On 12 September at 10:15 Lehti Saag will defend her doctoral thesis „The prehistory of Estonia from a genetic perspective: new insights from ancient DNA”.
Mait Metspalu, PhD (Molecular Biology), Senior Research Fellow of Modern Population Genetics and Director of Institute of Genomics
Kristiina Tambets, PhD (Molecular Biology), Senior Research Fellow of Population Genetics
Toomas Kivisild, PhD (Genetics), Senior Research Fellow of Population Genetics and Professor of Leuven KU
Daniel Bradley, PhD, Trinity College Dublin, University College Dublin, Ireland
The processes that have shaped the demographic histories of populations through time have been studied for decades using modern genetic data. In the last almost 15 years, ancient DNA research has started to contribute significantly to this field. Analysing modern genomes enables to derive models to explain population change in the past. Ancient genomes are connected to a certain time and place, enabling to specify these models and to uncover genetic lineages that have not managed to contribute to the genomes of modern populations.
The main topic of this thesis is the demographic history of Europe and more specifically Estonia. Modern humans reached Europe by around 45,000 years ago (ya). Around 8,000 ya, farming was brought to Europe by people with Near-Eastern ancestry. Estonia is somewhat different from most of Europe – the first evidence of human settlement is from after the ice age around 11,000 ya, farming arrived only with the Late Neolithic Corded Ware culture people, and Estonians, Finns and some smaller populations in Eastern Europe and Western Siberia speak Uralic languages, originating probably in the Volga-Kama region.
This thesis combines data from archaeology, linguistics and genetics to study the occupants of Estonia from the Neolithic until today in a wider Eurasian context. The genome of modern Estonians is found to be influenced by several past migration events. Firstly, the Neolithic hunter-gatherers of Comb Ceramic culture were likely to bring eastern influences to the initial population with a western genetic background. Around a thousand years later, farming-based economies spread in Estonia together with Corded Ware culture. Its carriers were people with ancestry from Yamnaya people from the Eastern European steppe. Hunter-gatherer ancestry increased again in the Bronze Age while Estonian Iron Age genomes reveal an influx of a new genetic component from Siberia, which also connects modern Estonians to other Uralic speakers in Europe and Siberia.