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The ethnogenesis of modern Europeans
I’ll try to keep this brief because I’ve already written an extensive article that tells you the whole story in detail.
All modern Europeans are descended from three populations, and our phenotypes are dependent on the proportions of ancestry that we’ve inherited from these populations. Firstly, the Mesolithic Western European Hunter-Gatherers (WHG), secondly, the Neolithic Early European Farmers (EEF) who moved into Europe and absorbed the WHG population, and finally, the warlike Bronze Age Proto-Indo-Europeans (PIE), who conquered the mixed WHG+EEF population.
The PIE were mostly of Mesolithic Eastern European Hunter-Gatherer descent (EHG, ~70%), with some admixture from women of the EEF and Caucasus Hunter-Gatherer (CHG) populations.
The EEF+WHG mixed population occupied the entirety of Europe to the west of the Black Sea, while the PIE originally inhabited Eastern Europe (as implied by “Eastern Hunter-Gatherer”). We could call these two populations “Neolithic Western Europeans” and “Neolithic Eastern Europeans.”
Genetically speaking, most regions of Europe have changed little over the past 2000–4000 years.
