Heterogeneous hunter-gatherer and steppe-related ancestries in Late Neolithic and Bell Beaker genomes from present-day France

The transition from the Late Neolithic to the Bronze Age has witnessed important population and societal changes in western Europe. These include massive genomic contributions of pastoralist herders originating from the Pontic-Caspian steppes into local populations resulting from complex interactions between collapsing hunter-gatherers and expanding farmers of Anatolian ancestry. This transition is documented through extensive ancient genomic data from present-day Britain, Ireland, Iberia, the Mediterranean islands and Germany. It remains, however, largely overlooked in France, where most focus has been on the Middle Neolithic, with the exception of one Late Neolithic genome sequenced at 0.05X coverage. This leaves the key transitional period covering ~5,400-4,700 cal. years BP (Before Present) genetically unsampled, and, thus, the exact timeframe of hunter-gatherer persistence and arrival of steppe migrations unknown. To remediate this, we sequenced 24 ancient human genomes from France spanning the mid-fourth to the mid-second millennium Before Common Era.