DNA Reveals ‘Fourth Strand’ Of European Ancestry In Ancient Tribe, Researchers Say

“The Caucasus hunter-gatherer ancestry is the best match we’ve found for the European genetic component found right across modern Indian populations”, Jones said.

Research shows Europeans are a mixture of three major ancestral populations- indigenous hunters, Middle Eastern farmers and a population that arrived from the east in the Bronze Age.

DNA from ancient samples is notoriously hard to work with as it degrades over time and has often vanished before researchers are able to analyze it. The cool, dry environments found in caves can be excellent for DNA preservation and, by targeting cave sites, the researchers were able to recover the genomes of two individuals who lived in Georgia in the Caucasus 13,300 and 9,700 years ago. The second one includes the farmers who came 7,000 years ago from the Middle East. The last tribe was the one of herders who came from the region now belonging to Russian Federation and Ukraine 5,000 years ago.

“We can now answer that as we’ve found that their (the Yamnaya) genetic make-up is a mix of Eastern European hunter-gatherers and a population from this pocket of Caucasus hunter-gatherers who weathered much of the last Ice Age in apparent isolation”.

Researchers may have uncovered a previously unknown “fourth strand” of ancient European ancestry.

Recent scientific advances have allowed researchers to retrieve and analyze genomes from ancient burials. One was over 13,000 years old and the other was nearly 10,000 years old.

Conducted by a team of researchers from Cambridge University, Trinity College Dublin and University College Dublin, the study is published in the journal Nature Communications.

To put into terms the life that these people would have led, their existence as hunter-gatherers would have been shortly after the melting of the ice sheets that followed the ending of the Ice Age and thousands of years before humans began organised agriculture.

Past studies of Eurasian genomes had only revealed three major DNA strands still present in modern-day Europeans.

Just as significantly they brought the Caucasus strand of hunter-gatherer DNA, a strand now present in virtually all populations from Europe.

Genetic study shows ancient populations of hunter-gatherers sheltering in the Caucasus Mountains during the ice age contributed to a significant portion of the genome of modern Europeans.

“We knew that the Yamnaya had this big genetic component that we couldn’t place, and we can now see it was this ancient lineage hiding in the Caucasus during the last Ice Age”, said Manica. Now, however, DNA from the remains of the Caucasus has revealed a fourth population that adds to the genetic mix.

Researchers also thought this strand of ancestry may also have been associated with the spread of Indo-European languages to the region.

A global team led by scientists in Trinity College Dublin, University College Dublin and Cambridge University, has, for the first time, sequenced ancient genomes from the Late Upper Palaeolithic period.

One of the two sets of remains came from the Kotias Klde cave near the village of Sveri in western Georgia and the other remains came from about 25 miles (40 km) away in the Satsurblia cave near the village of Kumistavi, Tengiz Meshveliani of the Georgian National Museum said.