Ricerc@Sapienza

Historically, many local grey wolf (Canis lupus) populations have undergone substantial reductions
in size or become extinct. Among these, the wolf population once living in Sicily, the largest island
in the Mediterranean Sea, was completely eradicated by human activity in the early decades of the
20th century. To gain a better understanding of the genetic identity of the Sicilian wolf, we used
techniques for the study of ancient DNA to analyze the mitochondrial DNA of six specimens stored

Here, we report genome-wide data analyses from 110 ancient Near Eastern individuals spanning the Late
Neolithic to Late Bronze Age, a period characterized by intense interregional interactions for the Near
East. We find that 6th millennium BCE populations of North/Central Anatolia and the Southern Caucasus
shared mixed ancestry on a genetic cline that formed during the Neolithic between Western Anatolia and regions
in today’s Southern Caucasus/Zagros. During the Late Chalcolithic and/or the Early Bronze Age, more

Le sepolture di equidi sono relativamente comuni nel terzo e secondo millennio a.C. in una vasta area che va dall’Egitto alla Mesopotamia. Durante la campagna di scavo del 2013, una sepoltura di equide è stata scoperta nel sito sumerico di Abu Tbeirah (Iraq meridionale) e riferita alla seconda metà del terzo millennio a.C. L’animale è stato deposto in una fossa poggiato sul lato sinistro con le zampe fortemente flesse e la testa ripiegata sulla spalla destra in una posizione “innaturale”.