Genetic histories of individuals from multi-faith medieval Sicily
Monnereau et al. · doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0350298
What the study found
Sicily sits between Europe, North Africa and the Near East, and in the Middle Ages it changed rulers repeatedly: Byzantine, Aghlabid, Fatimid, Norman and Swabian. Researchers looked at 111 people buried on the island between the 5th and 15th centuries CE. They read mitochondrial DNA, which is passed down the mother's line, for 67 of them, and much larger stretches of the genome for 32.
The picture is not one of a population being replaced each time the rulers changed. Several people buried before the Islamic conquest of Sicily already carried substantial North African ancestry. That means people were moving across the Mediterranean before the conquest, not only after it. People buried in Islamic cemeteries in the 9th to 11th centuries had varied ancestries from around the Mediterranean Basin, but the authors note that the same ancestry components turn up in earlier periods too, which limits what the data can say about migration during those centuries.
The Islamic period does bring something new: the appearance of individuals with distant ancestral origins, in West Africa and Northern Europe. Under the Normans, Christian and Islamic burials show the same genetic diversity, held for hundreds of years. By the late medieval period the ancestry components shift towards those of modern European populations.
Key points
111 archaeological individuals from Sicily, buried between the 5th and 15th centuries CE, were analysed; 67 gave mitochondrial results and 32 gave genome-wide results.
Several people buried before the Islamic conquest already carried substantial North African ancestry, evidence of movement across the Mediterranean before that conquest.
Burials in Islamic cemeteries from the 9th to 11th centuries show ancestries from around the Mediterranean Basin, but those same components appear in earlier periods.
By the late medieval period the ancestry components had shifted towards those of modern European populations, after centuries of stable diversity under Norman rule.
Relevance to this lineage
This study tested no one from the Chtouka, and it says nothing about E-PF2546 or H1-T16189C!. It is regional context. Sicily is a long way from Souss-Massa, but it is one of the places where North African ancestry can be measured inside someone else's population, century by century. Finding that ancestry in burials that predate the Islamic conquest suggests people were crossing the Mediterranean from North Africa before any conquest carried them. Our Lineage page describes a crossing in the other direction, from Iberia into North Africa in the early Holocene. Both make the same point: the sea was a route, not a wall.
This is a summary, not the paper
Written here as an aid to reading, from the paper’s published abstract. Where this page and the study disagree, the study is right — read it. Full citation: Monnereau, A. et al. (2026). PLOS One, 21, e0350298. All fifteen summaries are listed on the research page.
Last updated: 16 September 2026