Genetic study The Picenes and the Genetic Landscape of Central Adriatic Italy in the Iron Age.

[Vallicanus]

This analysis of Biasutti is very vague. Others speak of 'Noric' type (common nough in Austria, something described by Coon as a brachycephalized 'nordic', in fact involving some synthesis where played 'nordic', 'borreby' and 'dinaric' so not a so local type for northern Italy of Neolithic rather a Central Europe thing, spite its fuzziness. 'alpine' has been too often employed for everykind of brachycephals at some stage of "science".

You are so wrong!
If you had read the Italy section of Biasutti's Razze etc which I cited above you would see he distinguished very clearly between the Alpine and Dinaric (he preferred the term Adriatic) types.

He was not Ripley who lazily and hazily termed most European brachycephals as "Alpine".

 

[ihype02]

Wrong. This phenomenon of Y-DNA not reflecting autosomal DNA is actually extremely common, which is precisely why Y-DNA is such a poor proxy for ethnic makeup.

Proportionally Y-DNA tend to have a migration male bias, because such migrations are male driven but one should taken in account at least half of that 15% assuming those Germanic carriers did not brought any woman.

 

[ihype02]

No, that is a total cop out and you are only trying to end this discussion because all evidence here proves the exact opposite of your claim. It's amazing to me that you can have such a cognitive bias that you're willing to pretend that a supposed mass German admixture event in Rome just happens to exclude any German autosomal profiles during the precise timeframe that the first generation immigrant Germans entered Italy. You have no idea how much I1 was in northern italy to begin with and you also want us to believe that this cluster of 5 individuals which are specific to the exact PCA location of modern nothern italy and the picenes is just happenstance and that they all just happen to be perfectly identical admixture ratios for Germans and Imperials. Nobody with any common sense is buying this. Actual imperial/german crosses would not even cluster over northern Italy on this PCA and would instead necessitate a cline stretching just east of where England is shown.




Wrong. This phenomenon of Y-DNA not reflecting autosomal DNA is actually extremely common, which is precisely why Y-DNA is such a poor proxy for ethnic makeup.

Vitruvius I agree that there was probably (substantial) Norther Italian admixture in Central Italy during, but Goths and Longobards left some minor admixture too.

For South Italy and Sicily, Germanic admixture is close to zero. Save for some few Normans and Goth that left a ~ 2% contribution.

 

[torzio]

We can safely say with a very high percentage that republic roman period had near zero germanic admixture ................while Imperial roman period had at least 20% of Germanic admixture especially since roman hired many Germanic mercenaries into their armies of which many settled around adriatic side of Italy

 

[ihype02]

Setting aside individual exceptions, where are all these Scandinavian-like Dark Age Germanic types in modern Northern Italy (outside South Tyrol, but pretty rare there too) or even clearly Anatolian-like ones also for that matter?
The anthropologist Renato Biasutti indicated in his "Razze e Popoli della Terra" that blond hair in the Italian alpine region was strongly correlated with a local brachycephalic "Alpine" type, while the people of the Po valley were much darker-haired.

That is up to archeology, which haven't even digged an early Longobard settlement. Weren't you guys the ones that dismissed the Himerian samples, and the Peloponnesian ones in the leaked paper, as truly representative of Greek colonists?

I never thought implying a non zero Germanic admixture in North Italy would be controversial, I understand being skeptical about Northern Italians have having non-European admixture but Germanic is a little bit of a stretch.

 

[Vallicanus]

That is up to archeology, which haven't even digged an early Longobard settlement. Weren't you guys the ones that dismissed the Himerian samples, and the Peloponnesian ones in the leaked paper, as truly representative of Greek colonists?

I never thought implying a non zero Germanic admixture in North Italy would be controversial, I understand being skeptical about Northern Italians have having non-European admixture but Germanic is a little bit of a stretch.

Well, no, it's not up to archeology but a question of just looking around modern Northern Italians (and those further south too, of course) and seeing how few actually look Scandinavian or North German, even the few genuine blonds in Italy.

 

[Vitruvius]

Proportionally Y-DNA tend to have a migration male bias, because such migrations are male driven but one should taken in account at least half of that 15% assuming those Germanic carriers did not brought any woman.

There are many more biases associated with Y dna other than just male migration. It is a useless topic to focus on for this type of a conversation. If one wants to take an interest in when and how certain Y dna haplogroups arrived in Italy that is all fine and well, but attempting to quantify ethnic makeup with Y-DNA is a widespread fallacy. Speak of autosomal dna if you want to have conversion on the total german vs italic makeup of Italians, not haplogroups. There is nothing "masked" in this methodology because we necessarily have to have German profiles appearing en masse in Italy for these ideas of large admixture events to take place. So far again, we don't see it.

