A genetic history of continuity and mobility in the Iron Age central Mediterranean.

The Iron Age was a dynamic period in central Mediterranean history, with the expansion of Greek and Phoenician colonies and the growth of Carthage into the dominant maritime power of the Mediterranean. These events were facilitated by the ease of long-distance travel following major advances in seafaring. We know from the archaeological record that trade goods and materials were moving across great distances in unprecedented quantities, but it is unclear how these patterns correlate with human mobility. Here, to investigate population mobility and interactions directly, we sequenced the genomes of 30 ancient individuals from coastal cities around the central Mediterranean, in Tunisia, Sardinia and central Italy. We observe a meaningful contribution of autochthonous populations, as well as highly heterogeneous ancestry including many individuals with non-local ancestries from other parts of the Mediterranean region. These results highlight both the role of local populations and the extreme interconnectedness of populations in the Iron Age Mediterranean. By studying these trans-Mediterranean neighbours together, we explore the complex interplay between local continuity and mobility that shaped the Iron Age societies of the central Mediterranean.

Density separation of petrous bone powders for optimized ancient DNA yields.

Density separation is a process routinely used to segregate minerals, organic matter, and even microplastics, from soils and sediments. Here we apply density separation to archaeological bone powders before DNA extraction to increase endogenous DNA recovery relative to a standard control extraction of the same powders. Using nontoxic heavy liquid solutions, we separated powders from the petrous bones of 10 individuals of similar archaeological preservation into eight density intervals (2.15 to 2.45 g/cm3, in 0.05 increments). We found that the 2.30 to 2.35 g/cm3 and 2.35 to 2.40 g/cm3 intervals yielded up to 5.28-fold more endogenous unique DNA than the corresponding standard extraction (and up to 8.53-fold before duplicate read removal), while maintaining signals of ancient DNA authenticity and not reducing library complexity. Although small 0.05 g/cm3 intervals may maximally optimize yields, a single separation to remove materials with a density above 2.40 g/cm3 yielded up to 2.57-fold more endogenous DNA on average, which enables the simultaneous separation of samples that vary in preservation or in the type of material analyzed. While requiring no new ancient DNA laboratory equipment and fewer than 30 min of extra laboratory work, the implementation of density separation before DNA extraction can substantially boost endogenous DNA yields without decreasing library complexity. Although subsequent studies are required, we present theoretical and practical foundations that may prove useful when applied to other ancient DNA substrates such as teeth, other bones, and sediments.

Northeastern Asian and Jomon-related genetic structure in the Three Kingdoms period of Gimhae, Korea.

The genetic history of prehistoric and protohistoric Korean populations is not well understood because only a small number of ancient genomes are available. Here, we report the first paleogenomic data from the Korean Three Kingdoms period, a crucial point in the cultural and historic formation of Korea. These data comprise eight shotgun-sequenced genomes from ancient Korea (0.7×-6.1× coverage). They were derived from two archeological sites in Gimhae: the Yuha-ri shell mound and the Daesung-dong tumuli, the latter being the most important funerary complex of the Gaya confederacy. All individuals are from between the 4th and 5th century CE and are best modeled as an admixture between a northern China Bronze Age genetic source and a source of Jomon-related ancestry that shares similarities with the present-day genomes from Japan. The observed substructure and proportion of Jomon-related ancestry suggest the presence of two genetic groups within the population and diversity among the Gaya population. We could not correlate the genomic differences between these two groups with either social status or sex. All the ancient individuals' genomic profiles, including phenotypically relevant SNPs associated with hair and eye color, facial morphology, and myopia, imply strong genetic and phenotypic continuity with modern Koreans for the last 1,700 years.

Genome-scale sequencing and analysis of human, wolf, and bison DNA from 25,000-year-old sediment.

