A genome recovered from a woman buried roughly 30,000 years ago at Isturitz Cave in southwestern France — the oldest modern-human genome yet sequenced from that part of Europe — shows a detectable genetic signature from populations living hundreds of miles to the east, evidence that Gravettian-culture communities stayed in contact across distances once assumed to have isolated them.
The woman's ancestry is mostly western European hunter-gatherer, but researchers modeled a mixing event with central and eastern European groups to between 32,500 and 31,500 years ago, University of Vienna geneticists Pere Gelabert and Ron Pinhasi report in a study published in Science Advances. The team sequenced genomes from four individuals spanning the Gravettian and Solutrean cultures as part of a broader push to map population movement across Ice Age Europe.
Reading DNA from dirt, not bones
At El Mirón Cave in Cantabria, Spain, the same team recovered roughly 14,000 genetic markers from 22,000-year-old sediment where no human bones survived, using a technique that extracts ancient DNA directly from dirt. The sediment genome matched the "Fournol" lineage already known from Iberia, reinforcing the idea that the peninsula served as a refuge during the Last Glacial Maximum, roughly 26,500 to 19,000 years ago. A third site, Ostuni in southern Italy, yielded a genome from a male fetus whose parents were not closely related — suggesting mating practices that limited inbreeding, and complicating earlier models that assumed steady, localized ancestry through the Aurignacian and Solutrean periods.
Sediment DNA gives researchers a way to recover genetic information when human remains are missing.
Ron Pinhasi, University of Vienna
The researchers caution that framing Isturitz as a literal "meeting place" between distant populations is an inference supported by, but not proven by, the archaeological record alone. The team's next step is to combine sediment DNA recovery with ancient-protein analysis, hoping to trace the expansion of modern humans across Europe in finer detail than bone remains alone allow.
