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06 November 2014

European genetic identity stretches back tens of thousands of years

There is a surprising genetic unity between the earliest known Europeans and contemporary Europeans, ancient DNA reveals. This finding suggests that a complex network of sexual exchange may have existed across Europe over the past 50,000 years, and also helps to pinpoint when modern humans interbred with Neanderthals, the closest extinct relatives of modern humans, the researchers said.

http://www.livescience.com/48660-ancient-dna-europeans-origin.html

The origin of contemporary Europeans continues to be debated. The modern human ancestors of contemporary Eurasians are believed to have left Africa about 50,000 to 60,000 years ago, but how these earliest Eurasians contributed to the modern European gene pool remains unclear.
 
To shed light on the origins of modern Europeans, scientists analyzed DNA from the left shinbone of a skeleton, known as K14, which was excavated in 1954. K14 is one of the oldest fossils of a European modern human — a man who lived between 36,200 and 38,700 years ago in the area that's now Kostenki, in western Russia. That region is known for its mammoth structures, "circles made of mammoth bones that would have been the base of tents, huts, hearths, lithic and bone artifacts, as well as personal ornaments and figurines," said study co-author Marta Mirazón Lahr, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Cambridge in England.