LOST CIVILIZATION: The 15,000 year old ‘unknown chapter in human history’

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Here’s another story that adds another piece to the jigsaw puzzle of our past.

Watch a video of this report here:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=zJfsodqQzIw
An extensive study of DNA evidence obtained from the bones and teeth of ancient people who lived in Europe has revealed that a major, and at this point unexplained, population shift occurred around 15,000 years ago.

Local hunter-gatherers were almost completely replaced by a group from another area during the shift.

Johannes Krause, one of the scientists involved, said that, “we uncovered a completely unknown chapter of human history: a major population turnover at the end of the last Ice Age.”

Adam Powell, another author of the report, says, “our model suggests that during this period of climatic upheaval, the descendants of the hunter-gatherers who survived through the last glacial maximum [Ice Age] were largely replaced by a population from another source.”

In order to try and find out what could have caused this huge population shift, researchers now need to construct a more comprehensive picture of European genetics from this period.

It is possible that we will never know what exactly caused this shift.

A German professor has just discovered that ancient Babylonians were able to track Jupiter in the skies 1,400 years before Europeans, who were previously credited with being the first to do so.

Interestingly, this discovery coincides with the analysis of alternative researchers who have long pointed out that there is ample evidence of vast human civilizations and lost histories from the same period.

How many other important events and discoveries have been lost to history?

READ MORE ON OUR LOST HISTORY: 21st Century Wire Ancient History Files

DNA evidence uncovers major upheaval in Europe near end of last Ice Age

Summary: DNA evidence lifted from the ancient bones and teeth of people who lived in Europe from the Late Pleistocene to the early Holocene — spanning almost 30,000 years of European prehistory — has offered some surprises, according to researchers. Perhaps most notably, the evidence shows a major shift in the population around 14,500 years ago, during a period of severe climatic instability.

Dolnte Vestonice burial 16, South Moravia, Czech Republic

Credit: Martin Frouz

DNA evidence lifted from the ancient bones and teeth of people who lived in Europe from the Late Pleistocene to the early Holocene — spanning almost 30,000 years of European prehistory — has offered some surprises, according to researchers who report their findings in the Cell Press journal Current Biologyon Feb. 4, 2016. Perhaps most notably, the evidence shows a major shift in the population around 14,500 years ago, during a period of severe climatic instability.

“We uncovered a completely unknown chapter of human history: a major population turnover in Europe at the end of the last Ice Age,” says leading author Johannes Krause of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany.

The researchers pieced this missing history together by reconstructing the mitochondrial genomes of 35 hunter-gatherer individuals who lived in Italy, Germany, Belgium, France, the Czech Republic, and Romania from 35,000 to 7,000 years ago. Mitochondria are organelles within cells that carry their own DNA and can be used to infer patterns of maternal ancestry.

“There has been a real lack of genetic data from this time period, so consequently we knew very little about the population structure or dynamics of the first modern humans in Europe,” Krause says.

The new data show that the mitochondrial DNA of three individuals who lived in present-day Belgium and France before the coldest period in the last Ice Age — the Last Glacial Maximum — belonged to haplogroup M. This is remarkable because the M haplogroup is effectively absent in modern Europeans but is extremely common in modern Asian, Australasian, and Native American populations.

The absence of the M haplogroup and its presence in other parts of the world had previously led to the argument that non-African people dispersed on multiple occasions to spread across Eurasia and Australasia. The researchers say the discovery of this maternal lineage in Europe in the ancient past now suggests instead that all non-Africans dispersed rapidly from a single population, at a time they place around 50,000 years ago. Then, at some later stage, the M haplogroup was apparently lost from Europe.

“When the Last Glacial Maximum began around 25,000 years ago, hunter-gatherer populations retreated south to a number of putative refugia, and the consequent genetic bottleneck probably resulted in the loss of this haplogroup,” explains first author of the study Cosimo Posth of Germany’s University of Tübingen.

The researchers say their biggest surprise, however, was evidence of a major turnover of the population in Europe around 14,500 years ago, as the climate began to warm. “Our model suggests that during this period of climatic upheaval, the descendants of the hunter-gatherers who survived through the Last Glacial Maximum were largely replaced by a population from another source,” says Adam Powell, another senior author at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.

The researchers say the next step is to construct a more comprehensive picture of the past by analyzing the complete genomes of these ancient individuals along with additional specimens representing more times and places.

The researchers received support from the Baden-Württemberg Foundation, the DFG, the European Research Council, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences of CSUN, and the RBINS.

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The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Cell Press. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.