Evidence for Migration Influx into the Ancient Greek Colony of Metaponto: A Population Genetics Approach Using Dental Nonmetric Traits

Abstract

Ancient Greek colonies were founded by Greek seafarers all along the Mediterranean coast as early as the eighth century bc. Despite extensive archaeological and historical research, the population structure of the inhabitants of Greek colonies and their relationship to indigenous populations are still debated. Here, we perform a biodistance analysis to reconstruct migration and gene flow between the ancient Greek colony of Metaponto (southern Italy) and indigenous groups in the surrounding hinterland (900–250 bc). We collected dental nonmetric trait data of 355 human skeletons from the indigenous Italic sites of Santa Maria d'Anglona, Incoronata and Passo di Giacobbe. This data set is compared with an urban and rural sample of the Greek colony of Metaponto comprising 351 individual dentitions. The R‐matrix approach is used to estimate inter‐population relationships and FST. The resulting kinship coefficients indicate that the three indigenous groups exhibit greater similarity to each other and possess lesser similarity to the two Metapontian samples. Interestingly, the two samples of Metaponto are least similar to each other, although they are geographically very close. The FST estimates confirm this pattern and reveal greater biological variation between the two nearby Metaponto samples (FST = 0.0603) than between the three geographically fairly distant indigenous groups (FST = 0.0389). We conclude that the Greek colony of Metaponto included large numbers of people with diverse geographical origins, whereas the indigenous Italic communities of the surrounding hinterland exhibited high levels of homogeneity and cohesion. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Population history of southern Italy during Greek colonization inferred from dental remains

“…Lastly, it has to be noted that our results deviate from the findings of our previous dental biodistance study in the Gulf of Taranto region (Rathmann, Saltini Semerari, & Harvati, ), where we found a significant separation between the inhabitants of indigenous Italic sites and the Greek colony of Metapontion, which evidenced a higher amount of variability. The study presented in this manuscript expands and improves upon our previous investigation.…”

“…Very little is known about the population structure of indigenous Italic communities prior to Greek colonization (Rathmann, Saltini Semerari, & Harvati, ). Our study provides additional insights into this hitherto underexplored topic by finding that the inhabitants of the two pre‐colonial indigenous sites under investigation, Santa Maria d'Anglona and Incoronata, shared a similar yet not identical biological makeup.…”

“…We followed the standard procedure and dichotomized the ordinal‐scaled dental trait scores into binary categories of absence (0) or presence (1) in order to reduce observer error and simplify data analysis. The applied dichotomization thresholds follow established breakpoints (Irish, ; Turner, ) that have proven useful for effectively capturing variation across human populations in the Mediterranean Basin (Coppa, Cucina, Lucci, Mancinelli, & Vargiu, ; Irish, Lillios, Waterman, & Silva, ; McIlvaine, Schepartz, Larsen, & Sciulli, ; Parras, ; Rathmann, Saltini Semerari, & Harvati, ; Ullinger, Sheridan, Hawkey, Turner, & Cooley, ). A table listing the summary statistics of the dental nonmetric dataset is provided in Appendix S1, Table S2.…”

“…Biological distance (or “biodistance”) analysis provides a powerful tool that can circumvent this problem by utilizing heritable phenotypic features for inferring genetic relationships across individuals and samples (Buikstra, Frankenberg, & Konigsberg, ; Konigsberg, ; Stojanowski & Schillaci, ). Surprisingly, only a handful of studies have utilized biodistance methods to address the impact of Greek colonization on southern Italy (Henneberg, ; Rathmann, Saltini Semerari, & Harvati, ; Rubini, Bonafede, & Mogliazza, ). These investigations found that inhabitants of Greek colonies showed marked biological differences to indigenous Italian groups, possibly due to an influx of new genes.…”

Patrones estructurales en dentición permanente humana como predictores de edad y sexo: análisis de una colección osteológica documentada

“…Otro de los elementos distintivos de la dentición es su elevada heredabilidad. Una gran variedad de estudios realizados sobre poblaciones actuales han confirmado que las características morfológicas (tanto rasgos métricos como no métricos) de las piezas dentarias ostentan un fuerte componente hereditario (multifactorial con efecto genético aditivo múltiple) y con mínima influencia del ambiente (Bailey et al 2014, Bollini et al 2008, Edgar 2009, Luna 2015, Mizoguchi 1980, Rathman et al 2016, Rathman et al 2017, Townsend et al 2008. Esto implicaría que las diferencias fenotípicas en la dentición a nivel inter e intrapoblacional reflejarían de forma aproximada diferencias a nivel genotípico (Hillson 1996, Rathman et al 2017, Scott y Pilloud 2008.…”