Current species distributions at high latitudes are the product of expansion from glacial refugia into previously uninhabitable areas at the end of the last glaciation. The traditional view of postglacial colonization is that southern populations expanded their ranges into unoccupied northern territories. Recent findings on mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) of British small mammals have challenged this simple colonization scenario by demonstrating a more complex genetic turnover in Britain during the Pleistocene-Holocene transition where one mtDNA clade of each species was replaced by another mtDNA clade of the same species. Here, we provide evidence from one of those small mammals, the bank vole (Clethrionomys glareolus), that the replacement was genome-wide. Using more than 10 000 autosomal SNPs we found that similar to mtDNA, bank vole genomes in Britain form two (north and south) clusters which admix. Therefore, the genome of the original postglacial colonists (the northern cluster) was probably replaced by another wave of migration from a different continental European population (the southern cluster), and we gained support for this by modelling with approximate Bayesian computation. This finding emphasizes the importance of analysis of genome-wide diversity within species under changing climate in creating opportunities for sophisticated testing of population history scenarios.

Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Cornell University Ithaca NY 14853 USA

Institute of Environmental Sciences Jagiellonian University Gronostajowa 7 30 387 Krakow Poland

Institute of Environmental Sciences Jagiellonian University Gronostajowa 7 30 387 Krakow Poland Evolutionary Biology Group Faculty of Biology Adam Mickiewicz University Poznan Poland

Laboratory of Molecular Ecology Institute of Animal Physiology and Genetics of the Czech Academy of Sciences Rumburská 89 277 21 Liběchov Czech Republic

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