The spatiotemporal spread of human migrations during the European Holocene

Abstract

We present a study to model the spread of ancestry in ancient genomes through time and space and a geostatistical framework for comparing human migrations and land-cover changes, while accounting for changes in climate. We show that the two major migrations during the European Holocene had different spatiotemporal structures and expansion rates. In addition, we find that the Yamnaya expansion had a stronger association with vegetational landscape changes than the earlier Neolithic farmer expansion. Our approach paves the way for future work linking paleogenomics with other archaeometric datasets in the study of the past.