Questions about 23andme

"Italian" is actually a more meaningful category in 23andme. At least it's only based on one country's results, rather than the many countries used as references for the "Balkan" cluster.

Italian
The peninsula of Italy is home to a genetic legacy not only of the Roman Empire, but also of groups from both northern Europe and the eastern Mediterranean that occupied Italy at various points in its history.


PopulationSourceSample Size
Italy23andMe556
Italy1000 Genomes98
North ItalianHGDP13
TuscanHGDP8
Still, as can be seen from the list, it's based heavily on testees, the vast majority of whom have ancestry from southern Italy and Sicily, which explains why they get such heavy "Italian" scores.

This shows how much inaccurate 23andme is. 82% of the sample used for the Italian category comes from 23andme itself. So yes, very likely the striking majority are Italian-Americans.
 
This shows how much inaccurate 23andme is. 82% of the sample used for the Italian category comes from 23andme itself. So yes, very likely the striking majority are Italian-Americans.

Well, they're still Italian genetically even if they were born in the U.S. In that white paper to which I linked 23andme explains how it tests each sample to see if it's within certain parameters before including it in the reference population they'll be using. Imagine a PCA plot. If someone was half Finnish and half southern Italian, or 1/2 Puerto Rican and half southern Italian or something, they wouldn't plot anywhere near the "Italian" cluster. In the Puerto Rican case there'd be elevated SSA and Amerindian which would raise lots of red flags, and in the prior case abnormal NE European scores.

It's just that the vast majority of the samples in the reference population are from southern Italy and Sicily, and so the percentages for "Italian" are going to be skewed in their favor.

When DNA Land places "Italian" further north, all of a sudden southern Italians and Sicilians get much different levels of "Italian", and much higher levels of "Mediterranean Islander".
 
This is the list of reference populations for "Balkan". Here it is:
http://postimg.org/image/e86ev28pd/

Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzogovina, Serbia, Macedonia, Albania, Montenegro, Malta.
I don't know much about Malta history but i remember one article or theory;

Delivering a lecture in fluent Maltese, Michael Cooperson, a professor of Arabic and a translator of Arabic literature, argued that the much-debated identity of the slaves in 11th century Malta – from whom the present Maltese population is supposedly descended from – was Slavic.
http://www.timesofmalta.com/article...ese-may-have-been-descended-from-slavs.519587
For example we know about Slavic presence in Palermo (Sicily) Harat as-Saqaliba (Slavic Quarter), a Slavic-inhabited district of Palermo located close to the city's port.

There was bunch many of them in Muslim Spain for example;
The Taifa of Denia
The taifa was created in 1010, after the disintegration of the Caliphate of Córdoba, by the freed slave Mujahid al-Siqlabi, a former high functionary of the caliphate, who probably had a Slavic origin since Arabs called Slavs as Siqlab/Siqlav. In 1011 Dénia was the first taifa to strike coin. The kingdom had a relatively powerful navy, which in 1015 was used to take control of the Balearic Islands and thence to invade Sardinia.
694px-Location_map_Taifa_of_Denia.svg.png


Now the question is from where this Slavs come from;
But is most probably from the Balkans captured in the wars against Slavs by Byzantines in 8th,9th century or there was such that deflected to the Arabs from those resettled in Asia minor bunch many of them from Macedonian region.

Hispano-Arabic, Sephardi Jewish traveller Ibrahim ibn Yaqub placed the people of "Saqalib" in the mountainous regions of Central Balkans, west of the Bulgarians and east from the "other Slavs," thus somewhere around modern-day Bosnia, Montenegro, Serbia and Macedonia. The Saqalib had the reputation of being "the most courageous and violent"



Prof. Cooperson used Ta’ Skorba, derived from sqalba, as an example that the Slavic presence was documented in Malta. Prof. Wettinger adds more names to the list.
“There are also the surnames Schiavone and Zarb, which are derived from slaves and Serbs. But, then again, there is also Nigret and Ngieret, which mean ‘black’. However, he fully agreed with Prof. Cooperson that the slaves were Muslims.

