Ancient genomes reveal social and genetic structure of Late Neolithic Switzerland

Anja Furtwängler,Jürgen Hald,Sandra Lösch,Inga Siebke,Thiseas Christos Lamnidis ,Adam B Rohrlach ,Ella Reiter,Verena J Schuenemann,Bernadette Schnitzler,Anthony Denaire,Stephan Schiffels,Wolfgang Haak,Albert Hafner,Noah Steuri,Joachim Wahl,Gunnar U Neumann,Philipp W Stockhammer,Marianne Ramstein,Luka Papac,Johannes Krause

doi:10.1038/s41467-020-15560-x

Abstract

Genetic studies of Neolithic and Bronze Age skeletons from Europe have provided evidence for strong population genetic changes at the beginning and the end of the Neolithic period. To further understand the implications of these in Southern Central Europe, we analyze 96 ancient genomes from Switzerland, Southern Germany, and the Alsace region in France, covering the Middle/Late Neolithic to Early Bronze Age. Similar to previously described genetic changes in other parts of Europe from the early 3rd millennium BCE, we detect an arrival of ancestry related to Late Neolithic pastoralists from the Pontic-Caspian steppe in Switzerland as early as 2860–2460 calBCE. Our analyses suggest that this genetic turnover was a complex process lasting almost 1000 years and involved highly genetically structured populations in this region.

Highlights

Genetic studies of Neolithic and Bronze Age skeletons from Europe have provided evidence for strong population genetic changes at the beginning and the end of the Neolithic period
Genetic studies have revealed that Central Europeans, during the Neolithic, were genetically mixed between indigenous European hunter-gatherers and new incoming people with ancestry related to Western Anatolian early farmers[1,2,3,4,5]
We reconstructed complete mitochondrial genomes, used them to estimate DNA library contamination (Supplementary Data 1), and identified 96 samples that had less than 5% of contamination for further analyses

Summary

Introduction

Genetic studies of Neolithic and Bronze Age skeletons from Europe have provided evidence for strong population genetic changes at the beginning and the end of the Neolithic period. Towards the end of the Neolithic period, just before the transition to the Bronze Age, a second arrival of a new ancestry component in Europe was detected genetically[6,7], coinciding with the emergence of the Central and Eastern European Corded Ware Complex There are numerous Neolithic and Early Bronze Age sites from the lakeshores and moors, there are no burials directly related to them This is due, among other things, to the fact that the Chamblandes type stone cist tombs were already in use in the fifth millennium BCE. This burial custom, most probably ends around 3800 BCE, i.e., exactly at the time when the lakeshore settlements begin to become numerous.

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