Europe’s later hunter-gatherers may owe much of their ancestry to people who survived the Ice Age in the Balkans.

A new, not yet peer-reviewed preprint reports nine ancient genomes from Romania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Greece and Italy. They help identify a previously poorly sampled Balkan ancestry source that spread across much of Europe.

The westward story runs through Italy. Migrants related to Balkan hunter-gatherers mixed with people whose ancestry survived from before the coldest part of the Ice Age. One model for later Italian hunter-gatherers estimates roughly 75% Balkan-related, 20% earlier Italian-related and 5% earlier Spanish-related ancestry. That supports mixing, not complete replacement.

From Italy, descendants contributed to hunter-gatherers farther west. Later Iberian groups show roughly 30–75% Balkan-related ancestry in the models, with substantial variation across time and place.

The north followed a different path. Scandinavian and northeastern European hunter-gatherers carry a Balkan-related component that the models do not require to have passed through Italy. Farther east, it mixed with ancestry related to ancient Siberians. These are inferred population movements, not exact routes traced by DNA.

Another connection crossed the Aegean before farming. Two people from Maroulas on Kythnos, who lived about 9,000–8,400 years ago, are modeled with roughly 30% Balkan-related and 70% Anatolian-related ancestry. Their ancestors’ mixing dates to about 1,034 ± 266 years before they lived.

The legacy continued: the authors estimate about 16% Balkan-related ancestry in Yamnaya steppe herders, who later contributed ancestry across Europe and parts of Asia.

All these percentages are model estimates using ancient reference groups. They are not modern national identities—or percentages that apply to everyone living in these regions today.

📚 Source: Tabin et al. (2026), bioRxiv (preprint)
The Pan-European Impact of the Balkan Hunter-Gatherers

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