Genetic study The Genetic Legacy of the Roman Imperial Rule in northern Italy

[Pax Augusta]

It's still unclear, and I think either Bell-Beaker or Unfield are both possibilities. More samples of Bronze Age North Italian males are needed. But, It is very unfortunate that Emilian Terramare had a cremation funeral even before the Urn-cremation conversion.

There is a huge difference between the two, Bell-Beaker and Unfield, by nearly 1,000 years, beyond Cavazzutti's attempts to locate Urnfielder ancestors in central Hungary.

 

[Poxy]

There is a huge difference between the two, Bell-Beaker and Unfield, by nearly 1,000 years, beyond Cavazzutti's attempts to locate Urnfielder ancestors in central Hungary.

Let me restate my opinion so there is no misunderstanding. I'm not saying it is unclear where R-L2 originated. I'm saying It is unclear when and where R-L2 entered Italy. As you know, the earliest L2 discovered so far in Italy is BRC003 dated 16~15th Century BC(Migration period of Carpathian refugees). If L2 sample were found in Northern Italy before the 16th century BC, I would believe that Italian L2 directly entered with Bell-Beaker, but since there are no such samples yet, the hypothesis that the origin of Italian L2 is the Carpathian Urnfield remains valid.

(Of course, considering the strong trade links between the Danube and the Po Valley during the Bronze Age, we cannot rule out the possibility that L2 may have flowed from the Carpathia to Northern Italy via trade routes even before the large-scale refugee influx.
Therefore, I hope that, if possible, an L2 of the same age as the Parma Beaker sample will be found.)

 

[Vitruvius]

There is a huge difference between the two, Bell-Beaker and Unfield, by nearly 1,000 years, beyond Cavazzutti's attempts to locate Urnfielder ancestors in central Hungary.

While Urnfield is traditionally dated to around 1300BC as a widespread material culture, much earlier smaller and more regional iterations of it started around 2500BC in Hungary and it's not just Cavazzutti who has come to this conclusion. This has been known at least since 1965 in "Gimbutas, Marija (1965). Bronze age cultures in Central and Eastern Europe. Mouton Publishers. pp. 274–298.". Suffice it to say, I think it's fairly evident that both cultures (Bell beaker and Urnfield) were effectively transethnic in nature, as we do not see widespread replacement of CEU like DNA in Central Europe with Balkanic bronze age ancestry. This shouldn't be surprising as all of these cultures were in close contact with one another and had already established extensive bronze age trade networks so significant material exchanges and material cultural shifts are to be expected.

 

[Vitruvius]

Let me restate my opinion so there is no misunderstanding. I'm not saying it is unclear where R-L2 originated. I'm saying It is unclear when and where R-L2 entered Italy. As you know, the earliest L2 discovered so far in Italy is BRC003 dated 16~15th Century BC(Migration period of Carpathian refugees). If L2 sample were found in Northern Italy before the 16th century BC, I would believe that Italian L2 directly entered with Bell-Beaker, but since there are no such samples yet, the hypothesis that the origin of Italian L2 is the Carpathian Urnfield remains valid.

(Of course, considering the strong trade links between the Danube and the Po Valley during the Bronze Age, we cannot rule out the possibility that L2 may have flowed from the Carpathia to Northern Italy via trade routes even before the large-scale refugee influx.
Therefore, I hope that, if possible, an L2 of the same age as the Parma Beaker sample will be found.)

R1b's predominance in Italy is almost certainly attributed to offspring sex bias in terms of R1b individuals having more male children. There are many cases all over the world in which R1b does not accurately reflect autosomal makeup of a population. Take Bergamo for an example which has 80% R1b prevalence. We already know for a fact that that all Bergamaschi have much less than 40% steppe input from an autosomal standpoint and they are typical of other N. Italians. What's more is that if we were to look at only EHG input, less any of the CHG associated with steppe populations, the relative autosomal contribution would drop to equal to or less than 20%

It is actually impossible to achieve such a high level of R1b in tandem with ~20% EHG autosomal contribution in Bergamo's population purely with a founder effect scenario. If we were to replace 80% of EEF men in northern Italy with EHG or 100% EEF men with Yamnaya individuals (assuming only EHG ancestry is some variant of R1b), then the autosomal contribution of EHG ancestry would at minimum have to be 40%, which simply is not the case. For this reason alone we should assume that the prevelancy of R1b in Italy and probably most other places are the result of male offspring sex bias rather than the direct result of extreme male biased migration. That is not to say male biased migration didn't occur at all - it may or may not have. But one thing for certain is that it could not produce the Haplogroup distribution we see by itself.

