🌍 How Europe’s “great divide” ended

Ancient DNA reveals a long east–west split from the Black Sea to the Baltic: in the west, incoming Anatolian farmers caused big ancestry shifts, while hunter-gatherer ancestry persisted in the east until about 5,000 years ago.

Around that time, Yamnaya-related ancestry spread across most of Europe in ~1,000 years, dissolving the divide. Genetically, Yamnaya groups fit as roughly ~65% Middle Don hunter-gatherer plus ~35% Caucasus hunter-gatherer; later, steppe ancestry reached Europe mainly via peoples already mixed with Globular Amphora (GAC), seeding the Corded Ware expansion.

Takeaway: Europe’s post-glacial genetics shifted in two waves — first farmers from Anatolia in the west, then a steppe-driven turnover that united the continent’s gene pool.

Source: Allentoft et al., 2024. Population genomics of post-glacial western Eurasia.