Ancient W

In the early 2000's the received wisdom was that central and northern Europe were populated by Palaeolithic peoples from 'ice age refuges' in Spain and Italy after the glaciers melted. These first people on the land stayed there, and the genetic makeup of Europe was fixed by 10,000 years ago. Subsequent invasions of Europe - by agriculturalists, horse nomads, Celts, Germans, Greeks, Italics, Slavs, Hungarians, and so on involved transfer of technology, culture, or ruling classes, and did not make a big imprint on the genetic makeup of Europeans.

However as more and more results of ancient DNA extracted from Palaeolithic skeletons were published, it became apparent that their y-dna and mtdna types were quite different from those of modern Europeans. Generally opinion shifted until it was taken that Neolithic agriculturalists and pastoralists that migrated into Europe via the Danube Valley, by sea in the Mediterranean, and later by horse and wagon from southern Russia, all displaced the earlier inhabitant - if not by war, then simply by outbreeding them due to the more intense exploitation of the land and higher populations densities of farmers and herders compared to hunter-gatherers.

W skeletons, as in the modern population, are rarer. However there are some results. No W has been found in Palaeolithic Europe so far. The oldest W's reliably reported are from the Linear Pottery Culture (LBK; 5,500–4,900 calibrated B.C.) site Derenburg Meerenstieg II in Germany. Two of the 22 individuals for which an HVS1 sequence could be obtained were W's with the 16093 16223 16292 motif. The basic motif itself is found in modern mutations 16093 is found (in combination with other HVR1 mutations) in modern populations as W3a1a (with the 13263G coding region mutation) and as W4 (with 13263A in the coding region and the infamous 194-143-196-192 in HVR2). The basic motif is currently reported from Turkey (2), Netherlands (2), Britain (1), Ireland (2).However 16093 plus some other mutations is much more wide ranging. 7000 years since the LBK is enough time for another HVR1 mutation or more to have occurred.

There is an even older W, which predates LBK, but this is a very doubtful result. This was from Unseburg Germany 6550 BC, but 'multiple sequences' were read from the skeleton (which was an isolated find from the 1930's), 'crystal outside of physiological range' had formed on the exterior, and 'ambiguous results' were obtained. So the idea that W was absent in Europe prior to the arrival of middle eastern agriculturalists is not disproven by this sample.

Ancient W's identified so far are listed below. The LBK German ones are probably W3a1 or W5a1. The Spanish Iberian ones have a contemporary match on the Azores, and with additional 16390 mutation, in France, but only HVR1 sequences are available and the subgroup can't be predicted. Potential ancestors with only the 16295 mutation are W1's; those with only the 16304 mutation are central European (Czech, Hungary, Poland) and are probably W3's. All other ancient samples are 'vanilla' 16223 16292 and could be W1, W3, W4, or W5.

Here are the results to date:

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