But there is others with different view;

Historian Charles Dalli remarked that a new reading of a known source, though less exciting than the discovery of a new one, was always interesting to consider. It has long been known, he noted, that the term saqaliba referred to slaves of eastern European origin.
The only thing we knew concretely, however, was that the slaves in Malta were għabid and that, in a central Mediterranean context, this seemed to refer to slave soldiers, possibly of African origin in view of the usage of the term għabid in similar contexts.
“Is it possible that there were a number of people of eastern European origin among them?
“Yes, of course, it is always a possibility that there were saqaliba among the għabid of Malta but there is no independent evidence to support this. That all the għabid on Malta were really saqaliba seems even less likely.
“In his entry on Malta, al-Himyari uses għabid and not saqaliba; the theory as reported claims that al-Himyari was writing għabid while really referring to saqaliba.
“This reading does not seem to consider the fact that al-Himyari does employ the word saqaliba to mean saqaliba elsewhere in the same work.”


This even if true hypothesis of Michael Cooperson doesn't mean that Maltese descend from such people but maybe some gene flow,or maybe from much older times instead medieval.
 
I don't know much about Malta history but i remember one article or theory;

Delivering a lecture in fluent Maltese, Michael Cooperson, a professor of Arabic and a translator of Arabic literature, argued that the much-debated identity of the slaves in 11th century Malta – from whom the present Maltese population is supposedly descended from – was Slavic.
http://www.timesofmalta.com/article...ese-may-have-been-descended-from-slavs.519587
For example we know about Slavic presence in Palermo (Sicily) Harat as-Saqaliba (Slavic Quarter), a Slavic-inhabited district of Palermo located close to the city's port.

There was bunch many of them in Muslim Spain for example;
The Taifa of Denia
The taifa was created in 1010, after the disintegration of the Caliphate of Córdoba, by the freed slave Mujahid al-Siqlabi, a former high functionary of the caliphate, who probably had a Slavic origin since Arabs called Slavs as Siqlab/Siqlav. In 1011 Dénia was the first taifa to strike coin. The kingdom had a relatively powerful navy, which in 1015 was used to take control of the Balearic Islands and thence to invade Sardinia.
694px-Location_map_Taifa_of_Denia.svg.png


Now the question is from where this Slavs come from;
But is most probably from the Balkans captured in the wars against Slavs by Byzantines in 8th,9th century or there was such that deflected to the Arabs from those resettled in Asia minor bunch many of them from Macedonian region.

Hispano-Arabic, Sephardi Jewish traveller Ibrahim ibn Yaqub placed the people of "Saqalib" in the mountainous regions of Central Balkans, west of the Bulgarians and east from the "other Slavs," thus somewhere around modern-day Bosnia, Montenegro, Serbia and Macedonia. The Saqalib had the reputation of being "the most courageous and violent"



Prof. Cooperson used Ta’ Skorba, derived from sqalba, as an example that the Slavic presence was documented in Malta. Prof. Wettinger adds more names to the list.
“There are also the surnames Schiavone and Zarb, which are derived from slaves and Serbs. But, then again, there is also Nigret and Ngieret, which mean ‘black’. However, he fully agreed with Prof. Cooperson that the slaves were Muslims.

But there is others with different view;

Historian Charles Dalli remarked that a new reading of a known source, though less exciting than the discovery of a new one, was always interesting to consider. It has long been known, he noted, that the term saqaliba referred to slaves of eastern European origin.
The only thing we knew concretely, however, was that the slaves in Malta were għabid and that, in a central Mediterranean context, this seemed to refer to slave soldiers, possibly of African origin in view of the usage of the term għabid in similar contexts.
“Is it possible that there were a number of people of eastern European origin among them?
“Yes, of course, it is always a possibility that there were saqaliba among the għabid of Malta but there is no independent evidence to support this. That all the għabid on Malta were really saqaliba seems even less likely.
“In his entry on Malta, al-Himyari uses għabid and not saqaliba; the theory as reported claims that al-Himyari was writing għabid while really referring to saqaliba.
“This reading does not seem to consider the fact that al-Himyari does employ the word saqaliba to mean saqaliba elsewhere in the same work.”


This even if true hypothesis of Michael Cooperson doesn't mean that Maltese descend from such people but maybe some gene flow,or maybe from much older times instead medieval.

