Ancestry and kinship in a Late Antiquity-Early Middle Ages cemetery in the Eastern Italian Alps

Abstract

In South Tyrol (Eastern Italian Alps), during Late Antiquity-Early Middle Ages, archeological records indicate cultural hybridization among alpine groups and peoples of various origin. Using paleogenomics, we reconstructed the ancestry of 20 individuals (4^th-7^th cent. AD) from a cemetery to analyze whether they had heterogeneous or homogeneous ancestry and to study their social organization. The results revealed a primary genetic ancestry from southern Europe and additional ancestries from south-western, western, and northern Europe, suggesting that cultural hybridization was accompanied by complex genetic admixture. Kinship analyses found no genetic relatedness between the only two individuals buried with grave goods. Instead, a father-son pair was discovered in one multiple grave, together with unrelated individuals and one possible non-local female. These genetic findings indicate the presence of a high social status familia, which is supported by the cultural materials and the proximity of the grave to the most sacred area of the church.

Keywords: Archeology; Human Genetics; Human geography; Paleogenetics.

Graphical abstract

Figure 1

Location and distribution of graves in the cemetery (A) Map of South Tyrol showing the location of the cemetery of Burgusio Santo Stefano–St. Stephan ob Burgeis (BSS). (B) The church of BSS as it appears today. (C) Graves’ distribution in the church (archive photos of the Archaeological Office of the Autonomous Province of Bolzano in Reuβ 2016, modified).

Figure 2

Principal-component (PCA) and clustering analyses (A) PCA performed using genomic data from 18 unrelated individuals from the BSS cemetery and present-day populations. For more details refer to Table SM5. (B) Supervised clustering analysis (K = 4) performed using data from 18 unrelated individuals from the BSS cemetery and present-day samples from five groups: Tuscans = TSI, violet; Iberians = IBS, green; Utah residents with ancestry from Northern and Western Europe (CEU) and British = GBR, red; Finns = FIN, blue.

Figure 3

Schematic representation of the location of the studied graves within the BSS cemetery and relative genetic results Ancestry is marked by four different colors as presented in Figure 2B.

Figure 4

Principal-component analysis (PCA) executed by projecting the 18 unrelated BSS individuals and other ancient genomes from Europe onto the PCA performed using genomic data from the present-day populations (Figure 2A) For more details refer to Table SM10.