In the process any notion of European genetic purity has been swept away on a tide of powdered bone.Īnalysis of ancient genomes provides the equivalent of the personal DNA testing kits available today, but for people who died long before humans invented writing, the wheel, or pottery. In 2018 alone, the genomes of more than a thousand prehistoric humans were determined, mostly from bones dug up years ago and preserved in museums and archaeological labs. The result has been an explosion of new information that is transforming archaeology. Technical advances in just the past few years have made it cheap and efficient to do so a well-preserved bit of skeleton can now be sequenced for around $500. During the past decade it has become possible to sequence the entire genome of humans who lived tens of millennia ago. But above all it comes from the new field of paleogenetics. The evidence comes from archaeological artifacts, from the analysis of ancient teeth and bones, and from linguistics. Europeans living today, in whatever country, are a varying mix of ancient bloodlines hailing from Africa, the Middle East, and the Russian steppe. Their findings suggest that the continent has been a melting pot since the Ice Age. Now scientists are delivering new answers to the question of who Europeans really are and where they came from. It has long nourished white racism, and in recent years it has stoked fears about the impact of immigrants: fears that have threatened to rip apart the European Union and roiled politics in the United States. The idea that there were once “pure” populations of ancestral Europeans, there since the days of woolly mammoths, has inspired ideologues since well before the Nazis. This story appears in the August 2019 issue of National Geographic magazine.
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