also be affected.
In a statement, NASA said the difficulties
JOE MARINO/UPI/SHUTTERSTOCK
The Peregrine launch on 8 January went well — but then the craft got into difficulties.
a controlled touch down on the lunar surface.
So far, that feat has been performed only by
national space agencies.
NASA partnerships
Peregrine is the first of many Moon missions
planned as partnerships between NASA and
the US aerospace industry. Known as the
Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS)
initiative, the collaboration encourages small
businesses to build and fly lunar landers,
on which NASA will buy rides for scientific
equipment.
Five NASA research payloads, worth a total
of US$108 million, are on board Peregrine,
including instruments for studying water and
other volatiles in the lunar soil. NASA has said
it understands that these commercial missions
come with a level of risk, given that they use
brand-new equipment from companies that
might not have flown space missions before.
Only the space agencies of the Soviet Union,
the United States, China and India have ever
pulled off controlled lunar landings, although
other countries have made attempts in recent
years. Most failures have come as probes
attempted to descend to the Moon’s sur-
face, under lower gravity and a much thinner
atmosphere than on Earth.
The next CLPS launch is scheduled for no
earlier than mid-February. The spacecraft
involved is of a different design and built
by another company, Intuitive Machines in
Houston, Texas.
It’s not clear what impact the Peregrine
failure will have on that launch. Astrobotic is
also slated to launch another CLPS mission
— to send a large lander with an ice-drilling
rover from NASA to the lunar south pole — no
earlier than November. That mission could
ANCIENT DNA REVEALS
ORIGINS OF MULTIPLE
SCLEROSIS IN EUROPE
A huge cache of ancient genomes reveals the
roots of a range of traits in modern Europeans.
By Sara Reardon
M
ore than 1,600 ancient genomes have
helped scientists to trace the roots
of a host of genetic traits found in
modern Europeans. The genomes
suggest that many characteris-
tics — including a heightened risk of multiple
sclerosis — were carried to Europe by people
who migrated to the continent in three distinct
waves, starting around 45,000 years ago.
These results and others were published on
10 January in four related papers1–4 in Nature.
The findings suggest that some of the
regional variation in certain traits was caused
by differences in migrants’ dispersal pat-
terns. That contradicts the idea that genetic
with Peregrine provide a teachable moment.
“We will use this lesson to propel our efforts
to advance science, exploration, and com-
mercial development of the Moon,” said Joel
Kearns, deputy associate administrator for
exploration at the agency’s headquarters in
Washington DC.
Mission data
Before the launch, Astrobotic indicated its
willingness to learn from problems. “If we
have a bad day somewhere along the mission,
we’re going to be gathering all of the data that
we received up to that point, and we’re going to
learn from it,” said chief executive John Thorn-
ton. “We’re going to get smarter, and we’re
going to be ready for the next one.”
Until the propellant problems began,
Peregrine’s launch went nearly perfectly.
The mission was the first test flight of a rocket
called Vulcan, built by United Launch Alliance
in Centennial, Colorado, and of engines built
by Blue Origin in Kent, Washington. This type
of engine could reduce the US aerospace
industry’s current reliance on Russian-built
rocket engines. Vulcan is already slated to fly
many future missions for customers including
the US military and the tech behemoth Ama-
zon, which aims to use the rocket to launch a
constellation of broadband communications
satellites.
differences arose mainly as people adapted to
the conditions in specific locations in Europe.
“This is a tour de force,” says Lluís
Quintana-Murci, a population geneticist
at the Pasteur Institute in Paris who was
not involved in the study. He says that the
research provides unprecedented detail on
how ancient ancestry can influence disease
risk to this day. “It’s a beautiful example of
how, by addressing very basic fundamental
anthropological and genomic questions, you
can inform medicine,” he says.
New arrivals
Europe was settled by anatomically modern
humans in three main waves: hunter-gatherers
reached Europe from Asia around 45,000 years
Nature | Vol 625 | 18 January 2024 | 431
News in focus
This ancient European’s DNA helped to trace the rise of modern Europeans’ genetic traits.
ago; farmers arrived from the Middle East
11,000 years ago; and pastoralists, or animal
herders, came from the steppes of western
Asia and eastern Europe 5,000 years ago.
