Genetic study Population changes in northern Italy from the Iron Age to Modern Times

Francesco

Francesco

Regular Member
Messages
303
Reaction score
267
Points
63
Ethnic group
Italian (tuscan)
New study on northern Italy between the Iron age and the roman era. There is an etruscan-italic like substratum during the iron age, while the increase of the eastern mediterranean component during the roman era might be connected to movements from Magna Grecia, mediated by the roman colonization. The germanic input might be a bit inflated, maybe due to the absence of celtic samples in the study.


1709116199521.png
 
It seems that the focus of these studies, when it comes to Italy, is always an "Eastern Mediterranean signal".

Even in such a study concerning Northern Italy all the other components, like local IA and central Euro (genetically much more substantial, and meaningful to this region from a historical POV) seem to be there just to comment on their relative weight compared to that of any minor "Near East" signal (which doesn't even come from the Near East to begin with, if we must ascribe it to historical movements like those, possibly, from Magna Graecia).
 
Last edited:
Moja said:
Does it mean "Iranian-related ancestry"?
Click to expand...
Good question: unfortunately I find that these studies often use very genetic geographical expression when discussing the origin of a certain genetic input. In this abstract, for instance, the terms used are "middle east" and "eastern mediterranean", wich aren't even the same geographical context and can lead to some degree of uncertanty.
However, I believe that the ancestry in question came from Magna Grecia and was in fact richer in Iran neolithic components.
 
Were the sites where they found these 66 samples listed somewhere?
It's a non-secondary fact, also because Northern Italy is geographically vast and genetically varied as much as the generic Near East mentioned.
 
Stuvanè said:
Were the sites where they found these 66 samples listed somewhere?
It's a non-secondary fact, also because Northern Italy is geographically vast and genetically varied as much as the generic Near East mentioned.
Click to expand...
I believe the sites are all connected to the etruscan presence during the Iron Age, but so far we only have the abstract.
 
Francesco said:
Good question: unfortunately I find that these studies often use very genetic geographical expression when discussing the origin of a certain genetic input. In this abstract, for instance, the terms used are "middle east" and "eastern mediterranean", wich aren't even the same geographical context and can lead to some degree of uncertanty.
However, I believe that the ancestry in question came from Magna Grecia and was in fact richer in Iran neolithic components.
Click to expand...
It says three-quarters from local people in northern Italy and one-quarter from the Near East, of course ancient Greeks had also one-quarter of their ancestry from the Near East (Iran) but what about their local ancestry? It says nothing about Greece.
 
Francesco said:
New study on northern Italy between the Iron age and the roman era. There is an etruscan-italic like substratum during the iron age, while the increase of the eastern mediterranean component during the roman era might be connected to movements from Magna Grecia, mediated by the roman colonization. The germanic input might be a bit inflated, maybe due to the absence of celtic samples in the study.


View attachment 15456
Click to expand...
Do you have any link to this paper?
 
it does say imperial roman .........................republican Romans are different from Imperial Romans in regards to admixture, this would be the same for Northern Italians ...................we already know about these massive admixture differences.

NW Italians would have more gaulish admixture ..........while NE Italians would have more central European and northern Balkan influences ..................I refer to only BC times
 
Vallicanus said:
Do you have any link to this paper?
Click to expand...
Vallicanus: This is an abstract for a paper to be presented at the EAA conference which is meeting this August in Rome. So no paper is available even over at bioRxiv which has pre-print working papers available for the public to read. Therefore, it is likely this paper will be presented at the EAA conference in Rome, then authors will get feedback to make some revisions to their paper before submitting it to a journal. Hopefully, some time in the fall of 2024 there will be a pre-print available over at bioRxiv for the public to take a look at.
 
Francesco said:
New study on northern Italy between the Iron age and the roman era. There is an etruscan-italic like substratum during the iron age, while the increase of the eastern mediterranean component during the roman era might be connected to movements from Magna Grecia, mediated by the roman colonization. The germanic input might be a bit inflated, maybe due to the absence of celtic samples in the study.


View attachment 15456
Click to expand...

The authors here clearly have an agenda with trying to emphasize the importance of their hypothetical foreign admixture scenarios when it comes to Italy. There seems to be an obsession about trying to push this narrative and I find distasteful political motivation behind it all.

