🇪🇸 Spain Castile and Leon Mesolithic La Brana genetics

The La Braña-Arintero discovery

The genome published in 2014 came from a roughly 7,000-year-old Mesolithic individual at La Braña-Arintero in León, northern Spain. The site’s present-day location lies within Castile and León; that geographical label must not be confused with a medieval Castilian identity.

The World Genetics reference records n=1. The published name La Braña 1 is important for research history, but the dataset’s individual identifier and processing provenance should still be checked before equating this coordinate row with a specific sequencing release.

[1]

A genome before the farming transition

The La Braña study supplied a pre-agricultural European genome and showed that some variants associated with pathogen resistance were already present before farming. It also challenged the assumption that combinations of pigmentation variants typical of many present-day Europeans were universal among Mesolithic people.

These findings concern measured genetic variants and probabilistic biological interpretation. They do not justify assigning a precise reconstructed appearance, immune capability or health outcome to all Iberian hunter-gatherers. The comparison tools on this page analyse ancestry coordinates, not those individual trait variants.

[1]

Iberian continuity and later change

The broader Iberian ancient-DNA sequence records repeated demographic changes after the Mesolithic, including farming-associated ancestry, later steppe-related ancestry and historical Mediterranean movements. La Braña therefore provides a baseline for investigating change, rather than a shortcut to identifying an unchanged modern descendant population.

The ancient comparison is especially useful for contrasting La Braña with other hunter-gatherers and Neolithic Iberians. A modern nearest match is only the closest available coordinate profile in this database; it cannot show that one living population has exclusive ownership of this ancient ancestry.

[2]

What is Spain Castile and Leon Mesolithic La Brana DNA closest to?

In the World Genetics modern G25 comparison, the closest non-self match for Spain Castile and Leon Mesolithic La Brana is Karelian. Other nearby references include Lithuanian North Žemaitija, Karelian Southwest (Livvi), Lithuanian West Žemaitija, and Finnish. This gives the Spain Castile and Leon Mesolithic La Brana profile its nearest modern genetic context inside the current reference database.

What does Spain Castile and Leon Mesolithic La Brana ancestry look like?

The ancestral breakdown below loads the best-fitting World Genetics calculator for the Spain Castile and Leon Mesolithic La Brana average. It should be read as a model of deep ancestry components, while the closest-match table is the better guide to which modern populations are most similar in G25 space.

Where is Spain Castile and Leon Mesolithic La Brana DNA closest on the map?

The heatmap gives the Spain Castile and Leon Mesolithic La Brana profile a geographic shape. Warmer areas mark regions where available modern reference populations sit closer to the Spain Castile and Leon Mesolithic La Brana average, while cooler areas represent more distant matches.

Sources and further reading

1. Olalde et al. (2014), Derived immune and ancestral pigmentation alleles in a 7,000-year-old Mesolithic European
2. Olalde et al. (2019), The genomic history of the Iberian Peninsula over the past 8000 years