The genetic differences between the Longobardi (Cisalpine Italians) and Lombard (Germanic) population in Italy is confusing as the Lombard rulers of say Sicily encouraged the migration of Longobardi (not Lombards) who spoke Lombardic (Gallo-Italian). Therefore, the Germanic R1a and I yDNA groups would bring in U152 with them...
Is there a village or region in Italy that has a significant and definite Lombard (Germanic) history with no major population shifts. This would prove useful in determining the Germanic Lombard yDNA markers in Italy.
The Langobardi are
not Cisalpine Italians. I don't know how to make this any clearer. The
Langobardi were a
"Germanic speaking" people who didn't get to Italy until 560 AD. There were people already in Italy at that time, yes? First we have the mesolithic hunter gatherers, although we don't have any samples yet so we don't know if they were WHG like or something else, and it's unclear how much of their ancestry might have survived. I don't think much did, but I don't think we can say that none did, and it may have varied by region. Then we have the migration of Neolithic peoples to all parts of the peninsula, mostly Cardial, but some influence also from the Danubian Neolithic, I think. Then we have some Copper Age/Bronze Age migrations, and some from central Europe during the Iron Age.
By 560 AD when the
Langobardi arrived, there were already genetic differences between
"Cisalpine" Italians and Italians further south, partly, in my opinion, having to do with differing amounts of survival of mesolithic era hunter gatherers, partly to do with differing types of Indo-European input coming from different directions, partly to do with "Celtici" migrations in the first millennium BC. The Langobardi just added to the mix.
"Cisalpine" Italians would be different genetically depending on the time period under discussion.
The
"Lombardi" are the ethno-linguistic group which inhabits, generally speaking, the provincia of Lombardia, although the term was used in a loose way to describe the people who were brought in to re-populate certain areas of Sicily after the Moorish era. Those medieval newcomers to Sicily also included people from Liguria, for example.
I started a thread about attempts to quantify the amount of Langobard influence in Italy. They are supposedly testing a lot of samples. The first paper has been a bit disappointing, however. It is based on samples from Piemonte, and tries to compare the ancient samples to modern Piemontesi. However, they only tested mtDna, or at least they only published the mtDna results. The results are inconclusive. One rural town does seem to match quite well, but I'm not convinced that the mtDna of the ancient samples isn't itself a mixture of mtDna from various places in Europe. At any rate, in other areas of Piemonte the signal isn't as strong, doubtless because of all the mixing that has gone on. I don't see how you can get an overall percentage of influence from uniparental markers anyway, especially not mtDna. I think we would need autosomal analysis, although of course yDna is important as well.
This is the paper:
Genealogical Relationships between Early Medieval and Modern Inhabitants of Piedmont
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4312042/
See the discussion here:
http://www.eupedia.com/forum/thread...hern-Italy-(Piemonte)?highlight=Lombard+mtDna
If you would like, I can merge the threads.
I think part of the problem is that in countries like France, Spain and Italy it's unclear whether there seems to be so little genetic influence from the Germanic migrations because these were elite migrations which wouldn't have had much impact on areas which were very densely populated, or because these peoples were a very mixed group themselves who already shared some genetic similarity with some of the peoples of the areas they entered.
Ralph and Coop address this concern here:
"
[h=4]Italy, Iberia, and France.[/h]"On the other hand, we find that France and the Italian and Iberian peninsulas have the lowest rates of genetic common ancestry in the last 1,500 years (other than Turkey and Cyprus), and are the regions of continental Europe thought to have been least affected by the Slavic and Hunnic migrations. These regions were, however, moved into by Germanic tribes (e.g., the Goths, Ostrogoths, and Vandals), which suggests that perhaps the Germanic migrations/invasions of these regions entailed a smaller degree of population replacement than the Slavic and/or Hunnic, or perhaps that the Germanic groups were less genealogically cohesive. This is consistent with the argument that the Slavs moved into relatively depopulated areas, while Gothic “migrations” may have been takeovers by small groups of extant populations
[54],
[55]."
http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1001555
These "Germanic" migrants might have picked up a lot of what could be called central European ancestry, to put it broadly, which was similar to some types of dna already present in these countries.