Gravettian migrations in the Upper Palaeolithic

Gelabert et al. have a new paper, on the evolution-or-replacement of the Aurignacian culture in Iberia by Gravettian. They've used sedimentary DNA, which also gets laid down in layers, easing our ability to set dates. The dates for the new remains, themselves late in Gravettian-even-Magdalenian ages, point to an event in the millennium 31500-30500 BC.

Among the finds is a female, or at least her maternal line, with mito-DNA U8a. This is presently rare outside northern Iberia, which is Basque-country today. U8a is elsewhere known in famous Bacho Kiro also deemed Aurignacian. Otherwise there is continuity.

This suggests the local Aurignacians, called here the "Fournol cluster" exemplified by "Goyet Q116-1" in Belgium, responded to an incursion of the central Europeans. The latter are the "Věstonice" descended from Bacho Kiro, but not itself well-documented. Together they made, or brought, the Gravettian in/to Aurignacian Iberia.

The Věstonice by including their women was indeed a migration. I don't know if we can call it a forced invasion; populations may have been small enough, the newcomers culturally-compatible enough, and resources plentiful-enough that a merger was possible. The paper believes Věstonice itself had been a merger of Bacho Kiro and some western population. So a back-migration and assimilation seems a better bet than if the incomers had not brought their women; or if the locals had simply vanished.

The Isturitz seems also to have the widest breeding-pool, inferred to 265. Their kids should have been reasonably healthy.

Which brings us to the south Italian sample, a sad one. This is miscarried "Ostuni1b", so called because he is, or would have been, the son of Ostuni1 previously-published: mitochondrion M (like me; no longer common in Euroland). These two samples allow for narrower dates in the middle 25kBC millennium; and gets us about half Ostun1b's father, who had yDNA in the C family (also no longer common here). This is, further, flagged as about the second-least inbred Gravettian: population size inferred to 160 [breeders].