Genetic study Bronze Age Southern Italy: the case of Coppa Nevigata

[Jovialis]

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00438243.2025.2594201

 

[Jovialis]

I myself as a modern Apulian plot between 19 and 09 Bronze Age Apulians.

 

[Anfänger]

Three individuals project onto published Early Bronze Age individuals from the Italian Peninsula (Aneli et al. Citation2021; Saupe et al. Citation2021). They represent both postern burials (CNV017) and isolated bones in the fortifications (CNV018, CNV021). Two other individuals (CNV016, the adult male from Postern B, and CNV019 from the wall platform) share genetic affinities with Bronze Age individuals from northern Italy and Central Europe. Three individuals deposited in the wall platform (samples CNV009, CNV025, CNV006), plot between the ancestral affinities of Italian Bronze Age people and prehistoric individuals from various areas of the Balkans.

That’s a lot of genetic variation for just one site.

 

[Jovialis]

That’s a lot of genetic variation for just one site.

I wonder, If they mean Balkan ancestry, they mean samples like Albanian EBA, and Bulgarian_Yamnaya_o, and others that span that space between Yamnaya and South-Eastern European Farmers, and Minoan-like people, and the Copper age Ustove Majaky cultures where Steppe interacted with them early on. They could have mixed with EBA Italian/Sicilian populations, and created Modern Southern Italians.

 

[Anfänger]

I wonder, If they mean Balkan ancestry, they mean samples like Albanian EBA, and Bulgarian_Yamnaya_o, and others that span that space between Yamnaya and South-Eastern European Farmers, and Minoan-like people, and the Copper age Ustove Majaky cultures where Steppe interacted with them early on. They could have mixed with EBA Italian/Sicilian populations, and created Modern Southern Italians.


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Yes, I think that’s definitely a possibility but they say from "various areas of the Balkans“, which is very vague. I would have to re-read the paper and also the supplementary to get the bigger picture.

What about the data? Do you know, if its published? It would help a lot.

 

[Juan.delajara]

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https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00438243.2025.2594201

Hi Jovialis, any haplogroups?

 

[Vitruvius]

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https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00438243.2025.2594201

It's quite surprising to see Postern B individual 19 plotting directly over northern Italian norms in the southern Italian Middle Bronze age. We now have two of these BA types documented within Italy and both seem to be from rather early contexts. I hypothesize that this profile will become more common by the LBA at least in the north, though I doubt we will see nearly as much of it in Southern Italy.

It's also fairly surprising how close 9, 25 and 6 are to modern southern Italians. I'd guess they plot similar to the Greek Himera sample norms which themselves were not far removed from the modern S. Italian average. This is again significant evidence pointing towards an Aegean colonization of southern Italy that stretches back as far as the bronze age

16 seems to be more characteristic of EBA Northern Italian norms in the modern Iberia cluster, whereas 17, 21 and 18 are partway between EEF and aegean pulls of ancestry. These types of profiles have been seen more commonly in prior studies on EBA/MBA Italy.