Towards a genetic history of Sicily

The purpose of this note is to present a very tentative outline of the project at the background of this meeting: the analysis of human variation in Sicily. It is part of a larger study sponsored and granted by the Italian National Council of Research (Progetto Finalizzato Beni Culturali) and other national and local institutions. It can be also considered connected to the European side of the Human Genome Diversity Project, a world based initiative whose future is not yet well finalised in terms of financial resources, but whose general goal is to sample ethnically interesting populations and to keep their DNA so as to save their biological memory for the future and to give the prospective researchers the possibility to update their genetic analysis as far as the continuous advances of molecular technology can allow. It is obviously an interdisciplinary effort and the presence in this meeting of scholars from different fields is the best guarantee to avoid the frequent error of basing the interpretation of the results of his own discipline on an inaccurate understanding of evidence from other disciplines. A paradigmatic example of this misunderstanding is the interpretation of mitochondrial data, specially the dating of mitochondrial lineages. A major source of confusion in this field which is partially relevant for our topic has been the paper by Richards et al. [1] on the relative importance of Palaeolithic and Neolithic settlements in Europe as viewed by the mitochondrial lineages found in the extant European populations. They suggest their results are more in agreement with the idea of a local development of the farming techniques, in parallel with a diffusion by very few farmers from the Near East. This suggestion resulted from a calculation by which most mitochondrial lineages coalesce at ancestors presumably living in the Upper Palaeolithic period and is based on an evolutionary model of European populations which does not take into consideration a demic expansion. The elementary consideration that the age of a group of mitochondrial types may overestimate the age of the population from which they come adds to the fact that in their analysis the limited number of samples from Near East, only 42 individuals, mostly from Arabian peninsula, does not make it likely that most founder haplotypes have been identified. There are, moreover, apparent contradictions with other evi- * Correspondence and reprints E-mail address: a.piazza@cios.to.cnr.it, alberto.piazza@ molinette.unito.it (A. Piazza). Sup.40 A. Piazza et al. : J. Cult. Heritage 1 (2000) Sup.39-Sup.42 dence [2], one of which is the correlation between genetic data and linguistic patterns that are very unlikely to have been established earlier than Neolithic [3]. An interesting contribution to this problem was the finding of two DNA polymorphisms of chromosome Y recently identified in about 3 000 individuals which seem to describe the male genetic contributions, respectively, from the Palaeolithic and the Neolithic gene pools, in present European populations [4]. The interest of Sicily does not need to be pointed out: archaeology, palaeoanthropology, pre-history, history, anthropology, ethnology, linguistics, all reflect a complex and partially documented stratification of settlements and resettlements of people from different ethnic origin which the genetic analysis of extant human samples tries to reconstruct. How consistent is the traditional grouping of the island people in Sicanians, Sicels and Elymi, their ethnic origin and their continuity across the following colonisation are topics which we like to learn more about in this meeting. We limit our contribution to the evidence we have today about the genetic structure of Sicily with some excursions into linguistics a