A cold event intense enough to make central Europe uninhabitable — or to reduce available resources below the level needed to sustain a population — could have driven a small founding population to local extinction.

With a limited founder population and no ability to reconstitute from a larger gene pool, even moderate disruption could have ended a lineage.

Absorption is a third possibility.

Rather than being replaced or eliminated, Zlatý kůň’s population might have been absorbed into later populations through interbreeding, but at such a low contribution that it falls below the detection threshold of current genomic analysis.

If her population contributed, say, half a percent of ancestry to later Europeans, that contribution might be too dilute to detect against the backdrop of larger subsequent contributions from other groups.