A woman who lived about 30,000 years ago in Isturitz cave in south-west France carried in her genes traces of people from Central and Eastern Europe. The two groups mixed among her ancestors about 32,500 to 31,500 years ago. The analysis does not show that she herself travelled the thousands of kilometres.
The study was published on 23 October 2026 in Science Advances. Researchers at the University of Vienna led it, with Pere Gelabert as first author and Ron Pinhasi as senior author. From the woman's bone, they recovered the oldest genome of a modern human in south-western Europe. The data cover more than 454,000 variable sites in the DNA, not a full sequence. The cave lies at the western end of the Pyrenees, on the route between the continent and the Iberian Peninsula.
Ancestry from Fournol and Vestonice
Most of the woman's ancestry comes from the Fournol group, which is linked to western and south-western Europe. A smaller share comes from the Vestonice group, known from skeletons in the Czech Republic, elsewhere in Central Europe and Italy. Researchers work out ancestry by comparison: they check how closely her DNA matches that of skeletons already studied.
The Gravettian culture spread across Europe roughly between 34,000 and 25,000 years ago. It shows similar weapons and portable art from France to the Czech Republic. Until now, western groups looked genetically separate from central and southern ones. Whole-genome data exist for about 25 people from this period.
A similar signal appears in a person from Ormesson, near Paris, who was studied earlier. In that case the date of mixing is not statistically significant, so the finding for Isturitz rests mostly on the woman from the cave.
Dating the mixing by DNA fragments
The mixing is dated by how DNA from two groups gets shuffled over the generations. The longer ago it happened, the smaller the pieces from each origin. It is like shuffling two decks of cards again and again. The calculated window assumes a single wave of mixing. If there were several, the result changes.
The analysis therefore proves that the woman's ancestors included people of eastern origin, and that the mixing happened about 1,500 to 2,500 years before her time. It does not prove where the groups met. Which eastern people took part, and what route their ancestry took to the Pyrenees, has also not been established.
Eastern-linked ancestry may have reached the west even before the Gravettian, but this cannot be tested, because no DNA survives from the earlier Aurignacian culture in south-western Europe.
The authors suggest Isturitz was a meeting place for groups. In its statement, the university calls the cave a hub of cultural and biological exchange for much of the Late Palaeolithic. Gelabert says eastern and western communities "were not as genetically isolated as was thought". That the groups met in the cave itself is a guess, not an established fact.
Soil DNA from El Mirón
El Mirón cave in Spain has no bone or tooth. But from a layer about 22,000 years old, the team took around 14,000 human genetic markers out of the soil. They match the western Fournol line and show that it survived the coldest period of the last glacial maximum. Sediment DNA is a mix from many people, so it points to the ancestry of a group, not the genome of one person. "It lets us get genetic information for periods from which there are no human remains," Pinhasi said.
The team's next step is to sample more layers and Gravettian sites, especially where no skeletons have been found. Gelabert plans to combine soil DNA with protein analysis to trace the first movements of modern humans in Europe.