Özet:

The Eastern Mediterranean land snails Levantina display a disjunct distribution spanning the Middle East (Levant), Cyprus, few locations along the Aegean Turkish coast between Bodrum and Datça and on the islands of Rhodes, Karpathos and a few surrounding islets (Dodecanese). These land snails are strictly bound to limestone; shell variability is noticeable with a pair of umbilicate and non-umbilicate forms parapatrically distributed in the Levant and along the Aegean Turkish coast; they overlap on the Dodecanese islands. We sequenced fragments of two mitochondrial genes (Cytochrome Oxidase I and 16S rRNA) from the historical Levantina materials available at the Museums of Hamburg and Berlin. The aim of the study is to explain the current distribution of Levantina in the Eastern Mediterranean in light of an earlier hypothesis suggesting anthropochory due to the movements of Crusaders across the area. The deeper nodes in our phylogeny indicate that Levantina reached the Dodecanese from continental Turkey during the Pliocene exploiting continuity of landmasses. In five circumstances the same haplotype co-occurs on two different islands; one haplotype is shared between one island (Rhodes) and the Levant. We suggest that the movements of Crusaders likely explain the current distribution of haplotypes. In particular, the Knights Hospitaller of St. John occupied Cyprus, the Dodecanese and the facing Turkish coasts for more than two centuries (1306–1522) after they withdrew from Jerusalem in 1187 and from the Levant in 1291. Snails could have been introduced as an item of food or transported with other material including limestone used for building.

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