Indeed. This is pretty much what we know from the archaeology and ancient DNA now regarding Europe's population history:
- The most indigenous strain of ancestry on Peninsular Europe were "WHGs"
- WHGs = Western European Hunter-Gatherers
- In Eastern Europe (European Russia and places like Ukraine) they mixed with "ANEs"
- ANEs = Ancient North Eurasians
- ANEs' ancestry mostly peaks in Siberians like Kets if memory serves me right
- ANE is basically a very ancient relative (~35,000 years) of WHG with East-Eurasian admix
- Then around and after the Neolithic in the ME farmers from Anatolia (Turkey) expand
- These farmers bring farming, the first animal domestication and Neolithic culture to Europe
- They mostly displace and absorb the WHGs in Peninsular Europe
- In Eastern Europe another mixture is occurring between "CHGs" and "EHGS"
- EHGs = WHG + ANE
- CHGs = Caucasian Hunter-Gatherers who are a group from ME similar to HGs in Iran
- CHGs and Iran HGs seem a mix between something like Anatolian farmers and ANE
- CHG + EHG hybrids who have minor Anatolian Neolithic in them form
- These hybrids = the early Indo-Europeans
- The early Indo-Europeans expand into Peninsular Europe and heavily mix with the farmers
- Modern Europeans essentially = Steppe (IE) + Anatolian Farmers + remnant WHG
Oversimplified a bit, believe or not, but that's the gist and we have a myriad of papers, samples and analyses to prove it:
A sequencing study comparing ancient and contemporary genomes reveals that most present-day Europeans derive from at least three highly differentiated populations: west European hunter-gatherers, ancient north Eurasians (related to Upper Palaeolithic Siberians) and early European farmers of...
www.nature.com
A genome-wide analysis of 69 ancient Europeans reveals the history of population migrations around the time that Indo-European languages arose in Europe, when there was a large migration into Europe from the Eurasian steppe in the east (providing a genetic ancestry still present in Europeans...
www.nature.com
(Follow the publication history of
this Harvard Med Geneticist if you wanna see the other studies, especially the more recent ones)
Southern Europe, mainly Greece and Italy sort of breaks from this clear-cut story, though. Both regions received post-Neolithic admixture from the Middle-East after the Anatolian and CHG stuff. Greece seems to have started to get it between the Neolithic and Bronze-Age and continued on some level ever since.
The later ME ancestry in Greece and much of the Balkans is different from what it's in other Europeans like Brits and Germans in that it comes with elements like
Natufian and Iran Neolithic related ancestry from the post-Neolithic Middle-East when ancient MEs basically started intermixing and forming people like
Chalcolithic Iranians who were a mix of CHG, Iran-Neolithic, Natufian, Anatolian-Neolithic and so forth.
Italy is very similar but with Italy a recent paper has shown us that this shift only began around the Iron-Age:
science.sciencemag.org
Late Republican and Imperial Rome seems to have encouraged quite massive influxes of MENAs into Italy alongside
the substantial Greek colonization that was already going on. But both Greece and Italy experienced a sort of "balancing effect" during the Middle-Ages. With Greece and the Balkans this was the expansions of the Slavs who left behind quite a heavy mark on even modern Greeks genetically whereas in Italy it was the expansions of the Germanic and Celtic
Barbarians which leaves us now with modern Greeks and Italians who sit in an intermediate position between North-Central Europeans and Middle-Easterners where ancient Greeks would have been much more ME shifted and pre-Late Republic Romans would have been more European shifted:
These are models using a software called nMonte on
this website running samples from a
Global PCA hosted by this quite prolific Polish gentleman from
this blog who even gets recognition from and rubs shoulders with the authors of many of the studies I shared. He's a pretty reliable character as his software. Anyway, gonna leave this tangent be. Already derailed the thread enough.
Hope you were following along and learned something interesting, little huuno.