Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past

by David Reich

The data once again showed a correspondence between the archaeological culture and genetic discoveries, documenting the spread of people into central Europe who were not directly descended from the Gravettians who had preceded them. There was also a surprise: most of the ancestry of individuals associated with the Magdalenian culture came from the sublineage represented by the thirty-five-thousand-year-old individual from Belgium who was associated with Aurignacian tools but who was later succeeded at the same site by people who used Gravettian tools and carried DNA similar to others in Europe associated with that culture of eastern European origin. Here was yet another ghost population that contributed to later groups in mixed form. The Aurignacian lineage had not died out, but instead had persisted in some geographic pocket, possibly in western Europe, before its resurgence at the end of the ice age.