Vitruvius I agree that there was probably (substantial) Norther Italian admixture in Central Italy during, but Goths and Longobards left some minor admixture too.

For South Italy and Sicily, Germanic admixture is close to zero. Save for some few Normans and Goth that left a ~ 2% contribution.

I don't get this indication from your responses at all. You have been trying to pass the blatantly obvious Picene-like Northern Italic profiles found in late antiquity as "mixed Germanic Ostrogoths" due to some tiny amount of I1 Ydna found amongst them (Literally one sample if I'm reading this correctly) which is beyond absurd. They are plainly Northern Italics and this is a topic that is not up for debate.

If you want me to take the German repopulation hypothesis seriously then I expect to see large sums of real deal N. Euro/German autosomal profiles all over the northern half of Italy between late antiquity to the early middle ages. They should not be restricted to exotic Langobard burials but commonplace in every major town and city. Any of this nonsense of passing off 7th century Picene-like N. Italic profiles as "Mixed - German" is not even worth the time of day to take seriously. This idea of significant Germanic admixture in Italy is rapidly becoming a Russell's teapot scenario in which many who simply want this to be so are using every nonargument, blanket statement and excuse they can find to see Germans in places there were none.

I do not deny the existence of Germans entering Italy during the late antiquity/EMA eras, nor their historic impact on the politics of these eras, but I do not accept the idea that they were numerous or genetically substantial whatsoever compared to the larger Italian populace. The Langobards represented an estimated 2-3% of the population of Italy and from what I have seen they mainly occupied urban areas to rule from which are known population sinks.

We can safely say with a very high percentage that republic roman period had near zero germanic admixture ................while Imperial roman period had at least 20% of Germanic admixture especially since roman hired many Germanic mercenaries into their armies of which many settled around adriatic side of Italy

There is no evidence whatsoever to suggest 20%+ German admixture during the empire as there are absolutely zero Germanic profiles found from this time. If anything there is emerging evidence of near 0% individuals of Northern European extraction living in Italy during the imperial era as things stand right now. I don't have a crystal ball as to what future studies will show, but I am not anticipating anything coming soon that will evidence huge sums of incoming Germans.

 

[Vitruvius]

That is up to archeology, which haven't even digged an early Longobard settlement. Weren't you guys the ones that dismissed the Himerian samples, and the Peloponnesian ones in the leaked paper, as truly representative of Greek colonists?

I never thought implying a non zero Germanic admixture in North Italy would be controversial, I understand being skeptical about Northern Italians have having non-European admixture but Germanic is a little bit of a stretch.

Nobody dismissed them as Greek influenced, but they clearly show a Sicanian cline which the authors of the study noted. The conclusion shared by many, was simply that these were not what pure iron age greeks were probably averaging. We will have to wait until we get more iron age greeks from various geographies to make that determination absolute, but the 94 LBA Greek samples from Greece proper were already far more Anatolian shifted than Himera which gives us a pretty clear answer to this question already.

 

[torzio]

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ajpa.24302

Y-chromosome variability and genetic history of Commons from Northern Italy

........................................................................................
we also have the Cimbri people from Bavaria

Cimbrian language - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

as I said republican roman admixture is completely different from imperial roman admixture ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,we need to only concentrate on republican roman admixture to get a purer lineage

 

[ihype02]

Nobody dismissed them as Greek influenced, but they clearly show a Sicanian cline which the authors of the study noted. The conclusion shared by many, was simply that these were not what pure iron age greeks were probably averaging. We will have to wait until we get more iron age greeks from various geographies to make that determination absolute, but the 94 LBA Greek samples from Greece proper were already far more Anatolian shifted than Himera which gives us a pretty clear answer to this question already.

Most of Himerian samples 100% overlap with the average LBA Greek samples. The updated samples (I don't think they were 94?) showed more heterogenity but the average remained the same.
As for those forming a cline to Sicanians, we know that some old Greeks with less steppe were more ANF shifted towards Minoans however it could also be Italic admixture, but it does not change the fact that the base was overlapping with LBA Greeks.

Distance to:	ITA_Sicily_Himera_480BCE_1
0.01794275	Iberia_Northeast_Empuries2
0.02298276	GRC_Mycenaean_Attica_BA
0.02350047	GRC_Mycenaean
0.05064275	ITA_Rome_Imperial

Lazaridis just dropped the Greek migration hypothesis being the only or main pivot of shift in Italy now he's claiming it was the Roman Empire just like the rest of scientists did.

 

[Jovialis]

@ihype02

I for one believe Modern Italian cline is indeed IA Italics and LBA Greeks. We see that IA demographics throughout Europe remains relatively stable. The same is true for Italy. Using these ancillary merchants and slaves is a means to propagate the Netflix version of history.

