A 30,000-year-old woman from a Pyrenees cave carried Central European DNA

A piece of bone that sat in a Paris research institute for decades has yielded the oldest genome of a modern human ever recovered from southwestern Europe. It belonged to a woman who lived around Isturitz Cave, in the French Basque Country at the western end of the Pyrenees, and most of her DNA matches other western Europeans of her era. A small part does not. It points to hunter-gatherers tied to what is now the Czech Republic, some fifteen hundred kilometers to the east.

That fragment of eastern ancestry matters because the standard picture of Ice Age Europe kept the west and the east genetically apart. Earlier genomes suggested two lineages that barely mixed over thousands of years, even though their stone tools, burials and carved figurines looked alike from Iberia to the Russian plains. The woman from Isturitz gives the first genetic evidence from the far southwest that genes crossed that divide.

The study, led by Pere Gelabert and Ron Pinhasi of the University of Vienna with collaborators from Spain, France, Italy and David Reich’s laboratory at Harvard, appears in Science Advances. It adds three new genomes from the Gravettian, the hunter-gatherer culture that spread across Europe between about 34,000 and 25,000 years ago, plus human DNA pulled straight out of cave sediment from the coldest stretch of the last Ice Age.

“Our results show that eastern and western European populations were not as genetically isolated as previously assumed,” Gelabert said in a statement released with the paper.

How a museum bone became a genome

The Isturitz bone came out of excavations in the 1950s and was stored at the Institut de Paléontologie Humaine in Paris. Pinhasi sampled it in 2013, and the University of Oxford dated it directly by radiocarbon to 26,030 years, plus or minus 220, which the team places at roughly 30,000 calendar years ago. The DNA was processed jointly in Vienna and at Harvard Medical School.

Ancient DNA survives as short, damaged fragments swamped by bacterial DNA. To fish out the human part, the team used a capture kit that targets more than a million known positions where human genomes commonly differ. From eight libraries built from two extracts, they recovered 454,258 of those positions, with estimated contamination below 5 percent. That puts the Isturitz woman among the best-covered Gravettian individuals sequenced so far.

The second high-quality genome came from a fetus. In a cave near Ostuni, in southern Italy, archaeologists had found a woman buried about 27,600 years ago with the remains of a fetus. The new data, 467,368 positions, show that the fetus was a boy and her first-degree relative, most likely her son, and that his father probably came from the same population as his mother.

The third skeleton, a woman’s tooth found in 2021 in Chufín Cave in Cantabria, northern Spain, was badly degraded and carried 5 to 10 percent modern contamination. Only 19,895 positions survived the filters, enough to place her but not to study her in detail. She lived about 26,000 years ago.

The fourth sample contains no bone at all. Human skeletons from the Last Glacial Maximum, roughly 26,500 to 19,000 years ago, are extremely rare, so the team sequenced a layer of sediment from El Mirón Cave in Cantabria, dated to about 22,000 years ago. Across 101 sequencing runs they read more than one billion DNA fragments, found 294,109 unique human ones and kept 14,737 informative positions after discarding anything without the chemical damage typical of ancient molecules. The dirt most likely holds DNA from several people, probably more men than women.

Two Ice Age lineages that were not sealed off

Genomes from this period sort into two main groups. The Fournol cluster, named after a cave in southwestern France, dominates the west and descends from a lineage represented by a 35,000-year-old individual from Goyet Cave in Belgium. The Věstonice cluster, named after the famous site of Dolní Věstonice in the Czech Republic, dominates central Europe and Italy. Until now, the clearest documented mixture between the two appeared in Belgian individuals who lived 28,000 to 26,000 years ago, at the western fringe of the eastern group’s range.

The Isturitz woman belongs mainly to the Fournol cluster. But statistical tests show she shares more genetic variants with the Věstonice group than any other individual sampled from the Franco-Cantabrian region before the Ice Age peak, and the best-fitting family tree, chosen from more than 100,000 candidates, models her as a Fournol-like population with an influx from people closely related to the ancestors of the Věstonice group. A previously sequenced individual from Ormesson, in the Paris Basin, who lived between 31,822 and 29,970 years ago, carries a similar signal.

A dating method based on how mixed DNA segments shorten over generations places the mixing between 32,500 and 31,500 years ago, a few thousand years before the woman lived. The straight-line distance from Isturitz to Dolní Věstonice is about 1,500 kilometers, roughly the distance from London to Rome, across an Ice Age continent.

