Tuscany had a middle age admixture event?

Arame

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Most of genetics use Tuscany population as proxy for Etruscan and consistently find some Near Eastern links.
But how we can be sure that Toscanians represent the ancient population?
The Hellenthal et al. map shows a quite significant admixture in Middle Ages 942CE (522CE - 1222CE) for Tuscany. Some 40%. That is quite high compared to other populations.
And it comes from Near East (Armenia, Syria, Jordan) for the most part.
So what historic event can be associated to this influx. For the Near Easterns I can understand it is the Christians fleeing the rise of Khalifate and maybe Turkish invasions.
But do Italian historians attest such a influx? If such a influx is attested it basically means that all studies on Etruscans using Tuscans are useless.

PS. I know that this study was heavily criticized but neverthless it is consistent with historic events for Turks, Greek, Syrian and some others.

Screenshot from 2015-07-22 17:49:46.jpg
 
Hellenthal et al is a joke. They have actually tested ancient Etruscans from 500 BC and they are close to modern Tuscans in autosomal dna.
 
How did they manage to conclude that it happened in Middle Ages?
 
Hellenthal study is ridicolous lol
 
It's been a while since I've read it, but didn't they use Roll-Off?

Everything I know about this program indicates to me that it always makes the admixture(s) look too recent, because it may be picking up the "last" signal of perhaps many older, similar ones. The same thing happens with North Africans with regard to SSA admixture.

Anyway, I don't know why anyone would necessarily see that as a sudden 40% admixture of "Near Eastern" dna into Tuscans in the period following the Germanic invasions. That's nonsensical, as there is no possible historical migration to which it could be tied. No such thing happened.

Perhaps it's picking up admixture from the other direction. There were migrations in that era, of course, but they came from the north and the west. The dates are still off, but presumably it's possible that, as it is wont to do, Roll Off is picking up the last such admixture from that direction.

I don't doubt that there was some gene flow into Toscana from that direction during and after the fall of Rome, but it began much earlier, starting with the Indo-Europeans, then later with Celts etc. A sixty percent infusion is way too much, but Hellenthal is rightly criticized for many things, not least of which is their choice of "source" populations, all of which are "modern", and many of which are themselves "mixed".

I really don't give that study much head room, especially not for Italy, but if you're going to use it for any hints at all, it's just as likely that the admixture came from the north into an essentially heavily EEF population, as we know from much more sophisticated and respected analyses.
 
Most of genetics use Tuscany population as proxy for Etruscan and consistently find some Near Eastern links.
But how we can be sure that Toscanians represent the ancient population?
The Hellenthal et al. map shows a quite significant admixture in Middle Ages 942CE (522CE - 1222CE) for Tuscany. Some 40%. That is quite high compared to other populations.
And it comes from Near East (Armenia, Syria, Jordan) for the most part.
So what historic event can be associated to this influx. For the Near Easterns I can understand it is the Christians fleeing the rise of Khalifate and maybe Turkish invasions.
But do Italian historians attest such a influx? If such a influx is attested it basically means that all studies on Etruscans using Tuscans are useless.

942CE is an averaged date between 522CE and 1222CE, the two extremes (oldest & most recent) of the estimated admixture time frame (all their estimates are presented like that: two dates and a third date that falls in between.) It would be rather absurd to try to attribute all admixture in any population to just a single year, and to be so precise as to pinpoint such a year (you might as well try to pinpoint the exact day and hour when the admixture took place!) So considering the wide admixture time frame of roughly 700 years, it could be from late Roman times as well.


PS. I know that this study was heavily criticized but neverthless it is consistent with historic events for Turks, Greek, Syrian and some others.

View attachment 7379

The only type of criticism for their methods that I am aware of is about their limitations:

http://www.techtimes.com/articles/3...-to-create-genetic-atlas-of-human-history.htm
 
The only mixing from roman times was with Germanic and Celtic tribes at best.

Genetics triumph over pretty much anything. And ancient DNA triumph over estimations of admixture.