Cave sediments have been shown to preserve ancient DNA but so far have not yielded the genome-scale information of skeletal remains. We retrieved and analyzed human and mammalian nuclear and mitochondrial environmental "shotgun" genomes from a single 25,000-year-old Upper Paleolithic sediment sample from Satsurblia cave, western Georgia:first, a human environmental genome with substantial basal Eurasian ancestry, which was an ancestral component of the majority of post-Ice Age people in the Near East, North Africa, and parts of Europe; second, a wolf environmental genome that is basal to extant Eurasian wolves and dogs and represents a previously unknown, likely extinct, Caucasian lineage; and third, a European bison environmental genome that is basal to present-day populations, suggesting that population structure has been substantially reshaped since the Last Glacial Maximum. Our results provide new insights into the Late Pleistocene genetic histories of these three species and demonstrate that direct shotgun sequencing of sediment DNA, without target enrichment methods, can yield genome-wide data informative of ancestry and phylogenetic relationships.

A genetic history of the pre-contact Caribbean.

Humans settled the Caribbean about 6,000 years ago, and ceramic use and intensified agriculture mark a shift from the Archaic to the Ceramic Age at around 2,500 years ago1-3. Here we report genome-wide data from 174 ancient individuals from The Bahamas, Haiti and the Dominican Republic (collectively, Hispaniola), Puerto Rico, Curaçao and Venezuela, which we co-analysed with 89 previously published ancient individuals. Stone-tool-using Caribbean people, who first entered the Caribbean during the Archaic Age, derive from a deeply divergent population that is closest to Central and northern South American individuals; contrary to previous work4, we find no support for ancestry contributed by a population related to North American individuals. Archaic-related lineages were >98% replaced by a genetically homogeneous ceramic-using population related to speakers of languages in the Arawak family from northeast South America; these people moved through the Lesser Antilles and into the Greater Antilles at least 1,700 years ago, introducing ancestry that is still present. Ancient Caribbean people avoided close kin unions despite limited mate pools that reflect small effective population sizes, which we estimate to be a minimum of 500-1,500 and a maximum of 1,530-8,150 individuals on the combined islands of Puerto Rico and Hispaniola in the dozens of generations before the individuals who we analysed lived. Census sizes are unlikely to be more than tenfold larger than effective population sizes, so previous pan-Caribbean estimates of hundreds of thousands of people are too large5,6. Confirming a small and interconnected Ceramic Age population7, we detect 19 pairs of cross-island cousins, close relatives buried around 75 km apart in Hispaniola and low genetic differentiation across islands. Genetic continuity across transitions in pottery styles reveals that cultural changes during the Ceramic Age were not driven by migration of genetically differentiated groups from the mainland, but instead reflected interactions within an interconnected Caribbean world1,8.

Author Correction: The spread of steppe and Iranian-related ancestry in the islands of the western Mediterranean.

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

The spread of steppe and Iranian-related ancestry in the islands of the western Mediterranean.

Steppe-pastoralist-related ancestry reached Central Europe by at least 2500 BC, whereas Iranian farmer-related ancestry was present in Aegean Europe by at least 1900 BC. However, the spread of these ancestries into the western Mediterranean, where they have contributed to many populations that live today, remains poorly understood. Here, we generated genome-wide ancient-DNA data from the Balearic Islands, Sicily and Sardinia, increasing the number of individuals with reported data from 5 to 66. The oldest individual from the Balearic Islands (~2400 BC) carried ancestry from steppe pastoralists that probably derived from west-to-east migration from Iberia, although two later Balearic individuals had less ancestry from steppe pastoralists. In Sicily, steppe pastoralist ancestry arrived by ~2200 BC, in part from Iberia; Iranian-related ancestry arrived by the mid-second millennium BC, contemporary to its previously documented spread to the Aegean; and there was large-scale population replacement after the Bronze Age. In Sardinia, nearly all ancestry derived from the island's early farmers until the first millennium BC, with the exception of an outlier from the third millennium BC, who had primarily North African ancestry and who-along with an approximately contemporary Iberian-documents widespread Africa-to-Europe gene flow in the Chalcolithic. Major immigration into Sardinia began in the first millennium BC and, at present, no more than 56-62% of Sardinian ancestry is from its first farmers. This value is lower than previous estimates, highlighting that Sardinia, similar to every other region in Europe, has been a stage for major movement and mixtures of people.