The Genetic Origin of Daunians and the Pan-Mediterranean Southern Italian Iron Age Context

Abstract

Summary The geographical location and shape of Apulia, a narrow land stretching out in the sea at the South of Italy, made this region a Mediterranean crossroads connecting Western Europe and the Balkans. Such movements culminated at the beginning of the Iron Age with the Iapygian civilisation which consisted of three cultures: Peucetians, Messapians and Daunians. Among them, the Daunians left a peculiar cultural heritage, with one-of-a-kind stelae and pottery, but, despite the extensive archaeological literature, their origin has been lost to time. In order to shed light on this and to provide a genetic picture of Iron Age Southern Italy, we collected and sequenced human remains from three archaeological sites geographically located in Northern Apulia (the area historically inhabited by Daunians) and radiocarbon dated between 1157 and 275 calBCE. We find that Iron Age Apulian samples are still distant from the genetic variability of modern-day Apulians, they show a degree of genetic heterogeneity comparable with the cosmopolitan Republican and Imperial Roman civilisation, even though a few kilometres and centuries separate them, and they are well inserted into the Iron Age Pan-Mediterranean genetic landscape. Our study provides for the first time a window on the genetic make-up of pre-Roman Apulia, whose increasing connectivity within the Mediterranean landscape, would have contributed to laying the foundation for modern genetic variability. In this light, the genetic profile of Daunians may be compatible with an at least partial autochthonous origin, with plausible contributions from the Balkan peninsula.

The Genomic portrait of the Picene culture: new insights into the Italic Iron Age and the legacy of the Roman expansion in Central Italy

“…Remarkably, no major differentiation between individuals from the two Picene necropolises (Novilara and Sirolo-Numana) can be observed, pointing to the genetic similarity among the two Picene sites, notwithstanding differences in their material cultures [5,13]. In agreement with previous findings about other Italic Iron Age cultural groups [10], the Picenes show a slight deviation from the genetic distribution of modern Central Italians, being shifted towards Northern Italians and, more in general, Central Europeans (Additional file 3: Fig. S2).…”

“…Table S1) together with Italian IA individuals from the literature [8][9][10]. The Monteriggioni/Colle di Val d'Elsa samples overlap the genetic variability of other Etruscan individuals [9] and mirror the ancestry patterns already identified in this ethnicity (Fig.…”

“…To clarify the evolution of the gene pool of the Picenes and to get a general overview of the Italian IA population dynamics we also included in the downstream analyses newly generated data for 4 individuals from the Etruscan necropolis of Monteriggioni/Colle di Val d’Elsa (Table 1; Additional file 2: Table S1) together with Italian IA individuals from the literature [8–10]. The Monteriggioni/Colle di Val d’Elsa samples overlap the genetic variability of other Etruscan individuals [9] and mirror the ancestry patterns already identified in this ethnicity (Fig.…”

“…For genomic analyses, we compared our newly reported samples with modern and ancient individuals from the literature. The included samples belong to the AADR dataset v52.2 ([16], https://reich.hms.harvard.edu/allen-ancient-dna-resource-aadr-downloadable-genotypes-present-day-and-ancient-dna-data) both the 1240K and the 1240K+HO dataset, Lazaridis et al [19] and Aneli et al [10]. To maximize the number of SNPs available for each analysis we built three different dataset: A) including 1240K and HO data, used for PCA and Admixture analysis; B) including only 1240K data, used for kinship analysis, f3-statistic, D-statistics, qpAdm; C) including 1240K, HO and modern Italians from Raveane et al [52], employed for PCA to compare ancient and modern Italians (Additional file 3: Fig.…”

Toad zoonyms mirror the linguistic and demographic history of Greece

“…Examining the genome of modern populations and ancient remains (archaeogenetics) has also proven to be of great importance for linguistics, as it sheds light on the origin and transmission of various languages, such as the dispersals of the Indo-Europeans from the Caspian steppes to the rest of Europe and South Asia [ 54 , 55 ], the Bantu expansion [ 56 ], the transmission of Uralic languages into Asia and Europe [ 57 , 58 ], and the entry of Celtic speech into Britain [ 59 ]. In a Balkan context, several studies have examined the introduction of Greek into Greece [ 60 ], the possible relationship between the Daunians of Italy to populations from the West Balkan Iron Age [ 61 ], the migrations of the Arbëreshë to Italy [ 62 ], and the ancestry contribution of Slavs to the present-day peoples of the Balkan peninsula [ 63 , 64 ].…”