Ancient Etruscans from 500 BC plotted close to modern Southern Europeans.

etruscans.jpg
 
Moreover Hellenthal et al seems to contradicts Ralph et Coop et al which used a much larger number of samples.

Italians are actually mostly from the South (See Moorjani et al 2011) and they share less IBD segments with Turks and Cypriots than most other Europeans, including Sweden and Poles.

38S22ri.jpg


Imagine if the authors had only used samples from the Alps...
 
The earliest date for this admixture, according to Hellenthal, is 522 AD. This is a timeline of the history of the peninsula for that time and the immediately prior period, for anyone who skipped Roman history class.

"5th century to 6th century on the Italian peninsula.

  • 410– Rome is sacked by Alaric I
  • 423– After a long and disastrous reign, Honorius dies; succeeded by the usurper Joannes
  • 425– Valentinian III becomes Western emperor
  • 447– Eastern Rome loses to Attila the Hun
  • 452– Attila the Hun is turned away from Rome by Pope Leo I.
  • 455– Valentinian III is assassinated and succeeded by Petronius Maximus as emperor. Rome is plundered by the Vandals, and Maximus is killed during mob violence. Avitus becomes emperor of the west.
  • 457– Avitus is deposed by the magister militum Ricimer and killed. Majorian is installed as Western emperor.
  • 461– Majorian is deposed by Ricimer. Libius Severus becomes Western emperor.
  • 465– Libius Severus dies, possibly poisoned by Ricimer.
  • 467– Anthemius becomes western emperor with the support of Leo I.
  • 468– War against the Vandals by the joint forces of both empires. Naval expedition ends in failure.
  • 472– Ricimer kills Anthemius and makes Olybrius new western emperor. Both Ricimer and Olybrius die of natural causes. Gundobad becomes magister militum in Italy.
  • 473– Gundobad makes Glycerius new western emperor.
  • 474– Gundobad leaves Italy to take part in a succession struggle among the Burgundians. Glycerius is deposed by Julius Nepos who proclaims himself western emperor.
  • 475– Julius Nepos forced to flee to Dalmatia by his magister militum Orestes. Orestes proclaims his own son Romulus Augustulus as western emperor.
  • 476– Germanic general Odoacer kills Orestes, forces Romulus Augustus to abdicate and proclaims himself King of Italy. Traditional date for the fall of the western Roman Empire. The Eastern Roman Empire (later known as the Byzantine Empire) continues on.
  • 480– Julius Nepos, still claiming to be emperor, is killed in Dalmatia.
  • 533– Justinian I begins to restore the empire in the west; Belisarius defeats the Vandals at the Battle of Ad Decimum and the Battle of Tricamarum
  • 536– Belisarius recaptures Rome from theOstrogoths
  • 552– Narses defeats the Ostrogoths at the Battle of Taginae
  • 553– Narses defeats the Ostrogoths at the Battle of Mons Lactarius
  • 568– TheLombards invade Italy; no further attempts to restore the empire"

All of those tribes and all of those Kings were Germanic. That was the new gene flow that was going into Tuscany at that time, even if I don't believe it amounted to anywhere near 60% of the total.

Italian genetics, for all the work done on its modern populations, will only be understood once we have MN samples from further south than Remedello (who, I would remind readers, was very EEF like despite being culturally "Indo-European"), and from various subsequent time periods so that we know how much autosomal change was actually brought by the "Indo-Europeans" when they arrived, by any subsequent "Aegean" migrants, if there actually was such a migration, the Celts, the Lombards, and any slaves who might have been absorbed, whether they came from Gaul, Germania, Britain, Dacia, Pannonia, or from points south and east.

Until then it's all just speculation. However, some speculations are definitely improbable.

Ed. As for the signal from "Turks" being stronger in Eastern Europe than in Italians, I'm not sure about that looking at the data again, but it may be a slightly different signal, with the Near Eastern signal in eastern Europeans being weighted perhaps more to the kind of ANE heavy Near Eastern ancestry that went into Yamnaya, versus the Italians having proportionately more of the EEF as well as having more as an absolute number.

