That genetic gulf led Dr. Posth and his colleagues to argue that the Fournol and Vestonice belonged to two waves that migrated into Europe separately. After they arrived, they lived for several thousand years sharing the Gravettian culture but remaining genetically distinct.
“This result is, in my opinion, groundbreaking,” said Anaïs Luiza Vignoles, an archaeologist at the University of Paris who was not involved in the study.
Dr. Vingoles said that archaeologists could now investigate the kind of cultural contacts these two populations had. It’s clear from the new study that they were not isolated entirely from each other. In Belgium, the scientists found 30,000-year-old remains with a mix of Fournol and Vestonice ancestry.
Jüergen Richter, an archaeologist at the University of Cologne who was not involved in the new studies, suggested that in these sporadic contacts between the two peoples, they might have shared cultural ideas and artifacts like fertility figuring. “I’m absolutely not surprised,” he said of the new findings.
About 26,000 years ago, the two groups faced a new threat to their survival: an advancing wall of glaciers. During the Ice Age, from 26,000 to 19,000 years ago, European hunter-gatherers were shut out of much of the continent, surviving only in southern refuges.
Dr. Villalba-Mouco and her colleagues shed light on the refuge of the Iberian Peninsula, the region now occupied by Spain and Portugal, by studying DNA in the teeth of a 23,000-year-old man found in a cave in southern Spain. His DNA revealed that he belonged to the Fournol people who lived in Iberia before the Ice Age. The researchers also found genetic markers linking him to a 45,000-year-old skeleton discovered in Bulgaria.
When the glaciers retreated, some descendants of the Fournol continued living in Iberia. But others expanded north as a new population, which Dr. Posth and his colleagues called GoyetQ2. “It really seems like a peopling of Europe after the last glacial maximum,” he said.