 

[Pax Augusta]

No offense, but I have to disagree with this take. We have Bronze age samples dated to the Polada era from Broion. They show a Balkan route of Yamnaya pull rather than a northern route. If the ancestry was coming from north of the alps, I would expect the samples to fall along a more typical central european cline, but they don't. They're somewhat southern drifted. Geographically, Polada finds are also concentrated between Eastern Lombardy, Trentino, and Western Veneto, which implies an eastern bias of settlement. The Terramare culture is directly descended from them and by extension the Protovillanovans are descended from the Terramare. The Protovillanovan sample we have clusters with adriatic bronze+iron age populations found in Croatia, as well, hence my reasoning. Ultimately though, we'll have to wait and find out for Polada to be directly sampled.

Geneticists do not think of a Balkan route for the samples dated to the Polada era from Broion. Beyond all possible errors in this study. For example, the samples from Regina Margherita and La Sassa, which come from the border between central and southern Italy, can hardly represent all of central Italy. On the contrary, they may imply something for some areas of southern Italy.

From Saupe 2021.

https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(21)00535-2?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0960982221005352%3Fshowall%3Dtrue

Our analyses show the expected signature of peri- and post-BA movements from Steppe-related populations across Italy: absent in Italian individuals from the N and Chalcolithic, emerging in the Early BA (Italian Bell Beaker [I2478: 2195–1940 calBCE],9
Italian Remedello [RISE486: 2134–1773 calBCE],7,13 and Broion [BRC010: 1952–1752 calBCE (95.4%)]) and increasing through time in the individuals from Broion and Regina Margherita (GCP003: 1626–1497 calBCE [95.4%]). These samples confirm the date of arrival in Northern Italy to at least ∼2000 BCE and its presence in Central Italy by 4 centuries later, although denser sampling strategies are needed to assess the dynamics of this spread. Our qpAdm results suggest that the Steppe-related ancestry component could have arrived through Late N/Bell Beaker groups from Central Europe, though what remains unknown due to small sample size and limited geographical and chronological distribution is whether there were multiple Steppe population sources and the exact timing and diffusion of this ancestry component through the Italian Peninsula. The R1b subtype found in BA Broion is a lineage found in both ancient Sicilian samples and Italian Bell Beakers. Together with the autosomal affinity of North and Central Italian BA groups with Late N Germany, the Ychr data point to a possibly Northern-, trans-alpine-, and potentially Bell-Beaker-associated source of the Italian Steppe-related ancestry.

While Urnfield is traditionally dated to around 1300BC as a widespread material culture, much earlier smaller and more regional iterations of it started around 2500BC in Hungary and it's not just Cavazzutti who has come to this conclusion. This has been known at least since 1965 in "Gimbutas, Marija (1965). Bronze age cultures in Central and Eastern Europe. Mouton Publishers. pp. 274–298.". Suffice it to say, I think it's fairly evident that both cultures (Bell beaker and Urnfield) were effectively transethnic in nature, as we do not see widespread replacement of CEU like DNA in Central Europe with Balkanic bronze age ancestry. This shouldn't be surprising as all of these cultures were in close contact with one another and had already established extensive bronze age trade networks so significant material exchanges and material cultural shifts are to be expected.

All this is agreeable, not least because it is inappropriate to attribute ethnic groups to Bronze material cultures, although clearly Iron Age ethnic groups have among their ancestors individuals who lived earlier and were characterized by these material cultures. Urnfield cultures do not necessarily equate to Northern Balkans BA, from which then emerge the Iron Age Balkan peoples who are dominated, if I remember correctly, by the J2b-L283 clade which clearly as they were in the Balkans could also have been in the Pannonian Plain. What I continue to disagree with you on is the full equivalence you make between northern and central Italy and Northern Balkans BA. That of the northern Balkans is also a route into Italy. The Longobards are thought to have entered from there but were not a Balkan population originally.