As I said, we need more ancient dna from Italy. Hopefully it will be analyzed by some geneticists who aren't completely ignorant of history.

The idea that the Italy invaded by Vandals and Goths and then ravaged and laid prostrate by the Gothic Wars would have been a haven to anyone is indeed rather laughable, not to mention that there is no historical record of any such thing.
 
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Christians fleeing the rise of the Islamic Caliphate? I laughed so hard.

Italy was pretty much a huge battlefield for Germanic and Slavo-Germanic tribes from 300 AD to 1000 AD. It would be like fleeing Iraq to go in Somalia...
 
Thank everybody. It seems that Rollof method don't work well when there is a complex admixture stories. That 40% ( or 60% from other side ) is not real.
It gives good results when the event is simple like in the case of Turks.

Nevertheless I found some historic events that could bring some Near Eastern admixtures in the Middle Ages.
* It's the invasions of Saracens and their activities. But assessing it's real impact is difficult.
* The appearance of Cathars in North Italy and South France.

The origins of the Cathars' beliefs are unclear but most theories agree they came from the Byzantine Empire mostly by the trade routes and spread from the First Bulgarian Empire to the Netherlands. The name of Bulgarians (Bougres) was also applied to the Albigenses, and they maintained an association with the similar Christian movement of the Bogomils ("Friends of God") of Thrace. "That there was a substantial transmission of ritual and ideas from Bogomilism to Catharism is beyond reasonable doubt."
Catharism had its roots in the Paulician movement in Armenia and eastern Byzantine Anatolia and the Bogomils of the First Bulgarian Empire,[5] who were influenced by the Paulicians resettled in Thrace (Philipopolis) by the Byzantines.

Of course religions and ideas can move without mass movement, but from historic sources we know that Paulicians and related Manichean sects were wiped out by the Byzantine emperors from Anatolia and Armenia. They were mostly relocated to Bulgary. Did they move from there to Italy is unknown.
 
This story is also interesting.
I don't know how common is this that the donor appears from 2000 km without any recent common ancestry.

ARMENIAN STUDENT DONATES BONE MARROW TRANSPLANT TO ITALIAN CHILD

YEREVAN, JULY 15, ARMENPRESS: A five-year Italian child with
leukemia was saved after her genetic make up matched with that of a 22
year old Armenian student, Vahe Vardanian, who donated a bone marrow
transplant to the child.The operation was performed on July 6 in
Italy, but the experts say the result will be evident only in a year.
Vahe joined the Armenian Bone Marrow Donor Registry last year Its
mission is to save precious Armenian lives by creating a bone marrow
donor registry which, with the volunteer recruitment of Armenian
donors worldwide, will increase the pool of existing international
donors and thus give a chance of survival to patients with leukemia or
other blood related diseases. Although Armenians are considered
Caucasian, their unique genetic make up makes it very hard for them to
find matches for transplantation.
Vahe was selected after the Italian bone marrow registry asked
their Armenian counterparts to find a suitable match. The registry has
now 8,000 members.


I agree with Angela. It seems that genetic history of Italy is complex. Only many ancient DNAs will help to better understand it.
 
Saracens were not Western Asians. They were muslim Berbers, and from the Xth century onward, Iberian muslims.

The only recorded movement from the East was the one from Greece after the slavic-avar invasion. The whole population of Patras in Greece was relocated to Reggio Calabria to escape from the Avar-Slavs.
 
Thank everybody. It seems that Rollof method don't work well when there is a complex admixture stories. That 40% ( or 60% from other side ) is not real.
It gives good results when the event is simple like in the case of Turks.

Nevertheless I found some historic events that could bring some Near Eastern admixtures in the Middle Ages.
* It's the invasions of Saracens and their activities. But assessing it's real impact is difficult.
* The appearance of Cathars in North Italy and South France.

