Kinship Determination in Archeological Contexts Through DNA Analysis

Stefania Vai,David Caramelli,Martina Lari,Carlos Eduardo G Amorim

doi:10.3389/fevo.2020.00083

Stefania Vai, David Caramelli + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fevo.2020.00083

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Abstract

Knowing kinship relations between individuals in archaeological contexts is of great importance to understand social habits and structure in past human communities. Archaeological and anthropological analyses of burial sites and skeletal remains often allow us to infer connections between individuals, but only genetic analysis can provide a sound determination of kinship. Several case studies are now available in the literature that show the potentiality and limitations of different methodological approaches based on ancient DNA. Both experimental and computational strategies for kinship estimation on ancient samples are described in this review and we argue that, within a multidisciplinary approach, kinship inference contributes to the understanding of the biological and cultural patterns that characterized past societies.

Highlights

With the development of paleogenetic methods, both laboratorial and computational, ancient DNA analysis has been taking on an increasing importance in the study of archeological contexts
While this information is of utmost importance for reconstructing our history and understanding human evolution, evidence at a finer scale – e.g., the degree of relatedness between individuals interred in a cemetery or the existence of fine-population structure within an archeological site – have always been of crucial interest to anthropologists and archeologists
We describe molecular strategies for kinship estimation, from the classic PCR-based methods to NextGeneration Sequencing (NGS), with an overview of the computational approaches for kinship inference using ancient DNA (aDNA) data

Summary

INTRODUCTION

With the development of paleogenetic methods, both laboratorial and computational, ancient DNA (aDNA) analysis has been taking on an increasing importance in the study of archeological contexts. The first attempts to infer kinship in ancient individuals by genetic analysis focused on a limited number of loci that were genotyped with methods based on PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) In these early studies, mostly mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) fragments were used as target (Mooder et al, 2005; Rudbeck et al, 2005). Most of the kinship studies are exclusively [for example, the analysis of a Late Neolithic megalithic tomb in Alto de Reinoso, Spain, (Alt et al, 2016) and of a Merovingian necropolis in France (Deguilloux et al, 2014)] or mainly based on mtDNA, because, as explained above, it is present in higher amounts than nuclear DNA, it yields limited information, restricted to maternal relations, and does not allow one to obtain a complete reconstruction of possible relationships. With the NGS approach it is possible to dramatically increase the number of loci and individuals successfully typed and to obtain higherresolution kinship estimates and more complete reconstruction of past societies

NGS METHODS

COMPUTATIONAL METHODS FOR KINSHIP INFERENCE

Findings

CONCLUSION