Why Did Ancient Europeans Just Disappear 14,500 Years Ago?
Pleistocene Mitochondrial Genomes Suggest a Single Major Dispersal of Non-Africans and a Late Glacial Population Turnover in Europe
(Emphasis mine)
Pleistocene Mitochondrial Genomes Suggest a Single Major Dispersal of Non-Africans and a Late Glacial Population Turnover in Europe
(Emphasis mine)
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"Basically all modern humans outside of Africa, from Europe to the tip of South America, they belong to these two super-haplogroups that are M or N," Posth said. Nowadays, everyone of European descent has the N mitochondrial haplotype, while the M subtype is common throughout Asia and Australasia.
The team found that in ancient people, the M haplogroup predominated until about 14,500 years ago, when it mysteriously and suddenly vanished. The M haplotype carried by the ancient Europeans, which no longer exists in Europe today, shared a common ancestor with modern-day M-haplotype carriers around 50,000 years ago.
The genetic analysis also revealed that Europeans, Asians and Australasians may descend from a group of humans who emerged from Africa and rapidly dispersed throughout the continent no earlier than 55,000 years ago, the researchers reported Feb. 4 in the journal Current Biology.