Angela
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I really missed this one, probably because the title is pretty non-descriptive of the actual topic.
Geneaological Relationships Between Early Medieval and Modern Inhabitants of Piedmont.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25635682
There's always been some uncertainty as to how much autosomal impact the "Langobardi" or Lombards (as a stand in for the Germanic tribes) had on Italy, even northern Italy. Based on the relative paucity of yDna "I1" and R1b U-106, which are usually held to be markers for such ancestry in the Roman and Early Medieval Periods, I've always thought there probably wasn't that much, other than perhaps at their point of greatest impact, which would have been in northeastern Italy where they first entered, then in Lombardia etc. My feeling has always been that the impact in my own area was probably minor, despite the fact that the castles that dot every hill were established by Lombards, and some old, unpublished results showed some yDna I, because it was probably more of an elite male migration that was washed out over succeeding generations and the hundreds of years that have passed.
The only way to get a good handle on all of this is, in my opinion, for someone to do some pretty sophisticated analyses of ancient remains, a la Reich and Lazaridis, of ancient mtDna, yDna, and autosomal Dna from Langobard remains, and then to compare them to modern Italian populations.
This isn't that study or analysis. Apparently, testing of Langobard remains is indeed going on across Italy, of which this is the first result, but they are only reporting on mtDna, which, given how homogenous a lot of European mtDna has been found to be, is the least helpful analysis as far as I'm concerned, and moreover the resolution is only at the level of the mitochondrial hypervariable region I (HVR-I).
Anyway, the mtDna signature of these 28 ancient samples was compared with the dna from three isolated contemporary populations in Piemonte, and also with that from a modern sample drawn from a large city, representing a control for the effects of recent immigration. The authors maintain that:
" the contemporary samples are genealogically independent from the medieval sample..., with one exception, Trino Vercellese, in which the evidence was compatible with persistence up to the present time of genetic features observed among this early medieval population. We conclude that it is possible, in general, to detect evidence of genealogical ties between medieval and specific modern populations. However, only seldom did mitochondrial DNA data allow us to reject with confidence either model tested, which indicates that broader analyses, based on larger assemblages of samples and genetic markers, are needed to understand in detail the effects of medieval migration."
That seems rather noncommittal to me, and certainly doesn't give us any percentages autosomally in terms of total impact.
I'm also unsure that the mtDna from these Lombard remains is necessarily a match for "original" Lombard dna. How do we know that it isn't mtDna picked up during their sojourns and travels? The only evidence the authors posit is that:
"In the Piedmont medieval sample, gene diversity (0.942) and Mean Number of Pairwise Differences (3.484) are similar to, but both lower than, the average found for the other 79 (ancient and contemporary) populations (mean 0.957 and 4.067 respectively, see S2 Table). Among other ancient populations, estimates of internal genetic variation appear close in the Etruscans (0.943; 2.966) [9] and lower in Bronze-age Sardinians (0.830; 1.390) [8], pre-Roman Iberians (gene diversity not given; 2.120) [51] and in a Medieval sample from Tuscany (0.860; 1.971) [6].Accordingly, we see no reason to suspect that the early medieval, or “Lombard” individuals may represent a heterogeneous assemblage of people of different origins, even considering their vicinity in space and time and their archaeological affinities, and from this point on we felt justified in treating them as a single population. F[SUB]ST[/SUB] distances place Lombards in the middle of the area in which most of the populations cluster, graphically represented in S3 Fig. by a MDS plot."
Is that enough?
This is the list of ancient mtDna which they found (Table 1, which also contains the GenBank accession numbers).
H (7)
H2b (3)
H24 (2)
H2a2b1
H6a1b1
J (4)
J2a2c
T2e (2)
T
I2a
U4
U2e1
U5a1b1e (2) i
U5a2a
I quickly scanned Jean Manco's list of ancient mtDna and some of these mtDna lineages do show up in Yamnaya and Corded Ware but then Italic Indo-Europeans might have carried the same lines, so how is one supposed to distinguish one from the other? Anyway, these are the ones I saw on her list: U2e1a, U5a1a1, U4, H2b, H6a1b, H, I, J and T.
Perhaps someone very versed in mtDna can provide us with some more insight after taking a look at it, particularly in light of where these mtDna subclades appear in ancient samples and in today's modern populations.
Oh, the reason that they might have been able to find the link with the one isolated town, and not to other villages where people also possess mainly native Piemontese surnames is this:
"The 75 samples from Trino Vercellese were collected in 1994 from individuals belonging to the Association “Partecipanza dei boschi”, whose members have been transmitting their membership from generation to generation since the Middle Ages, and therefore have been settled in the same archaeologically important area for at least 20–30 generations;"
I wonder if Cavalli Sforza still has the blood samples from the Apennines he used all those years ago? If not, it's time to go test those now elderly people.
