Everywhere you look these days the population genetics folks are talking about three populations. Wait, what? I must have missed something. I thought there were only two populations in Europe. The older hunter gatherers who were the original population from the Paleolithic, or Old Stone Age, and the newer invaders who overran them in the Neolithic, or New Stone Age.
But no. It’s more complicated than that. Or it is now, anyway.
“First came the hunters. Then the farmers. Ancient DNA is now revealing how a very different group joined them from the east to lay Europe’s foundations.“
One thing about DNA research, if you’re going to bet on an answer always bet that it’s more complicated than we thought.
- Colin Baras, The three ancestral tribes that founded Western civilisation (July 1, 2015) at NewScientist.com.