Occam's razor dictates that less complex scenarios are more probable than undocumented mass migratory events from the near east and northern Europe. "Near eastern ancestry" will almost certainly correspond to Imperial Italian ancestry from Central or Southern Italy, which was in turn derived from Aegean originating Magna Graecian populations which had a genetic signature identical or similar to Skourtanioti's 2023 LBA Greeks.

"Northern European Group Ancestry" in contrast is more likely a resurgence of Northern IA Italic ancestry whose profile was retained in the alps in places like EMA Bardonecchia ~650AD. Populations beyond the alps likely had very little if anything to do with it based on their demographic insignificance in the Italian peninsula and the lack of N. European samples we see in EMA populations.

Bardonecchia EMA had no Northern or central european profiles and was homogenously modern Northern Italian like while Torino EMA had but one single french-like outlier with the rest ranging from Northern to Central Italian profiles. This "range" in turn also averaged modern-like for Piemonte when combined. The major damning factor here is that these populations are only dated to 650AD, which is only about 80 years after the Lombard entrance into Italy. If the author's hypothesis concerning Northern European mass colonization is true then we should see large quantities of 1st and 2nd generation Germanic profiles in Italian groups from this timeframe all over the general population but in contrast we see absolutely 0 of them with the only exception being langobard specific burial sites.

0edy26.png


Now, if we are talking about Etruscans in Northern Italy these coming samples will probably have to be from Emilia Romagna, so effectively the southernmost parts of the North. It will be interesting to see if they come up as totally identical to the IA Etruscans of Tuscany or if they will instead show a more Illyrian like pull due to their proximity to the adriatic, such as what was mentioned in the Picene study abstract. It was mentioned before that the imperials in this study are only half as east med shifted as the imperial samples from Imperial Central Italy so I am guessing that based off this loose descriptoin they will turn up averaging Central Italian like, but we will have to see.

This topic also begs the question as to what post christian inhumations will genetically look like in the same region, considering that we know inhumation was considered a foreign practice to the imperial era Romans up until the popular adoption of Early Christianity. Would late antiquity christian populations in these areas be more northern shifted like we saw around the city of Rome? Or was Rome a unique case that had an excess of foreigners compared to other cities and regions in Italy? These are questions that need clarification for anyone seriously interested in the topic.
 
Last edited:
Vitruvius said:
There seems to be an obsession about trying to push this narrative and I find distasteful political motivation behind it all.
Click to expand...
My thought exactly.

Other countries with similar geographical position, oddly, are less targeted by mass immigrationist theories hidden in scientific studies... On the other hand these countries seem to be less targeted by migration pressure, so some people in academia are not as interested in pushing this "vibrant mosaic" kind of narrative in respect to those countries.
 
HereToLearn said:
It seems that the focus of these studies, when it comes to Italy, is always an "Eastern Mediterranean signal".

Even in such a study concerning Northern Italy all the other components, like local IA and central Euro (genetically much more substantial, and meaningful to this region from a historical POV) seem to be there just to comment on their relative weight compared to that of any minor "Near East" signal (which doesn't even come from the Near East to begin with, if we must ascribe it to historical movements like those, possibly, from Magna Graecia).
Click to expand...
France, Iberia and parts of Northern Italy speak Romance languages today because of the Roman Empire. I'd say that's pretty meaningful. The only issue I see is that some labs and researchers still lag behind the aDNA findings and don't seem to realise (yet) that the "partly-Near Eastern admixed people" *were* the Romans after Augustus' period. We're going to see more of the Imperial genetic profile in Roman Iberia and Gaul and it'll become clear that these were the ancestors of Late Antique Ibero-Romans and Gallo-Romans that fused with the local populations and became the carriers of cultural and linguistic change. In some places of course we're also going to see Romanised locals without much of a genetic signal from Italy/Greece/Anatolia and that's part of the story as well.

P.S.: I bet we're going to see Roman samples with significant Balkan and/or East Mediterranean admixture in places as far north as Germany in the near future.
 
HereToLearn said:
My thought exactly.

Other countries with similar geographical position, oddly, are less targeted by mass immigrationist theories hidden in scientific studies... On the other hand these countries seem to be less targeted by migration pressure, so some people in academia are not as interested in pushing this "vibrant mosaic" kind of narrative in respect to those countries.
Click to expand...

