The skeleton of a child who died approximately 17,000 years ago in the Upper Paleolithic at the age of just 16 months, found in the Cave of the Walls near Monopoli in Puglia by archaeologists from the University of Siena led by Mauro Calattiniled to the sequencing of what is now the oldest genome discovered in Italyallowing to obtain information about the child, for example the fact that he had dark curly hair, light eyes and dark skin. The DNA study was carried out by the universities of Bologna and Siena and published in Nature Communications.
The skeleton of the infant (known as The Walls – 1) is among the best preserved in Italy as regards the Upper Paleolithic. More precisely, the child lived between 17,394 and 16,984 years agoThe sample chosen for analysis comes from the stony rocka rather thick part of the temporal bone of the skull, which due to its resistance is very likely to retain traces of DNA.
The sequencing of the genome, almost complete, has allowed us to reconstruct the child’s appearance, the probable cause of death and has provided us with a lot of other useful information for the study of Prehistory in Italy. The child was a maleI had dark colored curly hairThe blue eyes and the dark skinas it was very common among the populations of Western Europe during the Paleolithic, known by the acronym WHG (Western Hunter Gatherer“Western hunter-gatherer”).
Furthermore, from the data analyzed by researchers from Bologna and Siena it was discovered that the child’s parents were close relativesprobably cousins first degree (in the Upper Paleolithic the bands of hunter-gatherers were quite small in number, so theendogamythe habit of reproducing with members of the same group, was quite common) and that suffered from hypertrophic cardiomyopathyone congenital heart diseasethe probable cause of his premature death.
The child’s genetic heritage was also very useful in identifying population movements in Southern Italy at the end of the last ice age. From the data collected by scholars it would seem in fact that the population to which Le Mura – 1 belonged had developed a certain degree of genetic differentiation from contemporary groups who lived in northern Italy, who in turn probably arrived from the Balkan Peninsula.
