Early Medieval Migrations into Northern Italy through uniparental markers

while the goths had no issue with north-eastern Italy, they devastated the people in Lombardy Before the Lombards arrived a generation later.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_War_(535–554)

Basically a generation after these wars the lombards arrived to a place which was named after them which was bare of the local populace. The lombards after settling there bagame a significant percentage of the people

how many were the Lombards themselves, when they arrived ?
 
Very interesting study.

First of all, I think we shouldn't put too much weight in the percentages reported, as the sample sizes are small and it only shows a snapshot of on slice of society in one city at one particular time in history.

What we can say is that historical Germanic migrations, mostly of Ostrogoths and Lombards, did bring I1 and I2-M223 to Italy, and probably also R1a (I explained before that many Italian R1a seem to have Proto-Slavic rather than Germanic origin, and were probably tribes from Poland and Ukraine absorbed by the Goths before they moved into the Roman Empire).

I am surprised that the percentage of R1bxU152 is so low, and frankly rather disappointed that they didn't test for U106 in a study supposed to assess the impact of Germanic migrations. Considering that North Italy has a fair share of R1b-L23 and R1b-P312 other than U152, it would have been useful to clearly separate U106.

The high frequency of J2-M67 is intriguing, but might simply be due to a founder effect in the Partecipanzeand could be an ancient local lineage like U152. The other possibility, as Tomenable suggested, is that it represents Hunnic, Alanic, Sarmatian or Scythian lineages assimilated by the Goths or the Lombards before they reached Italy. I had already suggested that part of these Central Asian and Steppe invaders had brought Q1a to Europe (with the Huns) and that a back migration of Goths to Scandinavia brought assimilated Hunnic Q1a to Scandinavia. It could be the same for J2a, which also peaks in southern Sweden and at the Franco-German border (Rhine) just like Q1a.
 
What is interesting to me is that right after the fall of the Roman Empire there was already a lot Germanic DNA in Northern Italy. So it is likely that even during the Roman Empire era Northern Italy was already populated by the Germanic refugees and not only Celtic refugees (tribes).
 
Some of the non-native / non-local Y-DNA lineages in Lombardy could be also brought by the Celtic tribes and not only by the Germanic tribes.
 
I think it's important to not get ahead of the evidence. It seems very probable that the "Lombards" carried yDna I-L22. We don't know what other y lineages they carried by the time they reached Italy, although based on Paul the Deacon there were probably several. We know, for example, that the invasion force included Saxons, Pannonians, Heruls, Noricans, Bulgars etc. There are also the prior arriving Goths to consider, who might have carried similar haplogroups.

As for total numbers, they're all over the map, from 100,000 to 500,000 (including women and children). The best discussion of the issue I've seen is in Peter Heather's book: "Empires and Barbarians". His pithy comment is that most of the numbers "aren't worth a damn".

All this talk of population replacement is also premature. To the best of my recollection no academic posits total replacement anywhere, not even in north eastern Italy where there is the most evidence of Lombard settlement (and yDna I1). The estimates for the pre-Lombard population are also all over the map.

Our map here at Eupedia shows an average total number for I1 as 7% in Northern Italy and 4% in Tuscany. There is going to be variation even within northern Italy.
http://www.eupedia.com/europe/european_y-dna_haplogroups.shtml

We also have a thread dedicated to I1 in Italy. It can be found here:
http://www.eupedia.com/forum/threads/28667-Distribution-of-I1-in-Italy-(Boattini-et-al-)

According to Boattini, which however well done used small numbers of samples, it reaches 10.5% in Bologna as a whole, 17.5% in Vicenza, much lower numbers elsewhere. Other studies show around 3-4% in most of Sicily, but 18.75% in Caccamo. And so it goes.

A prior paper discusses Lombard dna in Italy. The area is in the northwest: Piemonte. The paper can be found here:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4312042/

It's discussed in this eupedia thread:
http://www.eupedia.com/forum/thread...hern-Italy-(Piemonte)?highlight=Lombard+mtDna

The authors compared actual ancient Lombard dna to that of communities in the area. Unfortunately, they have so far only published mtDna results. They show a stratification where the members of a Partecipanza show descent from the "Lombards", but the other communities don't show the same kind of relationship.

Just so we have a visual, these are the contracts dating back to the 12th century:
DSC_9009.jpg

There are a number of them in and around Bologna. This shows the typical land and farm buildings:
v4_r1_c1.jpg



Here is the headquarters for the particular one studied:
DSC_3797.jpg


Here are some of the presidents:

gruppo-minoranza-partecipanza.jpg


14.jpg


nanni2.jpg


A Consorzio:
image.jpg


They all look like a normal cross section of Emilians to me.
 
Some of the non-native / non-local Y-DNA lineages in Lombardy could be also brought by the Celtic tribes and not only by the Germanic tribes.

French have hardly any I1, so it is unlikely Gauls brought much I1. The I1 that does exist in France, can be explained by Germans. It surprising how unlike Germans, the French are, so Rome probably protected them from German migrations.
 