According to the Picene study abstract which has yet to be fully released, the IA Picenes were both very "homogenous" and also "multicultural" in nature because they found a few N. European outliers (probably invading Senonic gauls). Well which is it? If we find one outlying sample in any country is this now considered sufficient proof to claim multiracial and/or multicultural origin of its modern demographic populace? These ideas are absurd and I will say why.

The claim of mass foreign introgression necessarily has to be supported with widespread observation of this genetic phenomenon on a pro rata level as to effect the Italian populace and not blanket statement guessing from before/after. It should also be supported by large sums of material evidence which is impossible not to leave behind for the massive population movements to which these authors suggest. For example: I'm willing to accept the idea that mass Greek genetic introgression did occur in southern Italy because we keep seeing evidence of this in the Neolithic, Bronze age, Iron age and Imperial age. Many of Italy's largest cities were founded by Greeks and archaeologically, based on their size, were known to boast huge populations even prior to their assimilation into Oscan and Roman populations. All aspects of this are supported with linguistic evidence from material culture finds in tandem with the historic record from Greek and Roman sources. Simply put, large population introgression from foreign sources are not something that can ever be "hidden". They emperically leave behind a huge swath of evidence to support their existance before eventual assimilation and we see this precisely in the Magna Graecian phenomenon. On a genetic level the IA Daunians, Himerians and BA Sicilians all show a cline stretching to Mycenean profiles in their respective PCAs. We have more studies emerging on the study of IA campanian and MBA Apulian populations whose preliminary results implicate the same phenomenon. This is what a true large scale migratory event looks like.

The Near Eastern & Northern European migration narratives by contrast do not enjoy any of this kind of support. There are no historic Langobard or "Near Eastern" cities in Italy that I'm aware of. The historic migration of the Langobards occurred in such small numbers that their entire populace was assimilated and disappeared into the Roman culture in just two generations compared to the multi thousand year population exchanges we are seeing evidenced between the aegean and S. Italy. So far we see more evidence for outlier French individuals than those of Germanic origin in the EMA genetic record and even these types are still very uncommon. I've only seen Germanic individuals in the single specifically langobard associated burial at collegno and despite being lombard affiliated these individuals still showed a majority of Italian profiles. We also have the EMA samples from the northern border of the modern German speaking Alto Adige which do not show any German like individuals, but instead a combination of N. Italic, Spanish like and French-like individuals.

The evidence for Levantine or N. African introgression is even more lackluster. We have just a few lines from Juvenal's satires complaining about dealing with some groups of Syrian born Greeks in the city of Rome and that's really it. There were no Near Eastern cities or population centers in Italy during this period, with no material evidence for this phenomeon and of the Near Eastern like profiles we found in the imperial samples they only exist for a brief 2-300 years before disappearing in all proceeding peroids. In contrast the Aegean like profiles remain the majority with the new inclusion of also some N. Italic like profiles in late antiquity. I fail to see how either of these two groups relate to Near East or Northern Europe. We do not call Europeans with EEF ancestry from Anatolia "Near Eastern" shifted in any of these studies but for whatever reason authors feel perfectly content with referring to Italian Romans and Mycenean Greek ancestry as "Near Eastern".
 
Last edited:
peloponnesian said:
P.S.: I bet we're going to see Roman samples with significant Balkan and/or East Mediterranean admixture in places as far north as Germany in the near future.
Click to expand...

Thread: E-V13 Frequency Maps and Data

Enforcing engineering principles on the premise of yfull subclades listing is like doing Turkish Coffee Fortune Telling. Bulgaria not being in E-V13 Z5018 means that E-V13 Z5018 had more of a Central Balkan spread in antiquity perhaps. Z5018 has a spread in Central-Western Europe where no...
www.eupedia.com
 
The many Italian Picene studies, all indicate that south Picene was a Sabellic stronghold ( an umbri tribe ) , while north Picene was a Liburnian colony from the late bronze-age to 440BC when the liburnian and Picene navies clashed, after this the Liburnians in Italy either left or where merged into Picene society.

Check net for the many Liburnian colonies in Picene lands.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

This thread has been viewed 5912 times.

Back
Top