Genetic tests of ancient settlers' remains show that Europe is a melting
pot of bloodlines from Africa, the Middle East, and today's Russia.
The idea that there were once “pure” populations of ancestral Europeans,
there since the days of woolly mammoths, has inspired ideologues since
well before the Nazis. It has long nourished white racism, and in recent
years it has stoked fears about the impact of immigrants: fears that have
threatened to rip apart the European Union and roiled politics in the
United States.
Now scientists are delivering new answers to the question of who
Europeans really are and where they came from. Their findings suggest
that the continent has been a melting pot since the Ice Age. Europeans
living today, in whatever country, are a varying mix of ancient bloodlines
hailing from Africa, the Middle East, and the Russian steppe.
The evidence comes from archaeological artifacts, from the analysis of
ancient teeth and bones, and from linguistics. But above all it comes from
the new field of paleogenetics. During the past decade it has become
possible to sequence the entire genome of humans who lived tens of
millennia ago. Technical advances in just the past few years have made it
cheap and efficient to do so; a well-preserved bit of skeleton can now be
sequenced for around $500.
The result has been an explosion of new information that is transforming
archaeology. In 2018 alone, the genomes of more than a thousand
prehistoric humans were determined, mostly from bones dug up years
ago and preserved in museums and archaeological labs. In the process
any notion of European genetic purity has been swept away on a tide of
powdered bone.
Analysis of ancient genomes provides the equivalent of the personal DNA
testing kits available today, but for people who died long before humans
invented writing, the wheel, or pottery. The genetic information is
startlingly complete: Everything from hair and eye color to the inability to
digest milk can be determined from a thousandth of an ounce of bone or
tooth. And like personal DNA tests, the results reveal clues to the
identities and origins of ancient humans’ ancestors—and thus to ancient
migrations.
Three major movements of people, it now seems clear, shaped the
course of European prehistory. Immigrants brought art and music,
farming and cities, domesticated horses and the wheel. They introduced
the Indo-European languages spoken across much of the continent
today. They may have even brought the plague. The last major
contributors to western and central Europe’s genetic makeup—the last of
the first Europeans, so to speak—arrived from the Russian steppe as
Stonehenge was being built, nearly 5,000 years ago. They finished the
job.
In an era of debate over migration and borders, the science shows that
Europe is a continent of immigrants and always has been. “The people
who live in a place today are not the descendants of people who lived
there long ago,” says Harvard University paleogeneticist David Reich.
“There are no indigenous people—anyone who hearkens back to racial
purity is confronted with the meaninglessness of the concept.”
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