No abstract

European genetic ancestry originates from three main ancestral populations - Western hunter-gatherers, early European farmers and Yamnaya Eurasian herders - whose edges geographically met in present-day France. Despite its central role to our understanding of how the ancestral populations interacted and gave rise to modern population structure, the population history of France has remained largely understudied. Here, we analysed 856 high-coverage whole-genome sequences along with genome-wide genotyping data of 3,234 present-day individuals from the northern half of France and merged them with publicly available present-day and ancient Europe-wide genotype datasets. We also analysed, for the first time, the whole-genome sequences of six medieval individuals (300-1100 CE) from Western France to gain insights into the genetic impact of what is commonly known as the Migration Period in Europe. We found extensive fine-scale population structure across Brittany and the downstream Loire basin, emphasizing the need for investigating local populations to better understand the distribution of rare and putatively deleterious variants across space. Overall, we observed an increased population differentiation between the northern and southern sides of the river Loire, which are characterised by different proportions of steppe vs. Neolithic-related ancestry. Samples from Western Brittany carry the largest levels of steppe ancestry and show high levels of allele sharing with individuals associated with the Bell Beaker complex, levels that are only comparable with those found in populations lying on the northwestern edges of Europe. Together, our results imply that present-day individuals from Western Brittany retain substantial legacy of the genetic changes that occurred in Northwestern Europe following the arrival of the Bell Beaker people c. 2500 BCE. Such genetic legacy may explain the sharing of disease-related alleles with other present-day populations from Western Britain and Ireland.

No abstract

In 1998 a preventive excavation carried out in Nimes on a land located inside the Augustean wall, allowed to point to an area of about 800 square meters signs of planting quite well preserved under remnants built during the Early Empire. Three different and successive organizations, characterized by trenches or pits lengthened or stocky in shape were identified during a period stretching from the last quarter of the 2 century to the third quarter of the 1 st century B.C. These traces of agricultural ways, interpreted as witnesses of early wine cultivation, have been linked to others, ofien more tenuous, spotted out when previous diggings were carried out around the pre-Augustean town. The thorough archeological analysis of these documents, highlighted by informations yielded by texts from ancient and modern agronomists, leads to a first synthesis on the forms of farming around the urban area of Nimes during the 2 and 3 centuries B.C.