Perhaps if Maleth shows up he can chime in as he's Maltese and he knows a lot about the history of the island. From what he has posted in the past and from my own reading, while there was of course input from other parts of Europe, much of it owing to the Knights of Malta, the largest input into Malta was from Sicily. The history is supported by the fact that Maltese cluster close to Sicily in virtually every genetic test.
 
... People lose sight of what service 23andme is trying to provide. It's attempting to tell people where the majority of their ancestors lived in the last 500 years. It isn't, like academic studies, trying to trace the population history of each region over the last 3000 or 5000 years. Even for its stated goal, it isn't producing a totally accurate picture, partly because it doesn't have enough samples from certain areas, and partly because I don't think that's ever been their primary focus, and it's less important to them by the day. If they really cared about this, they'd at least include all the samples from all the academic papers that have been done. They haven't and they won't. No one should even expect an update of AC based on all the new samples they get.

That was a great post, very informative. (y)

I think I must admit I'm one of those people who is trying to find out where my ancestors were from before that 500 year mark. I know that my ancestors were Italian and Sicilian peasants, laborers and villagers for all those centuries. Hard as it was, and I'm still not convinced of 100% accuracy, I was able to trace part of my paternal Sicilian line back to the late 1700s in western Sicily. My paternal great-grandfather seems to have sprung up out of a hole in the Sicilian soil, because there is no record of him to be had anywhere. I can probably safely guess that my maternal line in southern Italy is no different in that they stayed put for 100s of years..

When I ran my 23andMe results through Gedmatch, using this recommendation http://slides.com/kittycooper/gedmatch#/14 my results came up very much like that slide. My question to people has been "why is there North Atlantic, North Sea, Baltic in "Italian" if people didn't migrate from those areas?" I got responses like "but you're typical Italian". What the heck is "typical Italian"? :confused: I said something to that effect elsewhere, and got a non-helpful response:

It looks like the "typical" southern Italian is indeed descended from peoples who migrated from northern Europe, hence the high number of fair-skinned, light-haired Italians and Sicilians.


This should be the most deluded deduction I had read this month.

Unless I miss my guess and truly do not understand any of this, I think what you said in post #1 is spot on, and shows that people (including me :embarrassed: ) really don't know what's going on.

The other problem is that some people attempt to use their results for one agenda driven purpose or another without really understanding how the algorithm works.

I've also been accused of that! :LOL: That was because I've been trying to understand why Gedmatch shows northern European, if as a "typical Italian" I have no northern European. Someone said I was trying to prove Viking descent. :rolleyes:

The tl;dr version and Cliff Notes is that when all is said and done, I think the test raised more questions than it answered. Though I have learned a lot I'm almost sorry I ever had it done.
 
@Thorbjorn,

One of the gurus of population genetics put it this way to paraphrase him roughly: over the last tens of thousands of years, three "tribes" of people moved into the "European" part of Eurasia. First to arrive were hunter gatherers, WHG, perhaps from the Near East originally, although some may have arrived from due east through eastern Europe, maybe some directly from Anatolia, perhaps a few through Gibraltar. There are differences of opinion which hopefully more ancient dna will resolve.

Around 9000 years ago, some hunter-gatherers, having developed farming, moved far and wide in a rather star burst fashion, including into Europe. The ones in Anatolia are usually labeled ENF. The ones in Europe are EEF. There were probably always more of them in southern Europe, mostly because that's where they first arrived, but also because their "agricultural" package of plants and animals was more suited to that climate and those soil conditions. There was some intermarriage between the two groups, although the original "farmer" component predominated, and it took thousands of years for the admixture to take place.

Another group of hunter-gatherers, from Northern Eurasia this time, moved into parts of far eastern and far northeastern "Europe" (although that's a later quasi-political term) around roughly 10-12,000 years ago. They're called the ANE, and probably, according to some people, they admixed with the WHG (the first hunter-gatherers) to form the EHG or eastern hunter-gatherers, although there are differences of opinion about this as well.

Then, around 5,000 or so years ago, in an area north of the Black Sea called the Pontic Caspian steppe, a group of people, half EHG and half what is called CHG, which is a group, according to some people, related to the early farmers from Anatolia but perhaps with some ANE, developed a culture based on various types of technology learned from others, like agriculture, animal herding, metallurgy, pottery, carts, maybe the wheel, and added to it the horse and a patriarchal culture. Their language is Indo-European. They moved from the steppes into Europe (among other places), admixing with the prior inhabitants along the way.

