Human genetic stories on the Mediterranean Basin: encounters between peoples along millennia of human evolution

Abstract

Humans are centred on their own limited life-span, tending to forget how populations change rapidly along time. This seems to be especially true in the present times, which are testifying the re-emergency and increase of populism and extreme-right groups, giving rise to hatred discourses of “us” and the “other”. This chapter summarizes the main results being contributed by genetics in the last three decades, which are clarifying the high population (and associated cultural, ethnic and even religious) dynamics taking place across the Mediterranean Basin since its settlement by our species in the last 45,000 years. If in the beginning the Mediterranean Sea may have been a barrier to the movement of people, at least by the Neolithic period it became a corridor facilitating faster migrations across the entire Basin. Our Mediterranean genomes are diaries of these stories of admixture between ancestries. The Basin continuous to be an attractive and safe port for other ethnicities, who will mingle and enrich further our genomes. Some of this new genetic diversity will help us in responding to the new public health challenges due to climatic changes, namely in surviving infectious diseases that are expanding from the subtropical and tropical regions.