Etruscan biology: the Tarquinian population, seventh to second centuryBC (Southern Etruria, Italy)

Biological divergence and equality during the first millennium BC in human populations of central Italy

“…Endogamy was practiced during the first millennium BC (and more generally during the protohistorical period) within Italian human groups. Endogamic phenomena within Iron Age communities have already been noted and described in Alfedena (Bondioli et al, 1986;Rubini, 1996) and Tarquinia (Mallegni et al, 1980;Rubini et al, 1997).…”

Biological distance at the Ryan Mound site

“…Humeral aperture and sternal foramen were scored by a group of trained undergraduate students; for these post‐cranial traits, the author was present during scoring and a random check by the author of 30 (20%) individuals found no discrepancies. The 42 traits were chosen because they had been used in previous studies that looked at within‐site or within‐cemetery biological distances (Prowse & Lovell, ; Rubini, ; Rubini, Bonafede, Mogliazza, & Moreschini, ; Ricaut et al, ; Stojanowski & Schillaci, ) and solid evidence exists for their heritability (see Berry, ; Brasili et al, ; Hauser & DeStefano, , Oudhof, ; Ricaut et al, ; Saunders & Popovich, ; Sjøvold, ). Research on macaque skulls, for instance, has revealed significant heritabilities in foramen and notch variation (Cheverud & Buikstra, ).…”

“…Negative MMD scores can occur; these negative numbers imply that the biological distance is very small (Nikita et al, ). Standardized MMDs, which are standardized by dividing the MMDs by their standard deviations, provide the values needed to assess statistical significance (alpha = 0.05) (Nikita et al, ; Rubini et al, ). For this study, MMD was applied according to the Freeman and Tukey method, which is used for small sample sizes (Movesian et al, ).…”

La Sassa cave: Isotopic evidence for Copper Age and Bronze Age population dynamics in Central Italy

“…Human burials have been found in two nearby caves: the Scalelle and Vittorio Vecchi caves. The burial goods collected at the Scalelle cave [25] typologically belong to the southern Italian Gaudo CA facies [2]; the latter covers in Latium a chronological span of about 500 years (3330-2860 BCE) [26]. Hundreds of disarticulated human bones in the Vittorio Vecchi cave have been found with abundant EBA (around 2100-1750 BCE) and MBA (around 1750-1300 BCE) potsherds and a few CA potsherds [4,5,15].…”