Modern humans have populated Europe for more than 45,000 years1,2. Our knowledge of the genetic relatedness and structure of ancient hunter-gatherers is however limited, owing to the scarceness and poor molecular preservation of human remains from that period3. Here we analyse 356 ancient hunter-gatherer genomes, including new genomic data for 116 individuals from 14 countries in western and central Eurasia, spanning between 35,000 and 5,000 years ago. We identify a genetic ancestry profile in individuals associated with Upper Palaeolithic Gravettian assemblages from western Europe that is distinct from contemporaneous groups related to this archaeological culture in central and southern Europe4, but resembles that of preceding individuals associated with the Aurignacian culture. This ancestry profile survived during the Last Glacial Maximum (25,000 to 19,000 years ago) in human populations from southwestern Europe associated with the Solutrean culture, and with the following Magdalenian culture that re-expanded northeastward after the Last Glacial Maximum. Conversely, we reveal a genetic turnover in southern Europe suggesting a local replacement of human groups around the time of the Last Glacial Maximum, accompanied by a north-to-south dispersal of populations associated with the Epigravettian culture. From at least 14,000 years ago, an ancestry related to this culture spread from the south across the rest of Europe, largely replacing the Magdalenian-associated gene pool. After a period of limited admixture that spanned the beginning of the Mesolithic, we find genetic interactions between western and eastern European hunter-gatherers, who were also characterized by marked differences in phenotypically relevant variants.

Ces dernières années, de nombreux travaux ont été consacrés aux modalités de production des supports d'armatures retouchées du Gravettien. Si les résultats obtenus contribuent à améliorer notre connaissance des systèmes techniques de ce techno-complexe, les tentatives de synthèse élargies sont encore rares. Certes, l'état des connaissances s'avère encore disparate d'une région et/ou d'une phase à l'autre, mais cela ne saurait justifier la seule poursuite d'un objectif documentaire visant à caractériser les modes de production lamellaires. Pour dépasser le simple constat de variabilité/analogies/différences, nous proposons quelques pistes de réflexion fondées sur l'étude de sites du Gravettien (moyen, récent et final) de France, du Portugal et d'Allemagne. La comparaison des modalités de production d'armatures de ces sites (

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Investigations of chronology play a key role in the majority of archaeological research endeavors and are particularly pertinent to examinations of culture-environment relationships, especially during periods characterized by rapid and marked climatic variability and environmental reorganization. Rigorous evaluations of available data and robust methods are required if one wishes to reconstruct reliable chronologies, and this is especially the case when examining periods that are associated with a relatively few radiometric measurements. Such is the case for the Upper Paleolithic archaeological record documented in present-day France from 32,000 to 21,000 calibrated years BP. We take into account critically examined radiocarbon measurements from contextually secure archaeological contexts and employ a recently-developed method of Hierarchical Bayesian Modeling to reconstruct the chronology of archaeological cultures from the Middle Gravettian to the Badegoulian. The calculated chronological 2 intervals for each typo-technologically defined culture phase are compared to the Greenland ice core climatic record and a terrestrial paleoenvironmental record from Bergsee Lake (Southern Germany)itself expressed in calendar years calculated with the same calibration curve employed in our age model-thereby permitting each archaeological culture to be correlated accurately with documented paleoclimatic variability. 1.1. Late Pleistocene climatic variability 1 LabEx LaScArBx "IMPACT" (W. Banks, dir.) Programme Collectif de Recherches "SaM" (S. Ducasse and C. Renard, dirs.) Programme Collectif de Recherches "Cassegros" (S. Ducasse and J.-M. Le Tensorer, dirs.) Programme Collectif de Recherches "Casserole" (A. Lenoble and L. Detrain, dirs.