French have hardly any I1, so it is unlikely Gauls brought much I1. The I1 that does exist in France, can be explained by Germans. It surprising how unlike Germans, the French are, so Rome probably protected them from German migrations.
You mean that germanic tribe of Franks, who conquered "France", didn't have much I1?
 
You mean that germanic tribe of Franks, who conquered "France", didn't have much I1?

Franks definitely had a lot of I1. I was pointing out that there's little I1 in modern France, meaning Germans never made a big Y DNA impact on France and Gauls are an unlikely source for I1 in Italy.
 
according to Maciamo: Y-I1: Brittany:8%, Normandy 7%, Flandres-Artois (north):13%, Alsace: 8%;
surely 2/3 of these Y-I1 are from Germanics, but not all of them (Brittany had contacts with Vikings, but its anthropologic results compared to Normandy cannot explain this situation by more Vikings or more Franks!) We can presume that Belgae were the most provided for Y-I1 even if relatively weakly.
That said I agree the possible percentage of 4-5% I1 among Celts cannot produce huge %s in Italy
 
You mean that germanic tribe of Franks, who conquered "France", didn't have much I1?

there were Franks on both sides of the river Rhine
the Franks conquered and founded France but they didn't replace the population
they were an elite but needed other administrators to help govern the country, as they were illiterate themselves
they left a big part of the Roman inheritage intact

the Franks may have been I1, without bringing much of it into France

if I recall correctly, some Merovingian (early Frankish dynasty) DNA turned out to be G2a
 
French have hardly any I1, so it is unlikely Gauls brought much I1. The I1 that does exist in France, can be explained by Germans. It surprising how unlike Germans, the French are, so Rome probably protected them from German migrations.
Of course, without Y-DNA hg. 'I' Germanic tribes would never be Germanic. Y-DNA hg. I1 is part of the Germanic race. But it could be that some haplogroups in Lombardy are not from Germanic tribes, but from Celtic tribes who settled in Northern Italy before the Germanic refugees arrived.

I think that the hg. I1 in Northern Italy is most probably from the Germanic refugees, true. But it is wrong to assume that some haplogroups can't be from the Celts because of the low distribution among the modern Celts. It could be that some ancient Celtic tribes or clans that migrated into the Northern Italy belonged mostly to the minor haplogroups. Clans & tribes have mostly a patriarchate construction and most males are paternally related to each other. The mixing only occurs if you get the confederation of different tribes.

I do take myself as an example. I do belong to a small clan of people (a couple of dozens of families/homes - villages) where all males share the same common paternal ancestry. And I do belong to 'maybe?' a rare haplogroup of my ethnicity. So if all my clan members had to flee to a saver place and start a new life and grow in population, native people would wrongly assume that all folks in the original homeland of the newcomers belong mostly to the same rare haplogroup where my clan belongs to.
 
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there were Franks on both sides of the river Rhine
the Franks conquered and founded France but they didn't replace the population
they were an elite but needed other administrators to help govern the country, as they were illiterate themselves
they left a big part of the Roman inheritage intact

the Franks may have been I1, without bringing much of it into France

if I recall correctly, some Merovingian (early Frankish dynasty) DNA turned out to be G2a

That said, the Germanic imput in N and E France is far to be neglictible (Franks, Vikings°Saxons, Alamans, Burgundians). Placenames and some dialectal evolutions and classical (but valuable) physical atrhopology show all this imput, I think it was about 15 to 30% according to North or Eastern regions of France. I posted in other threads about the Frans density of placenames in North/Northeastern France. Three generations ago, Northerners of France seemd (just a bit) more "germaniclike" than Walloons, and tehre were still differences in Normandy between the 'bocage' countrymen and coasts inhabitants.
I think the most of Western Germanics were principally Y-R1b-U106, Y-I1 + some Y-I2a2 and rare Y-R1a. Nothing excludes they took some earlier "autochtonous" Y-HGs (R-U152, Y-G, Y-I2a1 on their road towards South. In fact Y-I2a2 was pre-Germanic and could have been absorbed by Celts as well as by Germanics.
to go back to the core of this thread, the sepcific population studied in Italy could have known some internal drift concerning Y-Haplos. But a mix of diverses successive elites could explain the today results too. Concerning Y-J2-M67, it could have been part of the first Italics (mixed with Y-R1b-U152 and others maybe); why not think in Etruscans too?
Saying U152 was only Celtic is wrong I think. Ligurians and Italics had of it, Ipresume. The high presence in Corsica doesn't seem a Celtic inheritage, by instance.
 
there were Franks on both sides of the river Rhine
the Franks conquered and founded France but they didn't replace the population
they were an elite but needed other administrators to help govern the country, as they were illiterate themselves
they left a big part of the Roman inheritage intact

the Franks may have been I1, without bringing much of it into France

if I recall correctly, some Merovingian (early Frankish dynasty) DNA turned out to be G2a

Certainly. I suspect you are referring to the House of Bourbon (I suspect G-P303) who descend from a French noble, not William the Conqueror. It probably has to do with the fact LBK collapsed in central Europe along with many of the Near Eastern YDNA lineages. Otherwise, we'd all be 90% EEF or Stuttgart clones right now bearing higher frequencies of G2a, E-V13 and J2 lineages.
 

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