SHOVELING - into the North Italian Bronze Age with an integrative approach to unearth the evolutionary origins of a non-metric dental trait

Abstract:

• earlier or coeval migrations from Asia;
• ancestral inheritance from a hominin;
• local selection due to diverse possible agents.

To test which of the proposed hypotheses might explain the presence of shovel-shaped incisors in Italian protohistoric individuals, we propose an integrative approach which includes anthropological investigation, ancient DNA and stable isotope analyses, along with genetic examination of modern populations from different regions. The proposed research will elucidate population dynamics or adaptation of Bronze Age people in Northern Italy, contributing to shed light on our ancestry. Moreover, and even more significantly, it will highlight from an ancient perspective the evolutionary aspects behind the development of a pleiotropic gene, its interplay with environment and cultural behaviors, and possibly its interaction with other genetic sites.

Risultati attesi: 

For the project, we are completing a thorough investigation of shovel-shaped teeth (SST), the non-metric trait, in Bronze Age individuals from different regions.

In addition, we have extracted ancient DNA from 28 individuals of diverse Terramares’ necropolises and other Copper and Bronze Age individuals, with and without SST. We prepared libraries and subjected them to shotgun sequencing. Alternatively, samples with low aDNA content were submitted to target enrichment with a costum kit to capture SNVs of interest. Some samples showed poor or extremely poor aDNA content, but from 23 we were able to obtain genomes that we are analysing with bioinformatics tools for population genetic dynamics, ancestry, kinship, phenotypic traits and introgressions from Homo neanderthalensis, in order to establish any congruencies with the non-metric trait SST.

We are also finalising the isotopic analyses, that we carried out on the same 28 individuals plus all available individuals from the Terramares.

The next step will be to complete the analyses and cross-reference the data from the 23 individuals to better understand the evolutionary origin of the SST and gain further insights into the Northern Italian Bronze Age population of the Terramares.