Originally Posted by
Angela
I wasn't aware we had ancient Ligurian samples. If we don't, how do we know they plot anywhere near modern Cypriots? Modern Ligurians certainly don't. Are you saying these imperial Roman samples were found in Liguria?
Well, if that's the case, that's easy. Genua was a Greek city and then a Roman city, and Luni was founded by Romans and was used by them to try to pacify the area.
I think it's likely the Italics were more "Northern Italian" like and had more "steppe" than the "Imperial Romans". More than modern Southern Italians, for example. That's not "Northern" by any means. Northern Italians don't plot anywhere near Germans, much less Scandinavians. I'm also not convinced that this more "northern" like ancestry only arrived in Central Italy with "Etruscans" and "Celts", the latter of whom only raided in these more southern areas by the way, not settled. I think it might be earlier.
Are people on other forums fixating on those four samples that drift toward the Cypriots? For goodness' sakes. Talk about focusing on the minority.
Also, Mycenaean people were pretty darn "Aegean" like, and I think people like that were feeding into Italy at least from the Helladic Era. The Greek sample found in North Eastern Iberia in the Imperial Era still plots near Mycenaeans, who plot near Ashkenazi Jews, btw.
I don't personally find any of this very controversial.
We also still don't know what Neolithic Southern Italians were like, so maybe some people might be getting a little ahead of themselves.
Are the usual posters foaming at the mouth again about a flood of "Levant" like people coming into southern Italy? Fine with me if true, but where is the evidence? Is there any contemporary evidence of large migrations in writings, inscriptions, etc.? Did they just materialize out of thin air? I mean, the Carthaginians were only in the northwest corner of Sicily. That's giving them a little too much credit, don't you think? Or, are the Jewish members of some forums or the ones who think they're secret Jews or something proposing that floods of Jews moved to Italy but converted eventually? How many specifically Jewish yDna clades are there in Southern Italy or among imperial Romans?
The Moots leaks, btw, said that there was a "tail" leading toward the Near East at a certain time in the Imperial Era. They also mentioned some "sporadic" "Levantine" samples. I assumed the latter caused the former. That "tail", according to the leaks, then disappeared. I think it disappeared because a lot of the Jews moved on into the Rhineland.
Were the authors of this paper careful to distinguish local Roman from "foreign" burials? Did they do isotope analysis? I sure hope so.
This reminds me of all those "GOT" fan youtube sites where the creators would weave all these elaborate theories of what happened, garnering hundreds of thousands of views in the process, while the reality was much more simple. :)