DNA Shows That Modern Europeans Can Be Traced Back To Belgians

By R. Siva Kumar - 06 May '16 10:03AM

DNA samples collected in the last ice age showed that Europeans, at a particular point in time, descended from early humans who lived in Belgium. With Genome analysis, it was also shown that the remote ancestors underwent a number of evolutionary changes in the Ice Age as well as a few thousand years after the frozen era.

According to modernreaders.com, experts conclude that natural selection has helped to make Europeans' Neanderthal ancestry less obvious. They have analysed genomes from 51 people who existed between 45,000 years to 7,000 years ago.

Hence, experts gathered information on skin color, eye color and their relationships to each other. Revealing the patterns of migration, scientists said that these movements were rather complicated.

They also found that about 37,000 to 14,000 years ago, different European populations were descendants of a founder group from Belgium.

With rising temperatures in Europe about 19,000 years ago, a number of continents got freed from widespread ice sheets. With the disappearance of the frozen cover, human populations from modern-day Spain moved towards the north, while 5,000 years later, another group of people began to travel from southeastern Europe into the northern and western regions.

Those who entered from Greece and Turkey pushed away the earlier population, Tech Times reported.

Scientists traced the last major ice age as having peaked about 35,000 and 19,000 years before the modern day ended about 12,000 years ago. The ice cover extended as far south as northern France. "The ability to obtain genome-scale data from ancient bones is a new technology that's only been around for the last five or six years. It's a new scientific instrument that makes it possible to look at things that have not been looked at before," said David Reich of the Harvard Medical School.

Hence, humans entered Europe about 45,000 years before the modern age. It was a migration that spelt the end of the Neanderthals.

The Europeans studied seemed to show lineages that were traced back to a population living 37,000 years ago in what was later called Belgium. A new population arrived in Europe 14,000 years ago, traveling from the east, to displace this population.