Geneaological Relationships Between Early Medieval and Modern Inhabitants of Piedmont.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25635682
There's always been some uncertainty as to how much autosomal impact the "Langobardi" or Lombards (as a stand in for the Germanic tribes) had on Italy, even northern Italy. Based on the relative paucity of yDna "I1" and R1b U-106, which are usually held to be markers for such ancestry in the Roman and Early Medieval Periods, I've always thought there probably wasn't that much, other than perhaps at their point of greatest impact, which would have been in northeastern Italy where they first entered, then in Lombardia etc. My feeling has always been that the impact in my own area was probably minor, despite the fact that the castles that dot every hill were established by Lombards, and some old, unpublished results showed some yDna I, because it was probably more of an elite male migration that was washed out over succeeding generations and the hundreds of years that have passed.
The only way to get a good handle on all of this is, in my opinion, for someone to do some pretty sophisticated analyses of ancient remains, a la Reich and Lazaridis, of ancient mtDna, yDna, and autosomal Dna from Langobard remains, and then to compare them to modern Italian populations.
This isn't that study or analysis. Apparently, testing of Langobard remains is indeed going on across Italy, of which this is the first result, but they are only reporting on mtDna, which, given how homogenous a lot of European mtDna has been found to be, is the least helpful analysis as far as I'm concerned, and moreover the resolution is only at the level of the mitochondrial hypervariable region I (HVR-I).
Anyway, the mtDna signature of these 28 ancient samples was compared with the dna from three isolated contemporary populations in Piemonte, and also with that from a modern sample drawn from a large city, representing a control for the effects of recent immigration. The authors maintain that:
" the contemporary samples are genealogically independent from the medieval sample..., with one exception, Trino Vercellese, in which the evidence was compatible with persistence up to the present time of genetic features observed among this early medieval population. We conclude that it is possible, in general, to detect evidence of genealogical ties between medieval and specific modern populations. However, only seldom did mitochondrial DNA data allow us to reject with confidence either model tested, which indicates that broader analyses, based on larger assemblages of samples and genetic markers, are needed to understand in detail the effects of medieval migration."
That seems rather noncommittal to me, and certainly doesn't give us any percentages autosomally in terms of total impact.
I'm also unsure that the mtDna from these Lombard remains is necessarily a match for "original" Lombard dna. How do we know that it isn't mtDna picked up during their sojourns and travels? The only evidence the authors posit is that:
"In the Piedmont medieval sample, gene diversity (0.942) and Mean Number of Pairwise Differences (3.484) are similar to, but both lower than, the average found for the other 79 (ancient and contemporary) populations (mean 0.957 and 4.067 respectively, see S2 Table). Among other ancient populations, estimates of internal genetic variation appear close in the Etruscans (0.943; 2.966) [9] and lower in Bronze-age Sardinians (0.830; 1.390) [8], pre-Roman Iberians (gene diversity not given; 2.120) [51] and in a Medieval sample from Tuscany (0.860; 1.971) [6].Accordingly, we see no reason to suspect that the early medieval, or “Lombard” individuals may represent a heterogeneous assemblage of people of different origins, even considering their vicinity in space and time and their archaeological affinities, and from this point on we felt justified in treating them as a single population. F[SUB]ST[/SUB] distances place Lombards in the middle of the area in which most of the populations cluster, graphically represented in S3 Fig. by a MDS plot."
Is that enough?
This is the list of ancient mtDna which they found (Table 1, which also contains the GenBank accession numbers).
H (7)
H2b (3)
H24 (2)
H2a2b1
H6a1b1
J (4)
J2a2c
T2e (2)
T
I2a
U4
U2e1
U5a1b1e (2) i
U5a2a
I quickly scanned Jean Manco's list of ancient mtDna and some of these mtDna lineages do show up in Yamnaya and Corded Ware but then Italic Indo-Europeans might have carried the same lines, so how is one supposed to distinguish one from the other? Anyway, these are the ones I saw on her list: U2e1a, U5a1a1, U4, H2b, H6a1b, H, I, J and T.
Perhaps someone very versed in mtDna can provide us with some more insight after taking a look at it, particularly in light of where these mtDna subclades appear in ancient samples and in today's modern populations.
Oh, the reason that they might have been able to find the link with the one isolated town, and not to other villages where people also possess mainly native Piemontese surnames is this:
"The 75 samples from Trino Vercellese were collected in 1994 from individuals belonging to the Association “Partecipanza dei boschi”, whose members have been transmitting their membership from generation to generation since the Middle Ages, and therefore have been settled in the same archaeologically important area for at least 20–30 generations;"
I wonder if Cavalli Sforza still has the blood samples from the Apennines he used all those years ago? If not, it's time to go test those now elderly people.
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