0000000000310098
AUTHOR
Damià Ramis
The Arrival of Steppe and Iranian Related Ancestry in the Islands of the Western Mediterranean
A series of studies have documented how Steppe pastoralist-related ancestry reached central Europe by at least 2500 BCE, while Iranian farmer-related ancestry was present in Aegean Europe by at least 1900 BCE. However, the spread of these ancestries into the western Mediterranean where they have contributed to many populations living today remains poorly understood. We generated genome-wide ancient DNA from the Balearic Islands, Sicily, and Sardinia, increasing the number of individuals with reported data from these islands from 3 to 52. We obtained data from the oldest skeleton excavated from the Balearic islands (dating to ∼2400 BCE), and show that this individual had substantial Steppe p…
Landscape and fuel management in the context of prehistoric and historical occupations of Cova des Moro (Manacor, Mallorca, Spain)
Abstract In this paper, the first results of charcoal analyses carried out at Cova des Moro (Manacor, Mallorca, Spain) are presented. This cave is an archaeological but also palaeontological site that provides information on endemic fauna (the extinct caprine Myotragus balearicus) before the arrival of humans and, later, the relationship between the first farmers and the landscape. Several human occupations in the cave have been documented, from the Chalcolithic (end of the 3rd millennium cal BC), the Bronze Age (2nd millennium cal BC) and, finally, the Almohad period (13th century AD), during which the cave was used for different purposes. The first results of charcoal analyses at Cova des…
The spread of steppe and Iranian-related ancestry in the islands of the western Mediterranean
Steppe-pastoralist-related ancestry reached Central Europe by at least 2500 bc, whereas Iranian farmer-related ancestry was present in Aegean Europe by at least 1900 bc. However, the spread of these ancestries into the western Mediterranean, where they have contributed to many populations that live today, remains poorly understood. Here, we generated genome-wide ancient-DNA data from the Balearic Islands, Sicily and Sardinia, increasing the number of individuals with reported data from 5 to 66. The oldest individual from the Balearic Islands (~2400 bc) carried ancestry from steppe pastoralists that probably derived from west-to-east migration from Iberia, although two later Balearic individ…
Iron Age botanical remains from nuraghe S'Urachi, Sardinia
Excavation at nuraghe S'Urachi has yielded a wide range of archaeobotanical materials preserved through charring and waterlogging. This unusual evidence allows us to study the agricultural practices and diet of this community in the first millennium BC and to understand better the economic and cultural interactions between Sardinia and the wider Phoenician and Mediterranean world.
New data about the landscape of the first occupation of Mallorca: Coval Simó (Escorca, Mallorca)
The Coval Simó shelter provides some of the oldest evidence for settlement on the island of Mallorca and the Balearic archipelago. It also has the peculiarity of being a habitat in a mountain area, so that the human groups that settled there had to adapt their agricultural and farming system to this environment. The plant remains (wood charcoal and seeds) recovered in the occupation levels allow us to address these issues, since they are the result of the different activities developed in this cavity: fuel for domestic activities, food for livestock, etc. The results of this study show that between the III and II millennium cal BC, an agricultural system based on livestock and cereal farmi…
Phenolic metabolites from 5,000-year-old coprolites of Myotragus balearicus, an extinct insular bovid
Abstract To date, the identification of polyphenols in the archaeological and palaeontological record has been limited. Here, we demonstrate for the first time the presence of flavonoid and phenolic metabolites from non-mineralised coprolites belonging to a non-human mammal species. Myotragus balearicus is the last species of a bovid lineage that became extinct during the Holocene in the western Mediterranean basin. In this work, we characterize the phenolic metabolites of M. balearicus coprolites for the first time. The chemical analysis of coprolites revealed the presence of flavonoids, such as flavones and flavonols. Moreover, the detection of conjugates of hydroxyphenylvaleric, hydroxyp…