Azzurro:That's a very strong statement, I said some, I don't know what ancient Italian dna looks like, at the moment my guess its going to be mainly WHG like Iberian and French ancient samples (for neolithic).
Iberian and French? ancient Neolithic samples, or those from the Balkans, for that matter, are absolutely not mainly WHG. In the early Neolithic Balkans, the farmers from Anatolia had picked up only about 1-2% WHG. In the Central European LBK a little more. By the Middle Neolithic in Spain WHG only reached 25% in the population. The Remedello samples from northern Italy, which already show cultural influence from the steppe, have less than that and
no steppe genetic influences.
The only other ancient sample we have from Italy (other than Mesolithic), is a Bell Beaker sample from Parma. Autosomally, that sample seems to be either Northern Italian like(Bergamo), or perhaps Southern French like, or Iberian like. At any rate, certainly not anything very "steppe" like or Northern European like. Now, I know there has been additional gene flow in Italy, but precisely how much and when I don't know. At first glance it doesn't seem that the change has been very drastic in Parma, although Emilia plots south of Bergamo. What we need is ancient dna from Polada, Terramare, Villanova, Gaudo, Rinaldone, the Ligurians, the Latins, the Umbrians, the Italic tribes of the sou
th, the tribes of Sicily, the Greek settlers of the south, the Etruscans, the Veneti, the Langobardi, the Byzantines, and the locals pre-and-post the Germanic invasions, the Gothic War, and the Saracens.
We have none of those: nothing from around Rome, nothing from southern Italy, nothing from Sicily. We have lots of modern uniparental data, which has often led population geneticists astray in other areas, but even that is often not very resolved for non-R1b lineages.
We won't get all of those, but without a good bit of it we won't really know what happened.
How, just to give a few examples, can we know that Roman slavery totally changed or even very significantly changed the autosomal signature of Southern Italians when we don't have a single sample of, say, a poor person from before the Republican Era for comparison.
Who, with any sense, or knowledge of the relevant history or archaeology, or even uniparental
markers, would believe that fool on Eurogenes today, who is either a sock or a reinforcement from Stormfront or sites like it, when he says that the entire population of my father's Po Valley was liquidated and replaced by Lombards! Emilia is 60% R1b U-152. We don't know much about the Lombards, but given where they came from I'll be very surprised if it turns out they were a majority U-152 population. We do know that they spoke a Germanic language, and we speak a Gallo-Romance language. I mean, did this guy leave academics behind at 12, and learn history from a Stormfront coloring book?
I could go on and on, but I hope I've said enough so you understand that there are a lot of charlatans around promoting baseless, unproven, and often deliberate distortions of fact not solely out of ignorance, although there's a lot of that, but out of sick, twisted, personal and racist agendas.
One word of advice: don't believe anything written on sites like forum biodiversity or theapricity until you've checked it from all possible angles yourself.
I really recommend Razib Khan's article, and you can find lots of threads on all sorts of Italian genetics issues through our search engine.
Ed. I just heard that someone on Eurogenes said southern Italians are darker and more "exotic" than Sardinians! SARDINIANS!!!!!!!!!! Honestly, do some people never leave their own countries? They live under a rock? You can't make this freaking stuff up.