Modern Europeans descended from three prehistoric races, say Spanish researchers
Friday, September 26, 2014 @ 8:07 PM
TODAY'S Europeans are a mix of genes from three populations of early humans, not two, according to a study jointly involving two Spanish universities.
The research, published in the magazine Nature, explains how it has always been assumed that modern-day Europeans are a combination of the hunter-gatherers and the earliest agricultural farmers.
But the Institute of Evolutive Biology at Barcelona's Pompeu Fabra University, together with researchers from the University of Santiago de Compostela in the north-western region of Galicia, have found that a third 'species' of human is included in the modern genetic makeup.
This is a race which as yet has not been named, but which extended across the north of Eurasia - what would now be the eastern Baltic states and Russia - arriving in central Europe later than the early land-farmers.
Agriculture and domestication of animals started in the Near East about 11,000 years ago, leading to sedentary land-farmers migrating across Europe and western Asia, eventually substituting the hunter-gatherer race.
Their population increased and they began to settle down, forming large cities and societies of varied and complex cultural features, says the paper.
Read more at thinkSPAIN.com