 

[Pax Augusta]

R1b-L2's predominance in Italy is almost certainly attributed to offspring sex bias in terms of R-L2 individuals having more male children. There are many cases all over the world in which R1b does not accurately reflect autosomal makeup of a population. Take Bergamo for an example which has 80% R1b prevalence. We already know for a fact that that all Bergamaschi have much less than 40% steppe input from an autosomal standpoint and they are typical of other N. Italians. What's more is that if we were to look at only EHG input, less any of the CHG associated with steppe populations, the relative autosomal contribution would drop to equal to or less than 20%

It is actually impossible to achieve such a high level of R1b-L2 in tandem with ~20% EHG autosomal contribution in Bergamo's population purely with a founder effect scenario. If we were to replace 80% of EEF men in northern Italy with 80% EHG or 100% Yamnaya individuals (assuming only EHG ancestry is some variant of R1b), then the autosomal contribution of EHG ancestry would at minimum have to be 40%, which simply is not the case. For this reason alone we should assume that the prevelancy of R1b in Italy and probably most other places are the result of male offspring sex bias rather than the direct result of extreme male biased migration. That is not to say male biased migration didn't occur at all - it may or may not have. But one thing for certain is that it could not produce the Haplogroup distribution we see by itself.

Except that 80% of R1b I believe is reached in some prealpine or alpine valley in the Bergamo area, not in Bergamo city, where clearly there will have been more inbreding, but I think these considerations can be made about the distribution of any haplogroup in any modern population. The problem arises at the moment when geneticists first seem more obsessed with the formation of modern Italians than with a precise reconstruction of the past. The great fault lies with the older generations of geneticists who used modern samples as proxies for older ones. Before talking about the ethnogenesis of modern Italians, studies on ancient Italy that covered at least the majority of its territory should have come out.

 

[Robotnick]

Not that it disputes anything per se but it's perhaps relevant to keep in mind that a plurality of U152 of Lombardy and at least a significant amount in most of North Italy is of Z36, not L2, according to current data at least from what I recall.
L2 is undoubtedly also significant but comes in 2nd or 3rd.

Some of that Z36 may have been among North Balkan populations but I'd imagine the majority of it was from Alpine populations (Look at Z36 prevalence in Switzerland) I'm guessing since the EBA, and brought into North Italy throughout the Bronze and Iron Ages and probably a slight bit from Lombards themselves.

 

[Pax Augusta]

The distinct "ethnic groups" you refer to in the iron age are less so ethnic groups in the modern sense of the word and more of tribal varieties of Italians that exist on a related genetic cline. You can say there were some cultural differences but they were largely culturally homogenized in the protovillanovan era. Differences in culture after that period mostly had to do with degrees of contact with the Greek world technological complex.

I still have to respond to some old posts, I'll respond to this one in the meantime but I'm sorry but I'm out of time.

If you pick up an American or British university textbook on archaeology, such as the one written by Paul Bahn and Colin Renfrew, you will see that archaeology is considered a field within the larger anthropological discipline (not accepted by all archaeologists, but the fact remains that all archaeologists, including Italian ones, when talking about the emergence of the ethnic groups of Preroman Italy refer to anthropology concepts). It is anthropology that defines what an ethnic group is, and, according to anthropology, a human group can be called an ethnicity if certain requirements are met. Among these requirements is that the individuals of an ethnic group must show self-consciousness of belonging to the same (ethnic) group, and clearly this self-consciousness is shown only after the introduction of the alphabet and only after the ethnic group has compared itself with other ethnic groups, because it is in the comparison with others that we define ourselves as what we are. All these conditions occur only in Iron Age Italy (and other parts of Europe, while further north in Italy still later). This dating does not apply to the Greeks, being placed farther east, and thus being among the first who compare with the East (where these processes are anticipated by many centuries), and being the first to use an alphabet.

In the specific case of the Protovillanovan culture of the Bronze Age (not to be confused with the Villanovan culture of the Iron Age), archaeologists, particularly those in Italy, have been arguing for decades that the Protovillanovan culture at its end shows a process of "regionalization," from which are derived later Iron Age cultures, such as the Villanovan (hence Etruscan), the Atestine (from which the Veneti emerge), the Latial culture (from which the Latins later emerge), and so on.

The Terramare culture is directly descended from them and by extension the Protovillanovans are descended from the Terramare. The Protovillanovan sample we have clusters with adriatic bronze+iron age populations found in Croatia, as well, hence my reasoning. Ultimately though, we'll have to wait and find out for Polada to be directly sampled.

