Modern humans appeared in Europe by at least 45,000 years ago^1,2,3,4,5, but the extent of their interactions with Neanderthals, who disappeared by about 40,000 years ago⁶, and their relationship to the broader expansion of modern humans outside Africa are poorly understood. Here we present genome-wide data from three individuals dated to between 45,930 and 42,580 years ago from Bacho Kiro Cave, Bulgaria^1,2. They are the earliest Late Pleistocene modern humans known to have been recovered in Europe so far, and were found in association with an Initial Upper Palaeolithic artefact assemblage. Unlike two previously studied individuals of similar ages from Romania⁷ and Siberia⁸ who did not contribute detectably to later populations, these individuals are more closely related to present-day and ancient populations in East Asia and the Americas than to later west Eurasian populations. This indicates that they belonged to a modern human migration into Europe that was not previously known from the genetic record, and provides evidence that there was at least some continuity between the earliest modern humans in Europe and later people in Eurasia. Moreover, we find that all three individuals had Neanderthal ancestors a few generations back in their family history, confirming that the first European modern humans mixed with Neanderthals and suggesting that such mixing could have been common.

现代人类至少在 45,000 年前出现在欧洲^1,2,3,4,5 ，但他们与大约 40,000 年前消失的尼安德特人的互动程度⁶ ，以及他们与现代人类在欧洲以外更广泛扩张的关系人们对非洲知之甚少。在这里，我们展示了来自保加利亚 Bacho Kiro 洞穴的三个个体的全基因组数据，年代可追溯至 45,930 至 42,580 年前^1,2 。他们是迄今为止在欧洲发现的最早的更新世晚期现代人类，并且被发现与旧石器时代晚期的原始文物组合有关。与之前研究的来自罗马尼亚⁷和西伯利亚⁸的两个年龄相似的个体不同，它们对后来的种群没有明显的贡献，这些个体与东亚和美洲的现代和古代种群的关系比与后来的欧亚西部种群的关系更密切。这表明他们属于进入欧洲的现代人类迁徙，这一点以前从未从基因记录中得知，并提供了证据表明欧洲最早的现代人类与后来的欧亚大陆人之间至少存在某种连续性。此外，我们发现这三个人的家族历史中都有几代人的尼安德特人祖先，这证实了第一批欧洲现代人类与尼安德特人的混合，并表明这种混合可能很常见。