This is what I believe:

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1771524236433068044

R437 can indeed be modeled like pre-Slavic MBA North Greeks. The same is true for modern-day Apulia.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1771645746833494143

Many research papers follow many arbitrary constructions that sometimes deviate from what the actual sources of those samples imply. C6 for example is falsely lumped in with other divergent groups which die away by Late Antiquity. It is not a coincidence that C6 overlaps with LBA Greeks. It is also not a coincidence that North Italians overlap with certain Italics. This canard that there was this great Panmixa is purely based on Urbanites that died away, it's promoted by academics that want to put a liberal slant on history, while giving fodder to a racist agenda.

Frankly I could care less, because the fact exists that Ancient Greeks and Italics plot with modern Italians. Yes there is even qpAdm analysis that verifies it. Moreover there's obviously historical evidence. That should be a trifecta for aDNA. But because these people, Greeks and Romans, were also great and legendary civilizations that stir the hearts of the world, they're a political football. I am sick of it.

 

[HereToLearn]

Regarding the Lombards, however, my main point is that on a genetic level there is no functional difference between a scenario in which the Lombards entered into Italy, occupied and resided in its major cities (sources of tax revenue), mixed with the local urban population, asserted control, were never expelled but yet still were gradually replaced by higher fertility rural Italians who retained an iron age profile vs. the scenario of the Lombards not having entered Italy at all. This is the type of situation I'm seeing emerge with every new study that comes out. We can of course acknowledge their historical place in society for their time period but it's the genetic permanence that I'm simply not seeing here.

I see your point and as usual it makes sense to me: no, or very minimal, trace of autosomal DNA does not exclude the survival of a few Y-DNA lineages and that is why it is misleading to infer autosomal composition from uniparental Y-DNA and mtDNA markers.

My question before about possibly seeing "unusual" subclades for IA Italy came from self-interest, as the haplogroup I belong to is often associated to the North Sea area. Much as I'd find most exciting that it was found in IA Italy, the odds seem to point to another direction.

Even so, autosomally, I'm not different from the general populace. So I guess I'm a living example of your argument's validity.

 

[HereToLearn]

For whatever reason you again seem dead set on trying to "prove" a foreign origin of northern Italians against all odds and data. I can only wonder why that might be.

I see this often on these fora and I often seem to recognize a pattern, whereas some nationalities like to push this idea more so than others.

 

[Ghurier]

If one wants to take an interest in when and how certain Y dna haplogroups arrived in Italy that is all fine and well, but attempting to quantify ethnic makeup with Y-DNA is a widespread fallacy.

If well done, Y-DNA can be used as a proxy ... a noisy one, but still a proxy (that is only usefull when later admixture event have blured the autosomal DNA ... an issue "easy" to alleviate with ancient samples admixtures, but sometimes we don't have a lot of samples for many reasons).

The first thing to do for such analysis is correct for post-merging founder effects.
If you absorb diverse Y-DNA from foreign regions, you will also absorb admixture (less than Y-DNA if the migration is only male-mediated).

What should be looked at is the number of clades "already defined" at the moment of the claimed migration (in order to erase the impact of founder effets).
Then you can correct for sex-biased migrations if it is needed for the concerning movement.

Basically, under the assumption of similar clade-survivance rates post-population merging (which is a descent hypothesis), you can make an estimation of the fraction of males having contributed to the merged population.

Of course, there is some movement that can't be traced with such proxy, for exemple autosomal diffusion through mating network involving women migrations.

This is a very descent proxy of admixture, but it can be noisy (in particular when big founder effects have erased nearly all the older diversity dating from the pre-merging populations). That's why reaistic error bars also need to be produced and the conclusion need to rely on a significant number of independent clades by the time of the claimed population merging.

It also require a good spatial sampling of the concerned populations to avoid "local" peculiarities (associated with a specific site/region).

No, it is not a "fallacy", just a proxy to be used carefully and with properly assessed error bars ... as any statistical estimator.

 

[Francesco]

I see this often on these fora and I often seem to recognize a pattern, whereas some nationalities like to push this idea more so than others.

In defense of Hype, he doesn't claim for some germanic etnic replacement in northern Italy, just a 10-15% admixture. I believe their autosomic contribution to be a bit lower than that, more like 5-10% depending on the region, but I dont' see it as a big deal.
I would like to point out, however, that modern northern italians don't quite fall on a cline between imperial roman and germanic. The few samples from Bardoncecchia and Turin rather seem to suggest a cline from a tuscan-like imperial cluster in Turin and a more italic-like rural population in Bardonecchia.

 

[Hawk]

Urnfields is not reductible only to Lusacian C.
If I rely on the Hawk post in the thread "To burn or not to burn" where he put a map of Balkans from some study, I may say that at least cremation was become the rule in some places of Balkans along Sava and Drava rivers at LBA, the resistance (inhumation) holding ground in the Southwest and South parts of Western Balkans (so closer to the Adriatic), with some places of mixing.
Urnfields were not tightly tied to Y-haplo's everywhere and in its last developments were no more strictly linked to Vatya.

