Europe's Ice Age hunters had dark skin, light eyes, and live on in modern DNA
After the glaciers retreated, a population of hunters spread across Europe from Britain to the Carpathians. Ancient genomes suggest they probably had dark skin and pale eyes, lacking the gene variants behind the lighter skin common in Europe today. Farmers from Anatolia later swamped them, yet their ancestry survives, most strongly around the eastern Baltic.
Geneticists call this group Western Hunter-Gatherers, and a 2023 study proposed the name Oberkassel cluster after one of the oldest such skeletons found north of the Alps. They trace back to a late Ice Age population named for remains in Ripari Villabruna cave in northern Italy, which probably emerged near the Balkans. The earliest people of mostly Villabruna ancestry turn up in Italy around 17,000 years ago, though a woman from El Mirón cave in Spain, about 19,000 years old, already carried roughly 43% of it.
Roughly 14,000 to 12,000 years ago these groups pushed north and west, largely replacing the Magdalenian peoples, descendants of the Cro-Magnons who had lived in western Europe for more than 30,000 years. Compared with earlier European hunters, their genomes show a closer tie to populations of the Middle East, and one 2022 analysis dated their split from Middle Eastern and Caucasus hunters to about 26,000 years ago, at the height of the last glaciation. North of the Alps and in Britain the sampled individuals are strikingly uniform, while in Iberia repeated mixing with locals kept older lineages alive.
To the east lived Eastern Hunter-Gatherers, a blend of western-type ancestry and Ancient North Eurasians from Siberia; the boundary ran roughly from the lower Danube toward the western Baltic. Scandinavian hunters mixed both, with more western ancestry in eastern Scandinavia, around 62%, than in the west and north, about 51%. Most western hunter-gatherer men carried the Y-chromosome lineage I-M170, and most maternal lines belonged to U5.
In the early Neolithic, farmers of Anatolian origin spread across the continent and absorbed some local ancestry as they went. Most Europeans today can be modelled as a mix of these hunters, the early farmers and later herders from the Pontic–Caspian steppe. Eastern Baltic hunters never received the farmers' genes, which is why modern populations there carry the largest share.
Source: Western hunter-gatherer
