8,000 years of human adventure in the Iberian Peninsula
/Spotlight on Ancient Iberia
Largest-ever ancient DNA study of region spans 8,000 years
Stephenie Dutchen, Harvard Medicine News
The largest study to date of ancient DNA from the Iberian Peninsula (modern-day Portugal and Spain) offers new insights into the populations that lived in this region over the last 8,000 years. The most startling discovery suggests that local Y chromosomes were almost completely replaced during the Bronze Age.
Starting in 2500 B.C. and continuing for about 500 years, the analyses indicate, tumultuous social events played out that reshaped Iberians' paternal ancestry continuing to today.
“This is one of the strongest pieces of evidence in ancient-DNA research of sex bias in the prehistoric period,” said Iñigo Olalde, a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of David Reich at Harvard Medical School and first author of the study.
The work, published online in Science March 15 by a 111-person international team led by researchers at HMS and the Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Barcelona, Spain, also details genetic variation among ancient hunter-gatherers, documents intermingling of ancient Iberians with people from North Africa and the Mediterranean, and provides an additional explanation for why present-day Basques, who have such a distinctive language and culture, are also ancestrally different from other Iberians.
Some of the findings support or clarify what is known about the history and prehistory of Iberia, while others challenge them.
