A long bone from Isturitz Cave, in the French Basque Country, was excavated in the 1950s and deposited at the Institut de Paléontologie Humaine in Paris, where Ron Pinhasi sampled it in 2013. It belonged to an adult woman, radiocarbon dated at Oxford to 26,030 ± 220 B.P. (OxAX-2616-50), which the paper’s Figure 1 places at 30,850 to 29,970 cal yr B.P. Her genome, published in Science Advances1 on 23 October 2026, is now the oldest genome-wide dataset from a modern human in southwestern Europe, and it carries a component of ancestry that Gravettian people in that region were not thought to have.
The expectation comes from a mismatch the field has lived with for years. The Gravettian (about 34 to 25 ka) looks like a single continental network in its tools and portable art, yet ancient DNA has described two ancestry clusters that stayed relatively stable across it: the Fournol cluster in the west and southwest, descended from the Aurignacian individual Goyet Q116-1 from Belgium, and the Věstonice cluster in central Europe and Italy, named for Dolní Věstonice in Czechia. The model this paper challenges, drawn from Posth et al. (2023) and related work, held that the Franco-Cantabrian region and the rest of western Europe were exclusively Fournol-related around 30 ka.
The paper reports genome-wide data from three Gravettian individuals: the Isturitz woman, a tooth from Chufín Cave in Cantabria, Spain, and Ostuni1b, a male fetus from a cave at Ostuni in southern Italy. It adds human DNA recovered from sediment at El Mirón Cave, also in Cantabria. The headline result is that the Isturitz genome is mostly Fournol-like but carries a contribution from a population related to the ancestors of the Věstonice cluster, which the authors model as mixing between 32,500 and 31,500 cal yr B.P. First author Pere Gelabert, Department of Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Vienna, said in the university’s statement: “Our results show that eastern and western European populations were not as genetically isolated as previously assumed.” The claim I want to weigh is whether one woman’s genome can carry that conclusion, and my answer is that the signal is solid while its interpretation is softer.
