"Unknown lineage of ice age Europeans discovered" Topic

… in genetic study

"A previously unknown lineage of Europeans survived the coldest parts of the last ice age, only to vanish when Europe went through a warm spell starting about 15,000 years ago.

The discovery comes from the largest study yet to look at the genetic makeup of ice age European hunter-gatherers.

For most of the past 100,000 years, glaciers covered much of Europe. Starting about 45,000 years ago, hunter gatherers began arriving in Europe from Africa through the near East, toughing it out during the Last Glacial Maximum (roughly 25,000 to 19,000 years ago), the coldest part of the last ice age…"

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Armand

I am by no means well educated enough to understand all the ins and outs of this research. However, I'll throw my 2 cents in anyway. :-)

According to the article; "To shed light on this ancient time, scientists have now collected the largest known database of prehistoric European hunter-gatherer genomes. They analyzed the genomes of 356 ancient hunter-gatherers who lived between 35,000 and 5,000 years ago in what are now 34 countries across Eurasia. This included new data from 116 individuals."

It seems to me that using 356 samples to judge what went on over 100,000 years seems to be stretching things more than a bit. How can you generalize what went on with an entire continent's inhabitants over 100,000 years with only 356 samples? It seems to be way too small of a sample to make definative statements.

It seems to be way too small of a sample to make definative statements.

Which is why science does not make definitive statements about point estimates, it makes qualified statements about ranges of activities.

10K year granularity doesn't seem like an overly specific claim in this context. Nor does the existence of more than one distinct genetic group within is identified as a single culture. The existence of something doesn't take a lot of empirical evidence. I mean, it exists.

Something like the assertion that "over the course of 20K years across millions of square km of European lands the proportion of those two groups was 50%-50%" or "the proportion shifted from 80%-20% to 20%-80%" or even "there were no other genetically distinct groups" would certainly require lots more data. I just skimmed, but I didn't see any claims like that latter ones.

Usually the problem I see in science articles (as opposed to papers or studies) is the omission of context, qualifiers, and assumptions and also the over assertion or implication of specificity where it didn't exist in the actual research.

Glup!

Armand