Most European Men are Descended from a Small Population of Bronze Age Forefathers

It turns out that most European men descend from just a handful of Bronze Age forefathers. Scientists have taken a closer look at the DNA of men belonging to 17 populations from Europe and the Middle East and have found that population expansion was not only widespread, but recent.

In order to better understand the dispersion of humans in the ancient past, researchers often look to DNA. This reveals where ancient ancestors traveled and where their genetic material ended up.

In this latest study, the scientists determined the DNA sequences of a large part of the Y chromosome that's passed exclusively from fathers to sons. In all, they looked at the DNA of 334 men from 17 European and Middle Eastern populations.

During the DNA analysis, the scientists used new methods that provided a less biased picture of diversity, and also a better estimate of the timing of population events. This allowed them to create a genealogical tree of European Y chromosomes that could be used to calculate the ages of branches. Three very young branches, whose shapes indicated recent expansions, accounted for a staggering 64 percent of the men studied.

"The population expansion falls within the Bronze Age, which involved changes in burial practices, the spread of horse-riding and developments in weaponry," said Mark Jobling, one of the researchers, in a news release. "Dominant males linked with these cultures could be responsible for the Y chromosome patterns we see today."

The researchers were able to estimate past population sizes, which revealed that a continuous swathe of populations from the Balkans to the British Isles underwent an explosion in male population size between 2,000 and 4,000 years ago.

"Given the cultural complexity of the Bronze Age, it's difficult to link a particular event to the population growth that we infer," said Chiara Batini, lead author of the new study. "But Y-chromosome DNA sequences from skeletal remains are becoming available, and this will help us to understand what happened, and when."

The findings are published in the journal Nature Communications.

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