Villabruna Hunter-Gatherer R1b (Qiaomei Fu et al, 2016)

There's a lot to digest out of the Qiaomei Fu et al, 2016 paper. 

As to be expected, the overwhelming majority of Paleolithic Europeans belonged to paternal lineages that have effectively gone extinct or have been several times superseded.  Maternal lineages have mostly suffered from frequency changes because most women who ever lived had offspring.

The most interesting part of the paper is the blue-eyed, dark-skinned man from Villabruna Cave 1, directly dated to about 14,000 years ago and belonging to paternal haplogroup R1b1.  He was buried with a bag of implements and covered in red-painted rocks in the Dolomite Mountains.

There's more that is interesting about him than just the y-chromosome, but for a little background see the BBC story...

Fig 2 LUP burial of Villabruna 1.  (Vercellotti et al, 2008)

Since the Gravettian was an expansion of mammoth and bison hunters from north of the Black Sea going west, and because of some cultural, economic and mobility similarities with the Mal'ta-Burets hunters where this lineage was previously found, it might make some sense to see R1b1 lightly sprinkled as a minority lineage among a communities dominated by haplogroup I.  But a picture where Gravettian and Mal'ta cultures have anything common other than material borrowing doesn't square with the authors of Fu et al.  The two peoples are genetically distinct, and in fact, the Gravettians appear very distinct from even the Epi-Gravettians, who we might as well now more accurately call, Villabrunans.

So the first interesting thing is that Villabruna man's body proportions are intermediate between modern Europeans and Africans.  In fact, he generally clusters with North Africans on several skeletal metrics, although facially he is Caucasian.  This doesn't mean he is  <North African> and it doesn't mean mixed, but it does suggest some meaningfully deep ancestry in a sufficiently warm climate, possibly the Southern Near East(?).


Genetically, he and his cluster represent a shift towards the Near East from earlier Europeans, and really from the earlier 'true' Gravettians in Eastern Europe.  When looking at his physical proportions, Vercellotti et al (2008) seemed to suggest that his long-limbed features were a relict of early AMH or possibly some sort of new response to a warming climate.  It now seems migration offers the most plausible explanation for his body type in light of DNA.  To be clear though, his cluster extends all over Western Europe even though his unique lineage is so far only seen in Italy.

Fu et al, 2016

As far as I understand, Western Hunter Gatherer (WHG) might be mostly Middle Eastern with some ancestry of the oldest native hunters.  This will be an interesting complication to various memes, including my own memes.


See also  [Maju's post on Ahmarian culture]

Vercellotti, Alciati, Richards, Formicola (2008)  "The Late Upper Paleolithic skeleton Villabruna 1 (Italy): a source of data on biology and behavior of a 14.000 year-old hunter" Journal of Anthropological Sciences.  Vol. 86 (2008), pp. 143-163   [Link]