Multiple waves of modern human dispersal, some of them leaving no lasting genetic legacy, had apparently reached Europe during the Upper Paleolithic.

This was already known in general terms from other ancient genomes, but Zlatý kůň provided one of the most dramatic demonstrations of it — a woman who lived 45,000 years ago, whose genome had been sequenced with high quality, and who left no traceable descendants anywhere in the world.

A Genome Refined

A 2025 study by Sümer and colleagues added further nuance to the Zlatý kůň story by expanding the dataset of ancient European genomes and applying more refined population modeling to the question of where she fit.

Ancient DNA research is a rapidly evolving field.