The Protovillanovian sample (R1) is only one, she is a woman, and she comes from Abruzzo on the border with Marche, and she is a Proto-Picene. Many have noted that she may be descended from more recent migrants from the Balkans. And since, for archaeologists, a Balkan component does indeed exist in the ethnogenesis of the Picenes, which has nothing to do with the Protovillanovan, it seems rather obvious that this one sample is probably not enough to draw conclusions about the Protovillanovan as a whole.

Not that it disputes anything per se but it's perhaps relevant to keep in mind that a plurality of U152 of Lombardy and at least a significant amount in most of North Italy is of Z36, not L2, according to current data at least from what I recall.
L2 is undoubtedly also significant but comes in 2nd or 3rd.

Some of that Z36 may have been among North Balkan populations but I'd imagine the majority of it was from Alpine populations (Look at Z36 prevalence in Switzerland) I'm guessing since the EBA, and brought into North Italy throughout the Bronze and Iron Ages and probably a slight bit from Lombards themselves.

A Z36 seems to me to have been found among Etruscan samples, if I remember correctly, not sure. So maybe some Z36 was around as early as the Iron Age.

The underlying problem is that it is still too early to make comparisons between Iron Age populations and those of today. Clearly, today's distribution can be influenced by sex bias, genetic drift, founder effects, later migrations... you name it.

 

[Vitruvius]

Not that it disputes anything per se but it's perhaps relevant to keep in mind that a plurality of U152 of Lombardy and at least a significant amount in most of North Italy is of Z36, not L2, according to current data at least from what I recall.
L2 is undoubtedly also significant but comes in 2nd or 3rd.

Some of that Z36 may have been among North Balkan populations but I'd imagine the majority of it was from Alpine populations (Look at Z36 prevalence in Switzerland) I'm guessing since the EBA, and brought into North Italy throughout the Bronze and Iron Ages and probably a slight bit from Lombards themselves.

I've since edited my comment to simply reflect "R1b". This is a good point, though, so thanks for pointing it out.

 

[Vitruvius]

Geneticists do not think of a Balkan route for the samples dated to the Polada era from Broion. Beyond all possible errors in this study. For example, the samples from Regina Margherita and La Sassa, which come from the border between central and southern Italy, can hardly represent all of central Italy. On the contrary, they may imply something for some areas of southern Italy.

The authors of the study may not have envisioned it, but the samples from Broion and Regina Margherita very obviously avoid the entirety of the CEU cline. I can't help if they choose to posit a theory that disagrees with their own PCA. They probably made the vague association of steppe input with northern european ancestry without looking much further into it. You have to admit that the cline of the PCA which I posted directly from both studies really does not point to the average of CEU samples from the bronze age.

All this is agreeable, not least because it is inappropriate to attribute ethnic groups to Bronze material cultures, although clearly Iron Age ethnic groups have among their ancestors individuals who lived earlier and were characterized by these material cultures. Urnfield cultures do not necessarily equate to Northern Balkans BA, from which then emerge the Iron Age Balkan peoples who are dominated, if I remember correctly, by the J2b-L283 clade which clearly as they were in the Balkans could also have been in the Pannonian Plain. What I continue to disagree with you on is the full equivalence you make between northern and central Italy and Northern Balkans BA. That of the northern Balkans is also a route into Italy. The Longobards are thought to have entered from there but were not a Balkan population originally.

Sure and I of course agree with you that there do exist some material cultures which are ethnically homogeneous on a genetic level (Such as the Iron age Villanovan culture). I just don't see Bell Beakers and Urnfields being an example of this due to how many genetically differentiated areas they span. This was my point and I think we agree on this. Knowing this, I don't think it's a great argument to try to guess at Polada or Terramare's genetic makeup based off of commonalities had with Bell Beaker since Bell Beaker is associated with both the Carpathian Basin and Central Europe anyways.

From what I'm getting it sounds like you believe there is a significant difference between Central and Northern Italian ancestry during the bronze age. Could you elaborate more on what your disagreement is here? While I don't believe Central and Northern Italy were totally identical during the bronze age, I do think they were relatively homogeneous and formed a cline of ancestry as a result of the same types of steppe related populations movements. If you think otherwise, however, I would like to hear your thoughts on this to better understand your position.

Overall I think we agree on most things other than the above and the relative importance/numerical dominance of Hungarian vs Southern German expansions into Po Valley during the bronze age. I don't see any great degree of divergence between our thoughts on these topics.

 

[Vitruvius]

I still have to respond to some old posts, I'll respond to this one in the meantime but I'm sorry but I'm out of time.

