Western hunter-gatherer

Western hunter-gatherer

Genetic ancestry of hunter-gatherers in Europe between 14 ka and 9 ka, with the main area of Western hunter-gatherers (WHG) in blue. Individual numbers correspond to calibrated sample dates.[1]

In archaeogenetics, western hunter-gatherer (WHG, also known as west European hunter-gatherer, western European hunter-gatherer or Oberkassel cluster) (c. 15,000~5,000 BP) is a distinct ancestral component of modern Europeans, representing descent from a population of Mesolithic hunter-gatherers who scattered over western, southern and central Europe, from the British Isles in the west to the Carpathians in the east, following the retreat of the ice sheet of the Last Glacial Maximum.^[2] It is closely associated and sometimes considered synonymous with the concept of the Villabruna cluster, named after Ripari Villabruna cave in Italy, known from the terminal Pleistocene of Europe, which is largely ancestral to later WHG populations.

WHGs share a closer genetic relationship to ancient and modern peoples in the Middle East and the Caucasus than earlier European hunter-gatherers. Their precise relationships to other groups are somewhat obscure, with the origin of the Villabruna cluster likely somewhere in the vicinity of the Balkans. The Villabruna cluster (which is associated with the Epigravettian and other related archaeological cultures) had expanded into the Italian and Iberian Peninsulas by approximately 19,000 years ago, with the WHG cluster subsequently expanding across Western Europe at the end of the Pleistocene around 14-12,000 years ago, largely replacing the Magdalenian peoples who previously dominated the region.^[3] These Magdalenian peoples largely descended from earlier Western European Cro-Magnon groups that had arrived in the region over 30,000 years ago, prior to the Last Glacial Maximum.

WHGs constituted one of the main genetic groups in the postglacial period of early Holocene Europe, along with eastern hunter-gatherers (EHG) in Eastern Europe. The border between WHGs and EHGs ran roughly from the lower Danube, northward along the western forests of the Dnieper towards the western Baltic Sea.^[2] EHGs primarily consisted of a mixture of WHG-related and Ancient North Eurasian (ANE) ancestry.^[3] Scandinavia was inhabited by Scandinavian hunter-gatherers (SHGs), which were a mixture between WHG and EHG.^[4] In the Iberian Peninsula, early Holocene hunter-gathers consisted of a mixture of WHG and Magdalenian Cro-Magnon (GoyetQ2) ancestry.^[5]

Once the main population throughout Europe, the WHGs were largely replaced by successive expansions of Early European Farmers (EEFs) of Anatolian origin during the early Neolithic, who generally carried a minor amount of WHG ancestry due to admixture with WHG groups during their European expansion. Among modern-day populations, WHG ancestry is most common among populations of the eastern Baltic region.^[6]