Macabre Discovery: Mass Grave Sheds New Light on History

The remains found by the French team come from the area around the city of Troyes in France. They unearthed a mass grave of several people, about 4,500 years old. One of them may be the answer to the missing page in the history of the development of the “European genome”.

The French still have it

If you don’t know, the genome is a complete set of information about us, but you can also look for traces of our ancestors in it. It is also the basis for detecting some kind of patterns common to a larger group, such as the inhabitants of Europe. In the case of the modern inhabitants of the Old Continent, changes could have lasted for more than 40,000 years – reports the portal HVG.hu. During this time, the people inhabiting these lands mixed with each other between different populations during migrations.

The genome of Europeans shows traces of hunter-gatherers, representatives of Anatolian and Aegean populations from 8,000 years ago, who were descendants of the inventors of agriculture and animal husbandry and nomadic tribes from the steppes from 4-5 thousand years ago. It is this last moment that the find from France is supposed to show. In the case of one of the skeletons, the mother is supposed to come from the territories of modern France, while the father is a representative of the tribes from the steppes around the Black Sea. Of course, the discovered bones require even more extensive, but also careful (due to the age of the find) analysis. However, if the initial conclusions are confirmed, for researchers of the European genome it will be a long-awaited, missing piece of the “puzzle”.

It is provisionally determined that this skeleton dates from the period of the second wave of interbreeding of tribes from the period 4,550 years ago, which results to this day in the fact that the Y chromosome typical of the steppe peoples is still present in the majority of French men.