If you pick up an American or British university textbook on archaeology, such as the one written by Paul Bahn and Colin Renfrew, you will see that archaeology is considered a field within the larger anthropological discipline (not accepted by all archaeologists, but the fact remains that all archaeologists, including Italian ones, when talking about the emergence of the ethnic groups of Preroman Italy refer to anthropology concepts). It is anthropology that defines what an ethnic group is, and, according to anthropology, a human group can be called an ethnicity if certain requirements are met. Among these requirements is that the individuals of an ethnic group must show self-consciousness of belonging to the same (ethnic) group, and clearly this self-consciousness is shown only after the introduction of the alphabet and only after the ethnic group has compared itself with other ethnic groups, because it is in the comparison with others that we define ourselves as what we are. All these conditions occur only in Iron Age Italy (and other parts of Europe, while further north in Italy still later). This dating does not apply to the Greeks, being placed farther east, and thus being among the first who compare with the East (where these processes are anticipated by many centuries), and being the first to use an alphabet.

I am not disputing the idea that archaeological material cultures can and typically do correlate with anthropological groups and even more narrowly ethnic groups in most cases. Nor would I disagree that the broad field of investigative anthropology (i.e. the documentation of differences and developments between various groups of humans) could be considered as a basis for providing reasonable definition to ethnic identification. That being said your idea that ethnic groups can only be defined in the historical era is one I do have to reject quite flatly. It is not only probable but even certainly definite that ethnic groups in nearly all places of the world would have existed prior to their introduction of writing. They were clearly capable of demonstrating self consciousness through other means such as social organization, shared material culture, religion, language and shared genetics/breeding patterns. For this reason I think it's quite definite that many Italic tribal/ethnic groups almost certainly existed prior to the iron age, even if they were not calling themselves specifically "Italic" at that point in time. We can only speculate as to how culturally similar each was since they lacked any written records, however the Protovillanovan phenomenon would indeed suggest a peninsula-wide homogenization process that did occur. Because of this I think it's more apt to view the introduction of writing as simply the most broad lens through which modern populations are able to understand those of past, but not the end-all or total scope of ethnic groupings which have existed in prior times.

In the specific case of the Protovillanovan culture of the Bronze Age (not to be confused with the Villanovan culture of the Iron Age), archaeologists, particularly those in Italy, have been arguing for decades that the Protovillanovan culture at its end shows a process of "regionalization," from which are derived later Iron Age cultures, such as the Villanovan (hence Etruscan), the Atestine (from which the Veneti emerge), the Latial culture (from which the Latins later emerge), and so on.


The Protovillanovian sample (R1) is only one, she is a woman, and she comes from Abruzzo on the border with Marche, and she is a Proto-Picene. Many have noted that she may be descended from more recent migrants from the Balkans. And since, for archaeologists, a Balkan component does indeed exist in the ethnogenesis of the Picenes, which has nothing to do with the Protovillanovan, it seems rather obvious that this one sample is probably not enough to draw conclusions about the Protovillanovan as a whole.

Yes, the process of regoinalization to which you speak of did occur and does in fact mark the end of the Protovillanovan era and accounts for many localized differences you see between the Italic peoples that emerge out of the iron age at the beginning of the Italian historical record. The Protovillanovan phenomenon for this reason is likely to be where these various regionalized identities amongst italics draw their commonalities from (partially genetic but more broadly cultural/linguistic) rather than their differences. As for the one Protovillanovan sample, I don't believe she would be descended from first or second generation Balkan arrivals but instead will be more broadly representative of northern Italy during the Protovillanovan and Terramare eras. Your image suggests material cultural links to both the Adriatic but also more broadly the much more archaic Italian middle bronze age which suggests deep local connections. She very clearly overlaps moderns and I doubt this is any sort of fluke. That being said I agree that we will need many more samples to verify what was actually going on. One sample is a start but not enough.

 

[Vitruvius]

Except that 80% of R1b I believe is reached in some prealpine or alpine valley in the Bergamo area, not in Bergamo city, where clearly there will have been more inbreding, but I think these considerations can be made about the distribution of any haplogroup in any modern population. The problem arises at the moment when geneticists first seem more obsessed with the formation of modern Italians than with a precise reconstruction of the past. The great fault lies with the older generations of geneticists who used modern samples as proxies for older ones. Before talking about the ethnogenesis of modern Italians, studies on ancient Italy that covered at least the majority of its territory should have come out.