Of course religions and ideas can move without mass movement, but from historic sources we know that Paulicians and related Manichean sects were wiped out by the Byzantine emperors from Anatolia and Armenia. They were mostly relocated to Bulgary. Did they move from there to Italy is unknown.

Before one speculates about the genetic impact of the Saracens or any other ethnic group, it might make sense to know who they were ethnically and what areas they actually impacted. As has been pointed out by another poster, Saracen is just a name for the predominantly Berber populations of North Africa after their conversion to Islam, and later it was also applied to their compatriots in Al Andalus. Another name sometimes applied to them is "Moor". Their only contact with Toscana was through some coastal raiding, the kind of coastal raiding that took place along all the southern European Mediterranean coastlines.

The genetic impact of this coastal raiding was not on Toscana or any of the coastal areas, it was on North Africa, through the thousands of slaves that were kidnapped and sold in the slave markets of North Africa. The only place where there was actual settlement of North African Berbers was Sicily and a few places in southern Italy, and, of course Iberia. At any rate, if you take a look at Hellenthal, the signal they're talking about is "Cypriot like" (which is virtually the same as EEF like), not Berber or North African like, which is a separate component even in Hellenthal.

As for the Cathars, there is absolutely no indication in the historical record that the Cathar movement had anything to do with any actual migration from the Near East, other than the initial settlement of some heretics in Bulgaria.

"The Cathars were largely a homegrown, Western European/Latin Christian phenomenon, springing up in the Rhineland cities (particularly Cologne) in the mid-12th century, northern France around the same time, and particularly southern France — the Languedoc — and the northern Italian cities in the mid-late 12th century. In the Languedoc and northern Italy, the Cathars attained their greatest popularity, surviving in the Languedoc, in much reduced form, up to around 1325 and in the Italian cities until the Inquisitions of the 1260s–1300s finally rooted them out."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catharism

If all devotees of religious cults with roots in the East were held to have ancestry from there, then Hellenthal should show an admixture event for Swedes with Palestine around the time that they adopted Christianity.

Also, unfortunately, as was pointed out in the above article, most Cathar groups were in
northern Italy, not Toscana, yet the same kind of "admixture" event is not posited for northern Italy.

http://catharslideshow.blogspot.com/2010/11/italy-and-beyond.html

Plus, I don't quite see how the Cathars could have had a genetic impact on anyone since a primary tenet of their religion involved forswearing intercourse.

The kind of situation you raise where people from different ethnic groups can provide organs for one another is not at all uncommon. It's a coincidence of immunity profiles. Plus, even if you had to share broad ethnic ancestry for such matches to be possible, Armenians and southern Europeans share ancestry since the Neolithic and this was reinforced by shared ancestry from Yamnaya incursions. Why would the admixture event show up only in Toscana, and only at this time?
 
The genetic impact of this coastal raiding was not on Toscana or any of the coastal areas, it was on North Africa, through the thousands of slaves that were kidnapped and sold in the slave markets of North Africa. The only place where there was actual settlement of North African Berbers was Sicily and a few places in southern Italy, and, of course Iberia.

How can Tuscany have less "moorish" admixture than parts of mainland Southern Italy?

Haplogroup-E-M81.gif


Haplogroup-J1.gif


mtDNA-U6-map.png


mtDNA-L-map.png


Regarding Boatigue et al.

"The most recent study regarding African admixture in Iberian populations was conducted in April 2013 using genome-wide SNP data for over 2000 individuals, concluding that Spain and Portugal hold significantly higher levels of North African than the rest of the European continent. Estimates of shared ancestry averaged between 4 and 20% whereas these did not exceed 2% in other western or southern European populations."
 
How can Tuscany have less "moorish" admixture than parts of mainland Southern Italy?

Haplogroup-E-M81.gif


Haplogroup-J1.gif


mtDNA-U6-map.png


mtDNA-L-map.png


Regarding Boatigue et al.