The authors link the result to the cave itself. Isturitz holds one of the richest collections of portable Ice Age art in southern Europe and has long been read as an aggregation site, where groups met for collective hunts, exchange and finding partners. It sits at the main passage between continental Europe and the Iberian Peninsula. The genome supports the idea that this crossroads mixed people as well as objects.

The new genomes add personal detail too. Genetic trait predictions point to dark skin, dark hair and brown eyes in all of them. The Isturitz woman and the Ostuni boy carry relatively little DNA inherited identically from both parents, a sign that their parents were not close relatives, and the populations they came from were estimated at effective sizes of 235 and 160 people, higher than for any other Gravettian individual sampled.

A western population that held on through the big freeze

The eastern pulse did not replace anyone. The Chufín woman, the Isturitz woman and the El Mirón sediment all fall within the same western lineage, which shows the southwest kept its genetic continuity from about 30,000 to 20,000 years ago. That contradicts a population turnover around 28,000 years ago that earlier researchers had inferred from tooth shapes.

The sediment result carries the line through the harshest part of the Ice Age, when the southwest served as a refuge. Until now, only three genetic samples covered the Solutrean culture of that period, two of them of very poor quality. The El Mirón layer adds a fourth data point without a single human bone.

The Chufín woman carried a maternal lineage called U8, the same broad lineage found in an early individual from Bacho Kiro Cave in Bulgaria. A subgroup of it, U8a, is rare in Europe today but relatively frequent among present-day Basques. The paper notes the overlap without claiming direct descent.

What it doesn’t settle

The authors present two explanations for the eastern signal. One is real contact during the Gravettian: people, or their descendants, moving west and having children with local groups. The other is an older ancestral component that predates the Goyet lineage and was already present in some western populations. With no genome yet from the earlier Aurignacian culture in the southwest, the second scenario cannot be ruled out.

The team favors a single pulse of contact for two reasons: the signal is absent in earlier Aurignacian samples from Belgium, and it disappears from every southwestern individual sampled after 30,000 years ago. But the date itself assumes that one event, not several, produced the mixture, and the estimate for Ormesson did not reach statistical significance.

The sample is small. Three new individuals and one sediment layer join about 25 Gravettian individuals with genome-wide data, a population record that spans nearly 10,000 years. One of the tests comparing the woman with eastern hunter-gatherers was not significant, and the data cannot point to a specific eastern group as the source. Sediment DNA adds its own problems: it mixes material from several people and is hard to tie to a precise moment in the deposit.

Her genes also say nothing about her own travels. The eastern ancestry reached Isturitz through her ancestors, generations before she was born.

Common questions about Ice Age DNA in Europe

What is the oldest human genome from southwestern Europe?

The genome of the Isturitz woman, from a bone dated to roughly 30,000 years ago in the French Basque Country, is now the oldest genome-wide dataset from a modern human in southwestern Europe. It covers 454,258 informative positions, among the most for any individual of the period.

What was the Gravettian culture?

The Gravettian was a hunter-gatherer culture that spread across Europe between about 34,000 and 25,000 years ago. It is known for carved female figurines, elaborate burials and shared tool styles from the Atlantic to the Russian plains. Genetically, its people fell into a western group and a central European group.

Can scientists get human DNA from cave dirt?

Yes. Sediments can hold traces of DNA shed by people and animals. At El Mirón Cave in Spain, the team read more than one billion DNA fragments from a single layer about 22,000 years old and recovered 14,737 informative human positions, enough to identify the population that lived there.

Were Ice Age people in eastern and western Europe related?

They shared deep common ancestors, and this study shows their branches also met later. The Isturitz woman’s genome carries an influx linked to central European groups that, by the team’s estimate, arrived between 32,500 and 31,500 years ago.

What comes next

The team now wants to sequence sediments from the oldest Aurignacian layers of Isturitz itself, notably level C4 of the Salle Saint-Martin, to find out whether the eastern ancestry arrived with the Gravettian or was already there. The paper was received on 31 March 2026, accepted on 9 September and published in Science Advances on 23 October 2026.

Reference: Gelabert et al., “Early Gravettian genomic data from Western Europe reveal population movements before the LGM,” Science Advances, 2026. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aeh6128

Tags: archaeology, ancient DNA, Ice Age, El Mirón, Gravettian, Isturitz