You can apply my point to most areas in Italy, not just Bergamo's prealpine valleys. Simply put, R1b is drastically overrepresented in comparison to a mathematically plausible autosomal contribution via a male mediated migration scenario. There's of course nothing wrong with Italians having an R1b haplogroup, but it is simply not indicative of the genetic origins of most ancestors of Italians in any region. It instead appears indicative of some ancestors who have produced more male offspring than their counterparts who bore other types of Y haplogroups. For this reason I tend to prefer autosomal data to determine directions of gene flow. It is very possible and perhaps even likely that most of Italy's R1b did originate north of the alps but even so I still posit that the majority of ancestry was likely stemming from the Carpathian basin for the reason that the autosomal data points sharply to it. If we find further samples later on whose autosomal data shows otherwise I'll be happy to take a look at it.

Also, I don't fault the genealogists of old for attempting to determine the formation of various modern ethnic groups. It's a fairly natural curiosity and a valid question to pursue as long as it's done with reasonable scrutiny. I do fault those types who posit or believe in overly simplistic scenarios of ethnological formation which do not match the available historic written records or prehistoric archaeological data in favor of their own fantasies. These types are some of the most repulsive individuals who are interested in rewriting history with a modern pen while throwing away the very first hand accounts of the people they speak for. There's no justification for this.

 

[Jovialis]

Northern Italians are almost similar to IA central Italians except they get a small amount of excess CHG/Iran_N. Based on this chart, there were already people that could have facilitated this since the Iron Age. Clearly South Italians had excess CHG/Iran-related, and likely from lack of WHG and an EBA migration that also formed the Minoans and Mycenaeans. Italo-Celtic and Anatolian_N/CHG created "Central Mediterraneans" before the Imperial era. Thus, in my opinion, after Rome united Italy, that's when internal migrations created this cline. You don't need the Netflix version of history to explain it, that it was some mass migration from all over the empire in Imperial times. Antonio et al 2019 already shows east med and near east die away from the record in late antiquity. The modern Italians are predominantly formed by peoples "native" to Italy since at least the EBA, with some minor augmentations leading up to the middle ages.

 

[Jovialis]

View attachment 14328
Northern Italians are almost similar to IA central Italians except they get a small amount of excess CHG/Iran_N. Based on this chart, there were already people that could have facilitated this since the Iron Age. Clearly South Italians had excess CHG/Iran-related, and likely from lack of WHG and an EBA migration that also formed the Minoans and Mycenaeans. Italo-Celtic and Anatolian_N/CHG created "Central Mediterraneans" before the Imperial era. Thus, in my opinion, after Rome united Italy, that's when internal migrations created this cline. You don't need the Netflix version of history to explain it, that it was some mass migration from all over the empire in Imperial times. Antonio et al 2019 already shows east med and near east die away from the record in late antiquity. The modern Italians are predominantly formed by peoples "native" to Italy since at least the EBA, with some minor augmentations leading up to the middle ages.

"generated genome-wide data of 32 individuals from six sites in northern Italy archaeologically dated to the Imperial period. Principal Component Analysis reveals that all individuals fall on an admixture cline stretching from the placement of preceding Iron Age groups towards modern-day Near Easterners."

PCA based analysis brought them to the conclusion. Yet qpAdm can tell a different story. You can toss this study aside.

 

[Robotnick]

View attachment 14328
Northern Italians are almost similar to IA central Italians except they get a small amount of excess CHG/Iran_N. Based on this chart, there were already people that could have facilitated this since the Iron Age. Clearly South Italians had excess CHG/Iran-related, and likely from lack of WHG and an EBA migration that also formed the Minoans and Mycenaeans. Italo-Celtic and Anatolian_N/CHG created "Central Mediterraneans" before the Imperial era. Thus, in my opinion, after Rome united Italy, that's when internal migrations created this cline. You don't need the Netflix version of history to explain it, that it was some mass migration from all over the empire in Imperial times. Antonio et al 2019 already shows east med and near east die away from the record in late antiquity. The modern Italians are predominantly formed by peoples "native" to Italy since at least the EBA, with some minor augmentations leading up to the middle ages.

