An international group of researchers, including specialists from several Russian institutes, came to the conclusion that there used to be at least three populations independent of each other in Europe. Details are contained in the article , which is posted in the preprint archive arxiv.org. The work has not yet been accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed publication.

The article, signed by authors from 70 different scientific institutions (including the Medical Genetic Research Center of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences and several other Russian organizations), is devoted to the analysis of DNA from the bones of nine people who lived in the territory of modern Germany, Luxembourg and Sweden about eight thousand years ago. Scientists were able to read the complete genomes of ancient Europeans and compare them with the sequences of 2,196 people from 185 different modern populations.

Geneticists have determined that the modern population of Europe has inherited genes from at least three independent populations that lived on the continent in the past. The first population was the Ancient North Eurasians, who are genetically closest to the people who inhabited Siberia at the end of the Paleolithic . The second were Western European hunter-gatherers: scientists found the remains of one of them on the territory of modern Luxembourg and it was his DNA that was used for analysis. The researchers emphasize that this group passed on genes to almost the entire population of modern Europe, but not to residents of the Middle East region. The third population was Eastern European farmers. They, on the contrary, came from the Middle East.

A two-dimensional diagram of the kinship of ancient people and some modern European and Asian ethnic groups.
Image: arXiv:1312.6639

The proportion of Northern Eurasian genes among modern European peoples is the lowest: most of the European DNA is inherited from the other two groups. The diagram presented in the scientists' work shows that the inhabitants of the Balkan Peninsula and its surroundings are slightly closer to Eastern European farmers, and the peoples of Western and Northern Europe carry more genes of Western European hunter-gatherers.

The development of DNA sequencing methods over the past decade and a half has turned genome reading from a unique project (the first genome cost several billion dollars) into a routine operation, the cost of which is already comparable to some clinical studies. In addition to reducing costs, scientists have also learned to work with ancient and therefore partially degraded DNA: the new study says that the DNA analyzed in some places contained more than 20 percent nucleotide substitutions. This complicated the analysis of the material, but at the same time confirmed its antiquity and the absence of modern contamination.

The ancestors of Europeans were divided into three populations