"The most recent study regarding African admixture in Iberian populations was conducted in April 2013 using genome-wide SNP data for over 2000 individuals, concluding that Spain and Portugal hold significantly higher levels of North African than the rest of the European continent. Estimates of shared ancestry averaged between 4 and 20% whereas these did not exceed 2% in other western or southern European populations."

If you think you're going to be able to slip in some off topic discussion about relative North African ancestry in Italy versus Iberia so you can get your ridiculous anthrofora war between racist Italians and Spaniards going on this thread, think again. Any such further posts by anyone will be deleted and there will be other consequences as well.

As for "L", it has a tiny presence in Italy, and anyway, it's most likely Neolithic. That looks very much like a Cardial spread. "JI" in Italy, as discussed extensively on this Board, is not divided very well into subclades. Only part of it can be attributed to the "Arabic" and "Moorish" type. As has been explained before, a lot of it seems to cluster in refugial mountain zones that also harbor G2a, indicating an early arrival for a good part of it. The E-M81 figures for central and northern Italy are based on studies with extremely small sample sizes, unlike the case in southern Italy or Sicily. The E-M81 percentage for Emilia is based, for example, on one or two samples.

Perhaps you should spend some time using the search engine here and acquainting yourself with these matters. It's a much more productive use of one's time, in my opinion, than posting endless pictures of Italians and Iberians in some effort to "prove" who is "darker". Just a friendly suggestion.

In terms of U6, I would recommend that you read the excellent recent paper on it so you can get an actual scientific analysis of the complicated story of the source of U6 in southern Europe.
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2148/14/109

Of course, over and above all of that, there's been southern Italian immigration to the center and north since the late 1800's. I often wonder if the four grandparent rule as applied to samples taken in the late 20th and early 21st century is enough to screen all that out.

Regardless, yDna markers are subject to founder effect and sometimes have quite a limited correlation with autosomal make up, as anyone who has spent some time reading and researching these topics should know.

As for signs of Saracen and Moorish influence in southern Italy, other than in cases of attested rule in certain areas, you might want to investigate, as a Neapolitan, the Saracen presence in Salerno. Not that I'm one of those people who thinks that a few thousand troops are going to change the autosomal composition of any people, as I alluded to in the above paragraph. In terms of yDna there might be some influence, however.

As to North African autosomal signatures, I have yet to see any significant percentages in Tuscans in admixture analyses. At 23andme I've never seen a single one score it at all. As I'm sure you're aware, that is not the case for Sicilians and some southern Italians. It's in very minor percentages, of course. (Tuscans and northern Italians, .7 versus 4.1 for Sicilians.)
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet...HB00SRE5L6ED2osPs9M/edit?hl=en_US&pli=1#gid=0
 
The kind of situation you raise where people from different ethnic groups can provide organs for one another is not at all uncommon. It's a coincidence of immunity profiles. Plus, even if you had to share broad ethnic ancestry for such matches to be possible, Armenians and southern Europeans share ancestry since the Neolithic and this was reinforced by shared ancestry from Yamnaya incursions. Why would the admixture event show up only in Toscana, and only at this time?

I don't get the point of this thread. Modern Armenians are recent post Iron Age immigrants from Iraq into Anatolia, as showed by the recent Allentoft et al paper. That's also true for Kurds and Turks who came from Afghanistan, Tukmenistan and Iran.

On the other hand Italians show a genetic continuity since the Iron Age at least, with minimal external influences from the North and the Balkans.

So how can recent immigrants from the Iraq and the like claim to be somewhat related to us?
 
Christians fleeing the rise of the Islamic Caliphate? I laughed so hard.

Italy was pretty much a huge battlefield for Germanic and Slavo-Germanic tribes from 300 AD to 1000 AD. It would be like fleeing Iraq to go in Somalia...

You mysteriously forget that in this "battlefield" were also the Arabs and the Byzantines (who employed Near Eastern peoples in their armies as well.) In any event, all of these military intruders, including the Germanics, were nothing but small minorities.
 

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