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

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 sti...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:International journal of osteoarchaeology 2017-05, Vol.27 (3), p.453-464
Main Authors: Rathmann, H., Saltini Semerari, G., Harvati, K.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
biological distance
Cohesion
dental nonmetric traits
Gene flow
Genetics
Greek civilization
Greek colonisation
Homogeneity
migration
Population genetics
Population structure
southern Italy
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary: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.
ISSN:1047-482X
1099-1212
DOI:10.1002/oa.2569