>"Virtually all the major genetic components you find in contemporary Europeans are present among the earliest Europeans," said lead study author Eske Willerslev, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark.
>"I don't think many would have predicted this."
>The scientists discovered that for millennia, Europe may have been home to a so-called "metapopulation" of modern humans — a group of distinct, separate populations that regularly mixed, grew and fragmented.
>The genetic contributions of the earliest Eurasians to modern European populations may not have arrived through a few distinct migrations from Asia to Europe, but instead through gene flow in various directions.
>Indeed, the major components of the modern European genome may date farther back than scientists had thought, all the way to the Upper Paleolithic Era, between 50,000 and 10,000 years ago, the researchers said.
>The fact that there was genetic continuity during this span of time is remarkable because "this period corresponds to the most extreme climate modern human populations ever lived through, particularly pronounced in Europe," Mirazón Lahr told Live Science.
>"For 30,000 years, ice sheets came and went, at one point covering two-thirds of Europe," she said.
https://archive.is/s5C9X
>Here we use genome-wide data from European individuals to investigate these relationships over the past 3,000 years, by looking for long stretches of genome that are shared between pairs of individuals through their inheritance from common genetic ancestors. We quantify this ubiquitous recent common ancestry, showing for instance that even pairs of individuals from opposite ends of Europe share hundreds of genetic common ancestors over this time period.
https://archive.is/ZwQPZ