Cremation was not a foreign concept in Balkans during Late Chalcolithic or Early Bronze Age (Armenochori, Bubanj Hum III), if you follow cremation was a crucial burial rite of Hittites in Anatolia even, they cremated their death on a pyre, the difference is that the Urnfield added the tradition of putting the ashes on urns and several other material culture concepts, in some cases like in Caka Culture and similar they created the tradition of cremation on pyre on top of a tumulus mixing with the Hugelgraber traditions. The core Urnfielder tradition originated along the Carpathian Mountains but it formed in a cultural complex when Tumulus/Hugelgraber shepherd warriors from Bavaria crossed the Alps toward Carpathian-Pannonian basin and started triggering the whole chaos caused during late MBA and peaking in LBA(depending how you classify ~1500 b.c), Vatya Culture was one of the cultures affected by this chaos and eventually destroyed.

Tumulus people were highly effective due to their Naue I innovative swords and this peaking during Urnfielder time with the even more deadlier Naue II.

So, yeah, i expect several different Y-DNA's in the complex, since it was a complex and not a culture in ethnical sense. But R1b-L51/G2a, I2a in the middle and north and E-V13 in the east/south-east should have been the ones more common among this cultural complex.

 

[Riverman]

Uniparentals are indeed always the smoking gun for a migration and connection, because unlike autosomal profiles, they can't be confused due to similarities and recombinations in complex mixtures. The other would be IBD segments, but I haven't seen too much of that yet for Italy.

In any case, that there was Germanic admixture in Italy is beyond doubt, there is historical written, archaeological and genetic evidence for that. That's not even debatable. The question is just the extent of this admixture in percent. And whether its 5, 10 or 15 percent, this is all possible and needs to be proven or disproven. But I think everybody can agree that we are talking about 5-20 % in Northern Italy, as the possible range.
Some keep it lower, some estimate it higher, that's it.

Concerning uniparentals however, one needs to keep in mind that already the Germanic tribals and alter German and French even more were themselves mixed people. Therefore they might have been Germanic/German migrants, but no longer 90 % + Germanic themselves.

This extends to their uniparentals as well. Like if an ethnic German from the areas of say Bavaria, Tyrol or Austria came down to Northern Italy in the Medieval period, he might have had a non-typical Germanic haplogroup and a patrial Germanic autosomal ancestry.

Just saying, these pattern need to be kept in mind.

 

[Vitruvius]

I see your point and as usual it makes sense to me: no, or very minimal, trace of autosomal DNA does not exclude the survival of a few Y-DNA lineages and that is why it is misleading to infer autosomal composition from uniparental Y-DNA and mtDNA markers.

My question before about possibly seeing "unusual" subclades for IA Italy came from self-interest, as the haplogroup I belong to is often associated to the North Sea area. Much as I'd find most exciting that it was found in IA Italy, the odds seem to point to another direction.

Even so, autosomally, I'm not different from the general populace. So I guess I'm a living example of your argument's validity.

Precisely. Whether your Y-DNA truly arrived from Germanic migrations or not is inconsequential to the question of quantifying how much Germanic ancestry you or any other Italian may or may not have. As you've said, you are autosomally no different than the general Italian populace and in the past you've mentioned that you are ethnically northern Italian, meaning that you should cluster identical and overlapping to the Italic, non-german, Picenes. Does this totally exclude you from the possibility of having a few percentage points or less of Germanic autosomal makeup? No, but it also doesn't evidence that you have it at all, either. What it does evidence, is extremely strong continuity with IA Italic populations and it necessitates a near zero level of Germanic input if you do in fact have any. Truthfully if we were to find R-Z372 in other IA Italic samples we can then go on to say that there is now a much higher likelyhood that you actually do have 0% Germanic admixture as it would be much more likely that you would've received it from a local source, which is where we necessarily know you derive at minimum the vast majority of your autosomal makeup from.

 

[Riverman]

Uniparentals are important to estimate admixture on the population level, they are however largely irrelevant on the individual level. Like what does it matter whether a German has J2a or an Italian I1 on the individual level, if the lineage entered the respective gene pool more than 1.000 years ago? It is likely that not a single sizeable segment being inherited from that ancestor. It just proves the direct paternal lineage origin and is of relevance on the population level.

Even more, the general haplogroups can be misleading, because e.g. a Pole with R1b could have migrated to Germany whereas a German with R1a could have migrated to Poland. There it goes down to the subclade and exact time in question. Like a Celtic lineage in Northern Italy could have arrived with a Bavarian-Austrian for example, or could have been in situ since Antiquity.

 

[Jovialis]

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1772283658075815978