Yada, yada, yada. It seems that some people get upset when they're ignored.
Those are the breaks, though. Once someone tears off his mask, other people can't un-see the ugliness they've seen. Got it? I would suggest that in the future people with certain attitudes exert more self-control, and exhibit less impulsiveness.
I always find it interesting that depending on the situation certain people drastically change their opinions of certain studies. When these papers came out, the prior poster was very vocal about the fact that their conclusions were "strange", especially, of course, with regard to recent "Caucasus" admixture in Poles.
The papers are incorrect about Poles, but are correct about Italians, apparently.
For the record, people really have to wrap their heads around the fact that everyone doesn't look at the world in the same way. Most particularly, everyone doesn't look at the world from the "nordicist" perspective so beloved on racist anthrofora. So, if the goal is to "get" or "provoke" or "degrade" someone by saying they have more "Near Eastern" ancestry than might be the average in, say, let's say, Poland, I'm afraid that tool is "blunted" in my case. I couldn't care less, rather to the contrary, in fact.
I have absolutely no problem with the fact that during the Roman Empire some slaves may have survived, perhaps been manumitted, and their genes might have formed part of the nascent "Italian" gene pool. I mean, if we have African slaves in York, and a whole community in London, as recent papers have shown, I'm sure similar finds will be made in Italy, as well as of slaves or manumitted freedmen from other parts of the Roman world.
As far as the "Italia" of those times is concerned, anyone who has any knowledge of the history of the Roman Empire knows that the slaves taken by Rome included just as many, if not more slaves from Britain, and Gaul, and Hispania, and Germania, and Dacia, and Pannonia as there were more educated and valuable slaves from Greece, or Anatolia, or Syria, or Palestine, or Egypt or perhaps the occasional oddity from the Sudan. My God, some of you people need to do some reading of history. Caesar's slaves from Gaul alone, glutted the market and depressed the value for years. Just as an aside I don't take kindly to people misrepresenting history no matter the topic.
So, my point has always been that this cannot explain the south/north cline in Italy. After all, I've yet to see anything in the history of the period indicating that all the slaves from the Near East were sent to the south and all the slaves from northern and eastern and western Europe were sent to the north. Should any such evidence ever come to light, I would of course amend my view.
If this had been thought through it would also be clear that this cannot really affect the overall percentages of northern versus southeastern ancestry in Italy because, to repeat once again,
just as many if not more slaves came from "Europe" rather than the Near East. So it's a wash as far as the impact of slavery is concerned. I hope this mathematics isn't too difficult for some of our posters.
It also doesn't explain the Alder date for some of this admixture (even supposing that Alder dates are precise, which most scholars indeed do not believe).
Now, I don't want to drag this thread even more off topic than the poster Tomenable already has, as this is not a thread about Italian genetics, after all, but a recent Italian paper, which does an exhaustive analysis of Italian genetics based on modern autosomes addresses the Hellenthal and Busby papers and the dates they provided, suggesting that if such an additional admixture took place in the
post-Roman period, which is, after all, what the dates suggest, it may be tied to the Byzantine period and perhaps unrecorded settlements related to that period, settlements which may indeed, in terms of quantity and duration, have had a bit of a south/north cline. It may also
partly explain why the Greeks and the people of the southern Balkans have equally high if not sometimes higher "Caucasus" or Asia Minor percentages.
Given the mind set of this prior poster let me be clear that this is not some dread news to me. Honestly, people, some of you need to open your eyes and understand that the whole world doesn't share your point of view. This also applies to the irrelevant comments about how the "old" Roman families died out. Am I supposed to care? Why? Is it because they were more "steppe"? Please! By those standards, the Malatesta barons of my area were more "Germanic" so presumably more "steppe" than the common people. It doesn't matter a damn to me. They were blood suckers one and all and it's my earnest wish that the people in my trees who bore their name were retainers who adopted the name. I would find it abhorrent to think that their "blood" runs in my veins.
Now, I'll go back to ignoring certain posters.
Any further posts on this off-topic subject will be removed. I may, however, start a thread on this recent Italian paper if I have enough time.
