Oldest British DNA reveals mass immigrations after last ice age

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https://www.science.org/content/article/oldest-british-dna-reveals-mass-immigrations-after-last-ice-age

By Andrew Curry, Science Magazine. 

Excerpt: Genetic material recovered from two caves suggests climate change brought into new cultures and lifestyles. ...reindeer hunters etched designs onto human bones and drank out of carved human skulls about 15,000 years ago. A few hundred kilometers to the north, people living just a few hundred years later lived on freshwater fish and marine animals, laying their dead to rest in a cavern with decorated horse bones and bear-tooth pendants. Archaeologists had long thought these cultural shifts reflected people developing new tools and beliefs after the last ice age 18,000 years ago. But new evidence from the oldest known DNA from the British Isles shows the two sets of cave dwellers had dramatically different ancestry. These sweeping cultural changes weren’t signs of Great Britain’s first postglacial people adapting—they were signs of entirely new people altogether. ...As the climate warmed, open tundra quickly gave way to thick forests. Melting ice sheets opened up new areas for human habitation, including what is today Great Britain, which was then connected by a land bridge to mainland Europe. A genetic analysis from two English caves, published today in Nature Ecology & Evolution suggests that as the landscape changed, populations shifted, too, with groups bringing new cultural practices, diets, and hunting strategies with them while replacing or pushing out previous populations.… 

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