Laboratorio di Antropologia Molecolare, Dipartimento di Scienze Biologiche, Geologiche e Ambientali, Università di Bologna, Bologna, Italy.
PLoS One. 2013 May 29;8(5):e65441. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0065441. Print 2013.
Located in the center of the Mediterranean landscape and with an extensive coastal line, the territory of what is today Italy has played an important role in the history of human settlements and movements of Southern Europe and the Mediterranean Basin. Populated since Paleolithic times, the complexity of human movements during the Neolithic, the Metal Ages and the most recent history of the two last millennia (involving the overlapping of different cultural and demic strata) has shaped the pattern of the modern Italian genetic structure. With the aim of disentangling this pattern and understanding which processes more importantly shaped the distribution of diversity, we have analyzed the uniparentally-inherited markers in ∼900 individuals from an extensive sampling across the Italian peninsula, Sardinia and Sicily. Spatial PCAs and DAPCs revealed a sex-biased pattern indicating different demographic histories for males and females. Besides the genetic outlier position of Sardinians, a North West-South East Y-chromosome structure is found in continental Italy. Such structure is in agreement with recent archeological syntheses indicating two independent and parallel processes of Neolithisation. In addition, date estimates pinpoint the importance of the cultural and demographic events during the late Neolithic and Metal Ages. On the other hand, mitochondrial diversity is distributed more homogeneously in agreement with older population events that might be related to the presence of an Italian Refugium during the last glacial period in Europe.
位于地中海景观中心，拥有广阔的海岸线，今天的意大利领土在人类居住和南欧及地中海盆地的人类迁徙历史中发挥了重要作用。自旧石器时代以来，新石器时代、金属时代和最近的最后两个千年的历史（涉及不同文化和人群层的重叠）中人类迁徙的复杂性塑造了现代意大利遗传结构的模式。为了理清这种模式并了解哪些过程更重要地塑造了多样性的分布，我们分析了来自意大利半岛、撒丁岛和西西里岛广泛采样的约 900 个人的单亲遗传标记。空间 PCA 和 DAPC 显示出性别偏倚模式，表明男性和女性的人口历史不同。除了撒丁岛的遗传异常位置外，在意大利大陆还发现了西北-东南的 Y 染色体结构。这种结构与最近的考古综合表明，有两个独立且平行的新石器时代化过程。此外，日期估计强调了晚新石器时代和金属时代文化和人口事件的重要性。另一方面，线粒体多样性的分布更加均匀，这与较旧的人口事件一致，这些事件可能与欧洲最后一个冰河时代意大利避难所的存在有关。
