Claudio OttoniUniversity of Rome Tor Vergata | UNIROMA2 · Dipartimento di Biologia
Claudio Ottoni
PhD
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56
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Introduction
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August 2016 - October 2018
February 2009 - July 2016
September 2004 - June 2008
Publications
Publications (56)
Zooarcheological evidence suggests that pigs were domesticated in Southwest Asia ∼8,500 BC. They then spread across the Middle and Near East and westward into Europe alongside early agriculturalists. European pigs were either domesticated independently or appeared so as a result of admixture between introduced pigs and European wild boar. These pig...
More than two decades of archaeological research at the site of Sagalassos, in southwest Turkey, resulted in the study of the former urban settlement in all its features. Originally settled in late Classical/early Hellenistic times, possibly from the later fifth century BCE onwards, the city of Sagalassos and its surrounding territory saw empires c...
The cat has long been important to human societies as a pest-control agent, object of symbolic value and companion animal, but little is known about its domestication process and early anthropogenic dispersal. Here we show, using ancient DNA analysis of geographically and temporally widespread archaeological cat remains, that both the Near Eastern...
Dental calculus, or mineralized plaque, represents a record of ancient biomolecules and food residues. Recently, ancient metagenomics made it possible to unlock the wealth of microbial and dietary information of dental calculus to reconstruct oral microbiomes and lifestyle of humans from the past. Although most studies have so far focused on ancien...
Significance
The oral microbial community living in symbiosis with humans is a rich and diverse driver of health and disease that is strongly influenced by our ecology and lifestyle. However, its evolution across human prehistory remains elusive. By analyzing the DNA entrapped in archaeological dental calculus, we characterize the oral microbiomes...
Leprosy was one of the most outwardly visible diseases in the European Middle Ages, a period during which leprosaria were founded to provide space for the sick. The extant documentary evidence for leprosy hospitals, especially in relation to diet, therapeutic, and medical care, is limited. However, human dental calculus stands to be an important so...
Domestic cats were derived from the Near Eastern wildcat (Felis lybica), after which they dispersed with peolple into Europe. As they did so, it is possible that they interbred with the indigenous population of European wildcats (Felis silvestris). Gene flow between incoming domestic animals and closely related indigenous wild species has been prev...
Adulis, located on the Red Sea coast in present-day Eritrea, was a bustling trading centre between the first and seventh centuries CE. Several classical geographers--Agatharchides of Cnidus, Pliny the Elder, Strabo-noted the value of Adulis to Greco--Roman Egypt, particularly as an emporium for living animals, including baboons ( Papio spp.). Thoug...
Cats are hypercarnivorous, opportunistic animals that have adjusted to anthropogenic environments since the Neolithic period. Through humans, either by direct feeding and/or scavenging on food scraps, the diet of cats has been enriched with animals that they cannot kill themselves (e.g., large mammals, fish). Here, we conducted carbon and nitrogen...
The feline enigma: exploring the origins, dispersal and evolution of domestic cats
FELIX aims to unravel the intimate relationship between cats and humans. Through biomolecular archaeological meth-ods, it seeks to understand the origins of cat domestication and the global dispersal of cats. It will examine how cats changed their nutritional behavio...
29 Adulis, located on the Red Sea coast in present-day Eritrea, was a bustling trading centre 30 between the first and seventh centuries CE. Several classical geographers-Agatharchides 31 of Cnidus, Pliny the Elder, Strabo-noted the value of Adulis to Greco-Roman Egypt, 32 particularly as an emporium for living animals, including baboons (Papio spp...
The domestic cat is the world's most popular pet and one of the most detrimental predators in terrestrial ecosystems. Effective protection of wildlife biodiversity demands detailed tracking of cat trophic ecology, and stable isotopes serve as a powerful proxy in dietary studies. However, a variable diet can make an isotopic pattern unreadable in op...
Forager focus on wild cereal plants has been documented in the core zone of domestication in southwestern Asia, while evidence for forager use of wild grass grains remains sporadic elsewhere. In this paper, we present starch grain and phytolith analyses of dental calculus from 60 Mesolithic and Early Neolithic individuals from five sites in the Dan...
Forager focus on wild cereal plants has been documented in the core zone of domestication in southwestern Asia, while evidence for forager use of wild grass grains remains sporadic elsewhere. In this paper, we present starch grain and phytolith analyses of dental calculus from 61 Mesolithic and Early Neolithic individuals from five sites in the Dan...
The field of dental calculus research has exploded in recent years, predominantly due to the multitude of studies related to human genomes and oral pathogens. Despite having a subset of these studies devoted to non-human primates, little progress has been made in the distribution of oral pathogens across domestic and wild animal populations. This o...
This paper provides results from a suite of analyses made on human dental material from the Late Palaeolithic to Neolithic strata of the cave site of Grotta Continenza situated in the Fucino Basin of the Abruzzo region of central Italy. The available human remains from this site provide a unique possibility to study ways in which forager versus far...
Recent genetic studies have shed light on the phylogeography of cave bears; however, their paleoecology and their diet are still debated, and data from southeastern Europe are still scarce. Magura Cave, in northwest Bulgaria, has delivered rich faunal assemblages from the Late Pleistocene. The chronology of the excavated area spans from ca. 35 kya...
Domestication is one of the most interesting and challenging processes in human and animal evolution. The fundamental change in subsistence strategies from hunting and gathering to farming that took place for the first time in the Levant more than ten thousand years ago profoundly changed human culture and biology, and set the groundwork for popula...
The Cinta senese is a pig breed, highly esteemed for its meat and derived products, characterized by a black coat with a typical white "belt" and documented by scant iconography, since the 13 th-14 th century in Italy. A piece of pottery showing a Cinta pig was found in the Graffignano castle (Northern Latium, Italy) dated 15th-16th centuries, spur...
Over the last few years, genomic studies on Yersinia pestis , the causative agent of all known plague epidemics, have considerably increased in numbers, spanning a period of about 5,000 y. Nonetheless, questions concerning historical reservoirs and routes of transmission remain open. Here, we present and describe five genomes from the second half o...
Enteric redmouth disease caused by the pathogen Yersinia ruckeri is a significant problem for fish farming around the world. Despite its importance, only a few virulence factors of Y. ruckeri have been identified and studied in detail. Here, we report and analyze the complete DNA sequence of pYR4, a plasmid from a highly pathogenic Norwegian Y. ruc...
Context: Due to its unique paternal inheritance, the Y-chromosome has been a highly popular marker among population geneticists for over two decades. Recently, the advent of cost-effective genomewide methods has unlocked information-rich autosomal genomic data, paving the way to the postgenomic era. This seems to have announced the decreasing popul...
Inverse autotransporters comprise the recently identified type Ve secretion system and are exemplified by intimin from enterohaemorrhagic Escherichia coli and invasin from enteropathogenic Yersiniae. These proteins share a common domain architecture and promote bacterial adhesion to host cells. Here, we identified and characterized two putative inv...
The understanding of the first movements of the ancestral populations within the African continent is still unclear, particularly in West Africa, due to several factors that have shaped the African genetic pool across time. To improve the genetic representativeness of the Beninese population and to better understand the patterns of human settlement...
The field of palaeogenetics has not only contributed to our understanding of DNA degradation, but also to the development of sensitive methodologies to analyse genetic variation in degraded DNA. This chapter focuses on the processes involved in the degradation of DNA, and highlights the methodological advances that have taken place or might be prom...
Archaeological bone remains of sturgeon (Acipenser sturio/Acipenser oxyrinchus) from northwestern Europe are often identified to species on the basis of their surface morphology and then used to reconstruct the spatial distribution of the two species through time. The dermal bones of A. sturio are said to have an exterior surface pattern consisting...
Two trenches excavated at Magura Cave, north-west Bulgaria, have provided Late Pleistocene lithic artefacts as well as environmental evidence in the form of large and small mammals, herpetofauna and pollen recovered from Crocuta coprolites. One of the trenches also has a visible tephra layer which has been confirmed as representing the major Campan...
1 supplementary text file with a detailed description of the methods used in the present study.
Patterns of genetic variation in human populations across the African continent are still not well studied in comparison with Eurasia and America, despite the high genetic and cultural diversity among African populations. In population and forensic genetic studies a single sample is often used to represent a complete African region. In such a scena...
In a worldwide collaborative effort, 19,630 Y-chromosomes were sampled from 129 different populations in 51 countries. These chromosomes were typed for 23 short-tandem repeat (STR) loci (DYS19, DYS389I, DYS389II, DYS390, DYS391, DYS392, DYS393, DYS385ab, DYS437, DYS438, DYS439, DYS448, DYS456, DYS458, DYS635, GATAH4, DYS481, DYS533, DYS549, DYS570,...
Dung, macroscopically recognisable as such or not, can more commonly be found in archaeological contexts than is perhaps realised. Up to now, identification of dung to the species which produced it is usually either tenuous, or is not possible. However, species identification can be very informative and is necessary before any further studies can b...
The pattern of population genetic variation and allele frequencies within a species are unstable and are changing over time according to different evolutionary factors. For humans, it is possible to combine detailed patrilineal genealogical records with deep Y-chromosome (Y-chr) genotyping to disentangle signals of historical population genetic str...
Recent genetic studies of the Tuareg have begun to uncover the origin of this semi-nomadic northwest African people and their relationship with African populations. For centuries they were caravan traders plying the trade routes between the Mediterranean coast and south-Saharan Africa. Their origin most likely coincides with the fall of the Garaman...
The archaeological site of Sagalassos is located in Southwest Turkey, in the western part of the Taurus mountain range. Human occupation of its territory is attested from the late 12th millennium BP up to the 13th century AD. By analysing the mtDNA variation in 85 skeletons from Sagalassos dated to the 11th-13th century AD, this study attempts to r...
Ancient DNA from Anatolian pigs: unveiling human migratory trajectories in Anatolia during the Neolithic and the Bronze Age
Assignment of the 64 H1 mtDNAs detected in the Libyan Tuareg to sub-haplogroups H1v, H1w and H1x. Diagnostic sites in the coding region are also reported. Control region data are from Ottoni et al. [5].
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List of H1 complete sequences included in Figure 1.
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Frequencies of haplogroup H1 in the population samples included in Figures 2 and 3.
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The Tuareg of the Fezzan region (Libya) are characterized by an extremely high frequency (61%) of haplogroup H1, a mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) haplogroup that is common in all Western European populations. To define how and when H1 spread from Europe to North Africa up to the Central Sahara, in Fezzan, we investigated the complete mitochondrial genom...
Several studies have demonstrated a link between cardiovascular disease (CVD) susceptibility and the genetic background of populations. Endothelial activation and dysfunction induced by oxidized low-density lipoprotein (ox-LDL) is one of the key steps in the initiation of atherosclerosis. The oxidized low density lipoprotein (lectin-like) receptor...
Since prehistoric times Southern Italy has been a cultural crossroads of the Mediterranean basin. Genetic data on the peoples of Basilicata and Calabria are scarce and, particularly, no records on mtDNA variability have been published.
In this study mtDNA haplotypes of populations from Basilicata, Calabria and Sicily are compared with those of othe...
The Tuaregs are a semi-nomadic pastoralist people of northwest Africa. Their origins are still a matter of debate due to the scarcity of genetic and historical data. Here we report the first data on the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) genetic characterization of a Tuareg sample from Fezzan (Libyan Sahara). A total of 129 individuals from two villages in...
Restriction fragment length polymorphisms (RFLPs) of the COL1A2 and CYP1A1 and short tandem repeats of HS1,2 Ig enhancer genes are proving to be useful markers for describing human populations and thus are of interest for anthropogenetic research. Moreover, they can provide useful information in identifying alleles and haplotypes associated with pa...
Evolutionary biologists are increasingly relying on ancient DNA from archaeological animal bones to study processes such as domestication and population dispersals. As many animal bones found on archaeological sites are likely to have been cooked, the potential for DNA preservation must be carefully considered to maximise the chance of amplificatio...