Out of curiosity which Prenestini sample is which?
There's R435 (600-200 BCE, R-Z56>Z43>Z145) and R437 (400-200 BCE, R-L2>ZZ48>ZZ56)

 

[Jovialis]

437 is the one similar to Southern Italians, the other similar to Latini/Etruscan-like

 

[Jovialis]

"generated genome-wide data of 32 individuals from six sites in northern Italy archaeologically dated to the Imperial period. Principal Component Analysis reveals that all individuals fall on an admixture cline stretching from the placement of preceding Iron Age groups towards modern-day Near Easterners."

PCA based analysis brought them to the conclusion. Yet qpAdm can tell a different story. You can toss this study aside.

Principal Component Analyses (PCA)-based findings in population genetic studies are highly biased and must be reevaluated​

Principal Component Analyses (PCA)-based findings in population genetic studies are highly biased and must be reevaluated - Scientific Reports

Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is a multivariate analysis that reduces the complexity of datasets while preserving data covariance. The outcome can be visualized on colorful scatterplots, ideally with only a minimal loss of information. PCA applications, implemented in well-cited packages...

www.nature.com

You can take this study and throw it in the garbage as far as I am concerned...

 

[Vitruvius]

Principal Component Analyses (PCA)-based findings in population genetic studies are highly biased and must be reevaluated​

Principal Component Analyses (PCA)-based findings in population genetic studies are highly biased and must be reevaluated - Scientific Reports

Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is a multivariate analysis that reduces the complexity of datasets while preserving data covariance. The outcome can be visualized on colorful scatterplots, ideally with only a minimal loss of information. PCA applications, implemented in well-cited packages...

www.nature.com

You can take this study and throw it in the garbage as far as I am concerned...

The important aspect from this study will not be their baseless conjectures but the actual samples themselves.

 

[ihype02]

There is a big fat chunk of Classical Greek samples plotting with Mycenaeans in that Sicilian PCA. And the few more South-Eastern ones can easily be dismissed as mercenary outliers as there are twice as many outliers plotting way north of them.

The Roman Empire was the key architect of the Italian ethnogenesis with migrations from Western Asia under their control. It's the writing on the wall and I've been saying it for 2 years. Percentages are arguable.

 

[Vitruvius]

There is a big fat chunk of Classical Greek samples plotting with Mycenaeans in that Sicilian PCA. And the few more South-Eastern ones can easily be dismissed as mercenary outliers as there are twice as many outliers plotting way north of them.

The Roman Empire was the key architect of the Italian ethnogenesis with migrations from Western Asia under their control. It's the writing on the wall and I've been saying it for 2 years. Percentages are arguable.

There's an even larger amount of late bronze age Greeks that cluster identically to southern Italians in the paper titled, "Ancient DNA reveals admixture history and endogamy in the prehistoric Aegean" - about 40% of the entire LBA sample. For all the speculation on this type of genetic profile, I'm surprised nobody is talking about this major study. Findings reveal that LBA Myceneans show higher amounts of BA Anatolian and steppe related ancestry than earlier bronze age Greeks did, meaning active population exchanges were ongoing and caucasian ancestry was increasing over time. There are plenty of modern like samples here and not just southern Italian like, but also some central and northern Italian like as well.

For this reason and several others, I think it's more likely that this type of ancestry will have arrived via the poleis of Magna Graecia in the Greek archaic period prior to any Roman domination of West Asia or even southern Italy. Their assimilation probably first occurred via ver sacrum migrational conquests of Samnite descended tribes, and then once Rome fell on the side of victory after the pyyrhic wars, these types were further romanized as regular Italians. Outside of the mercenaries, Himera seems to show a spread of individuals between Sicanian and modern S. Italian profiles before any Roman subjugation (the city was destroyed before the first punic war). I think this heavy Sicanian component is likely due to them being at the edge of the Greek world.

By contrast, Ischian greeks from the leaked PCA plot of iron age Ischia seem to plot between modern Maltese and Sicilians, albeit it's hard to see. I used a typical west eurasian PCA plot as a reference to determine this. I think this is probably more representative of more pure Greeks from this era as it seems to align more closely with the LBA Greek samples taken from Greece proper. We also see the Etruscan samples taking on more Aegean related ancestry as time goes on between 900 and 400BC. This seems to be representative of
the beginning of rapid expansion of Aegean DNA into central and southern Italy. While the Greeks did not control that much territory, their numbers were nothing to scoff at. Sibari in Calabria is thought to have had a population ion of 300,000. By comparison, Rome would not record that many total citizens in its republic in the census until 130BC.