Italy's false refuge

Few days ago Max Planck Institute came out with some impressive new papers on post-Aurignac pre-LGM Europe. (Meanwhile the late-50s-kBC Aurignacian sweep from Sundaland remains consensus.)

From LGM west-Europe Southern Spain was a refuge: 21kBC genes there descend from a "Gravettian" Belgian(!) trace 33kBC. But North Africa was no such refuge, not from Europe anyway, perhaps because pre-Solutrean watercraft weren't yet up to it. Italy proved a false refuge for these Europeans; its Ice-Age population got replaced, one must assume by force.

From 30kBC on, those between Belgium and Spain shared the Gravettian Culture with those doomed Italians and also with Bohemians. These three populations despite sharing the same tech were genetically different. It was the westerners who gave rise to the Solutrean, across the LGM 23-17 kBC. I am less sure about Magdalenian.

I'd thought the Gravettians were an "interlude" between the Aurignacians (aka Cromags) and the Magdalenians (neoAurignacians basically, their genetic descendents). Maybe it depends where you look, like in the DNA. Aurignacian DNA hung on - out east I must induce - borrowing the Gravettian culture, like the Navajo took from the Hopi.

"Epigravettians" who were, by blood, eastern Aurignacian throwbacks, having taken over Italy, subsequently spread back north 12 kBC. These trounced their still-Magdalenian cousins. Kind of like the Romans will to their own Gaulish cousins, some twelve millennia later.