Abstract
Archaeological consideration of maritime connectivity has ranged from a biogeographical perspective that considers the sea as a barrier to a view of seaways as ancient highways that facilitate exchange. Our results illustrate the former. We report three Late Neolithic human genomes from the Mediterranean island of Malta that are markedly enriched for runs of homozygosity, indicating inbreeding in their ancestry and an effective population size of only hundreds, a striking illustration of maritime isolation in this agricultural society. In the Late Neolithic, communities across mainland Europe experienced a resurgence of hunter-gatherer ancestry, pointing toward the persistence of different ancestral strands that subsequently admixed. This is absent in the Maltese genomes, giving a further indication of their genomic insularity. Imputation of genome-wide genotypes in our new and 258 published ancient individuals allowed shared identity-by-descent segment analysis, giving a fine-grained genetic geography of Neolithic Europe. This highlights the differentiating effects of seafaring Mediterranean expansion and also island colonization, including that of Ireland, Britain, and Orkney. These maritime effects contrast profoundly with a lack of migratory barriers in the establishment of Central European farming populations from Anatolia and the Balkans.
Originalsprog | Engelsk |
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Tidsskrift | Current Biology |
Vol/bind | 32 |
Udgave nummer | 12 |
Sider (fra-til) | 2668-2680.e6 |
ISSN | 0960-9822 |
DOI | |
Status | Udgivet - 2022 |
Bibliografisk note
Funding Information:This ancient genomic work was funded by the Science Foundation Ireland / Health Research Board / Wellcome Trust Biomedical Research Partnership Investigator award no. 205072 to D.G.B., “ Ancient Genomics and the Atlantic Burden .” The authors would also like to thank the DJEI/DES/SFI/HEA Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC) for their support and for providing the computational resources. The human remains investigated for this analysis were studied as part of the European Research Council advanced grant 323727 “FRAGSUS” Project, PI Caroline Malone. Permission to study the remains was kindly granted by Sharon Sultana , curator at the National Museum of Archaeology , Valletta, and authorized by the Superintendence of Cultural Heritage (Malta). We thank the Cambridge Metabolic network for organizing a stimulating conference on obesity, which led to analysis of the genetic predisposition toward obesity in the Neolithic populations of Europe (BMI). We also would like to extend our gratitude to Harald Ringbauer and two anonymous reviewers for insightful suggestions.
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© 2022 The Authors