Italy was not a climatic refuge but a dead end where the ancient prehistoric peoples who migrated towards south-western Europe about 20,000 years ago in an attempt to shelter themselves from the peak of the last glaciation found extinction.
This is demonstrated by the analysis of the DNA of 356 hunters and gatherers dating back to the period between 35,000 and 5,000 years ago, including 116 individuals found in 14 different countries of Europe and Central Asia.
The results, which rewrite the migratory movements of our ancestors, are published in Nature by an international team led by the Italian Cosimo Posth, a paleogeneticist at the University of Tübingen in Germany.
Several Italian universities also participated in the study, such as those of Florence, Bologna, Cagliari, Palermo, Padua, Pisa and Siena.
The study, based on the largest set of prehistoric European hunter-gatherer genomes ever, reveals that the populations that settled in Europe between 32,000 and 24,000 years ago (Gravettian culture) were not closely related to each other.
They used similar weapons and artifacts, but genetically the populations of western and southwestern Europe (modern France and the Iberian Peninsula) differed genetically from those of central and southern Europe (modern Czech and the Italy).
The gene pool of hunter-gatherers in the southwest persists continuously for at least 20,000 years: their descendants remained in southwestern Europe during the coldest period of the last ice age (between 25,000 and 19,000 years ago) giving rise to the culture Solutrean and Magdalenian, and later moved northeastwards into the rest of Europe.
"The hunter-gatherer populations associated with the Gravettian culture that were present in central and southern Europe, and in particular in Italy, disappeared after the most acute phase of the ice age, contrary to what has been thought up to now: this means that a new pool gene settled in these areas", explains David Caramelli, professor of Anthropology at the University of Florence,
"We found that individuals associated with a later culture, the Epigravettian, were genetically distinct from earlier inhabitants of the area," adds co-author He Yu of Peking University.
"Presumably, these people came from the Balkans, first arrived in northern Italy around the time of the Glacial Maximum and spread southward to Sicily."
Finally, the analyzed genomes show that the descendants of these Epigravettian inhabitants of the Italian peninsula spread throughout Europe about 14,000 years ago, replacing the populations associated with the Magdalenian culture.
