![\"Ancient](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/ice-age-europeans-gravettian-1.jpg\")
<\/a>Cave of Isturitz, the cavity in which the bone of a Gravettian woman was found. Credit: Severine Dabadie<\/p>\nThe study appears in Science Advances and combines genome data from rare human remains with human DNA recovered from cave sediment.<\/p>\n
The Gravettian culture<\/a> spread across Europe from about 34,000 to 25,000 years ago. Artifacts from many sites pointed to wide contact between regions, and archaeologists have long argued for shared tools and trade across great distances. Earlier genetic work told a different story and showed two fairly stable ancestry groups, one in the east and one in the west. The new data change this picture.<\/p>\n A woman from Isturitz Cave in southwestern France lived around 30,000 years ago. Her genome-wide data is the oldest from a modern human in southwestern Europe. Most of her ancestry matched the western European line, but she also carried ancestry tied to groups from central and eastern Europe. Genetic models date this mixing to between 32,500 and 31,500 years ago. A person from Ormesson, France, studied earlier, shows a similar signal. First author Pere Gelabert says eastern and western Europeans were less isolated than researchers assumed. Gene flow across such distances adds a new layer to how scholars see Gravettian ties. Together with archaeological finds, the results suggest Isturitz served as a meeting place for different groups.<\/p>\n The team also found long-term roots in the southwest. Genomes from Chuf\u00edn Cave in northern Spain show western ancestry stayed in the region for thousands of years. At El Mir\u00f3n Cave<\/a> in Cantabria, the researchers pulled enough human nuclear DNA from a 22,000-year-old layer to read ancestry, even though no human bones or teeth turned up there. They recovered about 14,000 genetic markers from the sample. The DNA matched the Fournol lineage and shows this line lasted through the Last Glacial Maximum<\/a>, from roughly 26,500 to 19,000 years ago. This supports the idea of the Iberian Peninsula as a refuge during those years.<\/p>\n Senior author Ron Pinhasi says sediment DNA gives researchers a way to recover genetic information when human remains are missing, and to link archaeological layers to the ancestry of the people who lived at a site.<\/p>\n In southern Italy, the team studied Ostuni1b, a male fetus and likely the son of Ostuni1, a woman studied before. His father likely came from the same genetic group, yet the parents were not closely related. This points to mating habits that kept inbreeding low. Earlier models assumed steady local ancestry from the Aurignacian to the Solutrean, about 24,000 to 19,000 years ago, and the new results challenge them.<\/p>\n Taken together, the findings show regional groups stayed rooted in place while genes still moved across long distances. Gelabert\u2019s team now combines sediment DNA with protein studies to trace the first expansions of modern humans across Europe and their interactions with carnivores at sites where organic remains are scarce.<\/p>\n Publication: Gelabert, P., Sawyer, S., Villalba-Mouco, V., Cheronet, O., Oberreiter, V., G\u00e1rate, D., \u2026 Pinhasi, R. (2026). Early Gravettian genomic data from Western Europe reveal population movements before the LGM. Science Advances, 12(43). doi:10.1126\/sciadv.aeh6128<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"People who lived in Europe more than 30,000 years ago were more connected than scientists believed. A team…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":663874,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[116715,179531,281020,34375,61,60,208473,63708,82],"class_list":["post-663873","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-archaeogenetics","tag-bioarchaeology","tag-gravettian","tag-ice-age","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-osteoarchaeology","tag-paleolithic","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/663873","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=663873"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/663873\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/663874"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=663873"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=663873"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=663873"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a>Genomic data from four new individuals from Gravettian and Solutrean cultures. Credit: P. Gelabert et al., Science Advances (2026)<\/p>\n