Archaeologists and historians had assumed
that these groups mixed with one another
across the continent, and that populations
in particular places evolved distinct traits in
response to their local environments.
But when geneticist Eske Willerslev at the
University of Cambridge, UK, and his team
began analysing the ancient-human genomes,
they found that that wasn’t the full story.
The researchers collected and sequenced
DNA from 317 ancient skeletons found in
Europe, most of which were between 3,000
and 11,000 years old1. They then combined
these sequences with existing genomic data
for more than 1,300 other ancient Eurasians.
By comparing the remains’ genetic markers,
ages and burial locations, the scientists drew
a European family tree and migration map
that revealed how genomic characteristics
in a specific location changed as populations
moved over time1. It showed that the steppe
pastoralists mainly went to the more northern
parts of Europe, whereas the Middle Eastern
farmers went to the south and west.
Of genes and geography
Some of these migrants completely replaced
existing populations. Denmark, for instance,
underwent two large population transitions,
each within just a few generations2. Willerslev
says that archaeological evidence and the
speed of the transition suggest that the new-
comers killed all the locals rather than driving
them out or mixing with them.
432 | Nature | Vol 625 | 18 January 2024
The dispersal patterns mean that many
modern Europeans carry some genetic ances-
try from all three population waves, but the
relative amount of each varies depending on
the location, Willerslev says.
Next, the researchers compared the ancient
genomes with those of 410,000 modern indi-
viduals whose genetic profiles are stored in the
UK Biobank, a massive database of genetic and
physical information3. The data provided clear
evidence that many traits can be traced back
directly to one of the three migration waves.
For instance, modern northern Europeans
are taller and lighter skinned than their south-
ern counterparts because they have more
ancestry from the steppe pastoralists. And
Neurons are damaged in multiple sclerosis.
those with the most hunter-gatherer ances-
try have variants that put them at higher risk
of diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease.
“A lot of the history was created outside
Europe,” Willerslev says. But once these
migrants settled in geographically iso-
lated areas of Europe, the variants became
cemented in individual populations.
The study helped to solve questions such
as why human adults evolved the ability to
digest milk before Europeans herded animals.
Mutations near the gene encoding lactase, the
enzyme that allows babies to process milk,
could have helped early humans to survive
famines even before the arrival of the pasto-
ralists. These mutations might have primed
the genome for the development of the variant
that allows lactase to continue to function in
adults.
But it’s unclear whether other traits, such as
DANISH NATL MUSEUM
height, provided any advantage to the people
who carried them, Willerslev says.
Evolutionary mysteries
That ambiguity does not surprise Tony Capra,
an evolutionary geneticist at the University of
California, San Francisco. “It’s just really, really
hard to know what drives selection,” he says.
Although it can be tempting to conclude that
a genetic variant was an evolutionary adapta-
tion to an environment, sometimes it is just
the result of who was living there at the time,
Capra notes. “Even with these amazing win-
dows into the past that ancient DNA gives us,
it just underscores what a complex process
human evolution has been.”
Surprisingly, one of the traits that seems
to have had a strong evolutionary advantage
is one associated with a predisposition to
multiple sclerosis4. This trait arrived in Europe
with the west-Asian pastoralists and became
even more common in northern Europe over
subsequent millennia.
Today, multiple sclerosis is a devastating
disease caused by an overactive immune
system attacking the nervous system. But
that superpowered immune system, or
genetic variants associated with it, could have
helped ancient people to survive plagues and
common pathogens, Willerslev says. “That’s
the best explanation we can come up with.”
Capra says that the team has taken a “clever”
approach to understanding ancient humans
by looking at how ancestry affects modern
traits, rather than trying to work out the traits
JOHN ZAJICEK/SCIENCE SOURCE LIBRARY
by looking only at ancient-DNA samples. The
next step, he and Quintana-Murci say, will
be for researchers to apply the methods
developed by Willerslev and his colleagues to
genomes from other parts of the world, such
as southeast Asia and the Americas.
1. Allentoft, M. E. et al. Nature 625, 301–311 (2024).
2. Allentoft, M. E. et al. Nature 625, 329–337 (2024).
3. Irving-Pease, E. K. et al. Nature 625, 312–320 (2024).
4. Barrie, W. et al. Nature 625, 321–328 (2024).