individuals included in this analysis are the same as those in Figure 2. Plotted f₃ values were calculated using ADMIXTOOLS as implemented in admixr.

Fig. 4. Modelling West Eurasian hunter-gatherer individuals (n = 26) as having a single-source or a two-source ancestry with qpAdm, using the lowest rank model.

The ~15,140-year-old Goyet Q2 individual from Belgium and the ~14,060-year-old Villabruna individual from Italy were used as potential sources. Within each geographical area (Central/Western Europe, Iberia and Britain) individuals are ordered on the basis of their chronological age from oldest to youngest. Standard errors (s.e.) were calculated using weighted block jackknife and a block size of 5 Mb. Here, s.e. indicates ±1 s.e.