A woman who lived about 30,000 years ago in what is now southwestern France carried ancestry from the other end of the continent. Her genome, recovered from remains at Isturitz Cave, shows western European roots mixed with central and eastern European ones. Researchers at the University of Vienna led the analysis, published in Science Advances in October 2026.
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The mixing dates to roughly 32,500 to 31,500 years ago, and it overturns the idea that Ice Age Europeans in the east and west lived in genetic isolation. Pere Gelabert, the first author, and Ron Pinhasi, the senior author, work in the university’s Department of Evolutionary Anthropology, and the international author list includes Thomas Higham and David Reich.
The Isturitz woman and a mixing event 32,500 years ago
The paper, titled “Early Gravettian genomic data from Western Europe reveal population movements before the LGM,” is indexed under DOI 10.1126/sciadv.aeh6128. The team describes the Isturitz woman’s genome-wide dataset as the oldest from a modern human in southwestern Europe. Most of her ancestry is western, but modeling shows she also carried ancestry related to groups from central and eastern Europe, the signature of an exchange between distant populations. A previously studied individual from Ormesson, in France, shows a similar signal.
Gelabert said the results show that eastern and western European populations were not as genetically isolated as previously assumed, according to the University of Vienna release. Combined with archaeology, the team suggests Isturitz may have hosted different groups at different times.
A Gravettian culture that crossed the continent
The people in question belonged to the Gravettian, a culture spread from Portugal eastward across much of Europe. Dates for it vary by source, from about 33,000 years ago to 21,000 years ago, and the Vienna team gives roughly 34,000 to 25,000 years ago. Archaeologists usually split it into a western variant known from cave sites and an eastern variant, often open-air, in Central Europe and Russia.
Long-distance contact had been suspected on archaeological grounds, because similar tools and art, including the Venus figurines, show up far apart. Genetic data had seemed to say otherwise, pointing to distinct eastern and western ancestry. The Isturitz genome reconciles the two, showing that people and not only ideas moved.
More than 100 Venus figurines survive from the period, most from its early part, carved from ivory or limestone in a consistent form with little facial detail. A figurine from Mal’ta in Siberia resembles them, yet a 2016 genomic study found no genetic link to European Gravettian groups, so the shared look may reflect spreading ideas. The new Isturitz result is different in kind, because it ties a real western individual to eastern-related ancestry by direct DNA evidence.
DNA from cave sediment at El Mirón
The study also worked without bones. At El Mirón Cave in Cantabria, northern Spain, researchers recovered human nuclear DNA from a sediment layer about 22,000 years old, with no teeth or bones present. The cave in the upper Asón valley is known for a Magdalenian burial, the Red Lady, who died about 18,700 years ago. The sediment ancestry persisted through the Last Glacial Maximum, which supports the Iberian Peninsula as an Ice Age refuge. The Last Glacial Maximum, the coldest stretch of the glaciation, pushed human populations into southern pockets of Europe, and the sediment record suggests that the western lineage survived there without bones to prove it.
Pinhasi said sedimentary DNA makes it possible to recover genetic information from periods when human remains are missing, a point the ScienceDaily summary repeats. The team plans to combine sediment DNA with proteomic analyses to study the first trans-European expansions of modern humans and their interactions with carnivores, especially where organic remains are scarce.
Chufín, Ormesson and a Gravettian family from Ostuni
Genomic data from Chufín Cave in northern Spain indicate that western European ancestry persisted in the southwest for thousands of years, so the newcomers’ contribution did not simply replace the local population. In southern Italy, the male fetus known as Ostuni1b was most likely the son of the woman Ostuni1. His father probably came from the same genetic population, yet the parents were not closely related, which the authors read as mating practices that limited inbreeding.
The ScienceDaily page does not give a total sample count, and the exchange rests on a single genome-wide dataset at Isturitz plus the Ormesson individual. How many people moved, in which direction and how often are the questions the sediment work is meant to answer. Each new site that yields DNA, whether from a tooth, a bone or the dirt on a cave floor, adds another point to a map that is still mostly empty across the roughly nine thousand years the Gravettian lasted. Pinhasi’s group is betting that sediment, which survives where skeletons do not, will fill many of those gaps over the next few field seasons.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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