Angela
Elite member
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- 21,823
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- Ethnic group
- Italian
Using whole-genome sequencing to shed insight on the complex prehistory of Sardinia. Chiang et al
https://ep70.eventpilot.us/web/page.php?page=IntHtml&project=ASHG16&id=160122402
"Abstract:
Genetic studies of complex traits using individuals from the island of Sardinia have been fruitful for decades. Understanding the population history of Sardinia may provide insights to how risk alleles arise in Sardinia and the expected degree of sharing with mainland populations. Current models for the peopling of Europe consider extant Europeans as having varying ancestral contributions from Paleolithic hunter-gatherers, Neolithic farmers, and Steppe pastoralists. In these analyses, extant Sardinians are inferred with the largest amount of Neolithic farmer ancestry among Europeans. However, previous studies of uniparental markers have highlighted the high frequency of the Y-chromosome haplotype I2a1a1 in Sardinia, which has been associated with Paleolithic ancestry in Europe. Here we aim to elucidate finer details of the population history of Sardinia. We study >3,500 whole-genome sequenced individuals across Sardinia together with reference European datasets and recently published ancient humans. We confirm that compared to mainland Europeans, Sardinians exhibit the greatest amount of shared drift with Neolithic farmers. Within the island of Sardinia, there is a demarcation of individuals from the Lanusei Valley in the geographically isolated province of Ogliastra and individuals from other provinces. In unsupervised analyses, a Sardinian-specific ancestry component correlates with shared drift parameters with both the Neolithic farmers and Paleolithic hunter-gatherers, and is consistent with supervised estimates of ancestry proportions in which the Ogliastra individuals have higher Neolithic farmer and Paleolithic hunter-gatherer ancestries, while individuals from the rest of the island show an infusion of the pastoralist ancestry. Finally, we find that the Sardinian people exhibit increased sharing of alleles with the Neolithic farmers on the X chromosome compared to the autosome (P < 1x10-4), suggesting a sex-biased demographic history in Sardinia. Together, our results indicate that in addition to the strong Neolithic farmer component of ancestry, isolated regions of Sardinia also harbors significant ancestry components from Paleolithic Europe and that the Neolithic transition in Sardinia may have involved sex-biased demographic change. These results help provide more insight into the history of Sardinians and the frequency distribution of variants they carry."
It will be interesting to see the differences in Ydna by area.
Other than that, I think we've known this for a while.
This is Ogliasatra:
These are the people of Lanusei: