mtDNA analysis for the characterisation of Sumerian equids

Two equines teeth of Sumerian age were collected in the archae-ological site of Abu Tbeirah with the aim of extracting and char-acterising nucleic acids. The site is located near Nasiriyah, 16Km south-east from Ur, in Southern Iraq. In this locality, since2012, an Iraqi-Italian Archaeological Mission excavated the Tellbringing to light a Sumerian city of about 42 ha, dated to 4500B.P. The morphological characteristics of recovered teeth, as wellas the postcranial skeleton, are deemed to belong to an asininetype rather than a wild ass or horse, whereby they should puta-tively be attributed to the domestic donkey. We would like to con-firm these data and also test if there are evidences of hybrid formdonkey-onager as hypothesized by cuneiform texts and archaeo-zoological metric data. In order to achieve the purpose, we per-formed a DNA extraction. We quantitated the extracted DNA ofthe two teeth of different samples and found respectively 2.5 and4 ng/uL of DNA. A preliminary amplification of mitochondrialaDNA fragments using primers designed to obtain a polymorphicsite able to discriminate between E. asinus, E. caballusand E.hemionus onager, was successful giving about 20 ng/uL amountof amplified DNA. Partial specific sequences of mitochondrial D-loop were obtained and we discuss the results achieved.