Ancient mtDNA from Late Bronze and Iron Age Sardinia

From the paper:

In the multidimensional scaling of Fig. 3, Nuragic Sardinians cluster with the majority of the European populations. Given the small sample size, inevitable in ancient DNA studies, it is at present impossible to infer their evolutionary relationships from mtDNA aYnities. Nevertheless, in relation with ancient samples, Nuragic Sardinians appear more related to the Iberians than to the Etruscans, whose position in the graph is eccentric. Three data points are not enough for a robust generalisation. However, one can at least conclude that Sardinians and Iberians show a greater genealogical continuity with the Bronze-Age inhabitants of the same regions than the Tuscans.

Human Genetics Volume 122, Numbers 3-4 / November, 2007. DOI: 10.1007/s00439-007-0403-6

Genetic variation in prehistoric Sardinia

David Caramelli et al.

Abstract We sampled teeth from 53 ancient Sardinian (Nuragic) individuals who lived in the Late Bronze Age and Iron Age, between 3,430 and 2,700 years ago. After eliminating the samples that, in preliminary biochemical tests, did not show a high probability to yield reproducible results, we obtained 23 sequences of the mitochondrial DNA control region, which were associated to haplogroups by comparison with a dataset of modern sequences. The Nuragic samples show a remarkably low genetic diversity, comparable to that observed in ancient Iberians, but much lower than among the Etruscans. Most of these sequences have exact matches in two modern Sardinian populations, supporting a clear genealogical continuity from the Late Bronze Age up to current times. The Nuragic populations appear to be part of a large and geographically unstructured cluster of modern European populations, thus making it difficult to infer their evolutionary relationships. However, the low levels of genetic diversity, both within and among ancient samples, as opposed to the sharp differences among modern Sardinian samples, support the hypothesis of the expansion of a small group of maternally related individuals, and of comparatively recent differentiation of the Sardinian gene pools.

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