Everybody in Europe is descended from these groups, but in different proportions. In far northeastern and northwestern Europe perhaps there were pockets of WHG people remaining, which didn't exist in the south. Perhaps when the Indo-European speakers got to Central and Northwestern Europe there weren't all that many mixed ENF/WHG people left because there had been a climate or environmentally caused population crash, perhaps because the newcomers carried plague, perhaps because they killed a lot of the males there. In southern Europe,perhaps the population density was higher, so more of the prior inhabitants remained.

The differences are probably also due to subsequent migrations in Europe which scrambled things up again, particularly just before and after the Roman Era; Celts moved into Northern Italy, Germanic tribes went west and south after the fall of Rome, Germanic tribes also moved into Britain as Angles, Saxons and Jutes. Vikings did the same, and then there were the Slavic migrations west and into southeastern Europe, and the Moorish invasions in Spain, Sicily and southern Italy. Each of these groups had their own particular mix of the ancient "tribes".

The basic picture is one of stasis interrupted by punctuated burst of large folk migrations. From about 1000 AD to the late 1800s in Italy, there's been stasis in most cases.

If you want an academic paper discussing the ancient migrations, Haak et al is a good place to start. It will tell you in general terms how much of each group is in each European "national" group.
http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/02/10/013433

Haak-et-al-2015-Figure-3-Admixture-Proportions-in-Modern-DNA-With-Linguistic-and-Historical-Origins-Added.png




If you're using the "calculators" created by various hobbyists and put on gedmatch, you have to be aware that they're not showing you your WHG/ANE/ENF percentages. Neither are they giving you how much "Italian" you have, the way 23andme is attempting to do, except as an approximation in the Oracle function. The calculators are looking at "components". Once again, it's a sort of "cluster". "Northern European" just means the genetic signature that is most common in northern Europe. That has ENF genes in it, and WHG, and EHG etc. Likewise, "Southern European" has ENF, and WHG, and EHG. Or substitute EEF, WHG, and ANE. It's only the proportions that are different.

What those calculator results can't tell you is WHEN those different elements arrived in southern Italy or with whom, which is what I think you want to know. Yes? You want to know if that "Northern European" arrived in the historical era, i.e. in the last 1000 years, with Normans, perhaps, or Angevins etc.? I don't think those calculators can tell you that. It might be from the Italici, or other Indo-European migrants into Italy for all we know. The only way I think we could tell in general terms is if we had an ancient sample from, say, the Roman or post Roman era and then one from, say, 1600 or so from your area.

What the calculators are good for, in my opinion, is so that you can compare yourself with other people in your area, because it's indeed true that people in certain regions of Italy get similar scores for each of these components. If your scores are in the same ballpark, then you are indeed "typical" for your area of Italy. It got to the point, after seeing dozens of those scores, that I could tell someone's ethnicity by just scanning them, I didn't even have to look at the Oracle results.

You might want to take a look at this graph for the Dodecad calculators. If your scores on that calculator approximate those scores for southern Italian/Sicilian, then you're indeed "typical" for your area.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_UOHFTxL-bOA/TOYpHMIrsVI/AAAAAAAAAOE/on63ho681uI/s1600/ADMIXTURE10.jpeg

It would be best, however, to compare against other people from your area. Then you'd know if you're an "outlier" for some reason.

One other way of telling if it's accurate for you is, however, to run the Oracle function on these things. The lower the number, the better the "fit". Now, Italians have a lot more variation than people in northern Europe, so you're not going to get the fits way below 1 that some of them get. However, there is a difference in terms of calculators. The more representative the samples, the better the results. For me, the MDLP 23 is by far the best at pinpointing my regional ethnicity in Italy, and that's because it uses lots of academic samples for northern Italy. For example, one of the samples is from the border area between Piemonte, Liguria and Emilia, and, predictably enough, that's a very good match for me. In other words, I'm pretty "typical" for my area.

If you already knew a lot of this I apology for droning on, but perhaps it will help some newbies.
 
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@Angela...

That was great. It was definitely worth your effort. I knew only part of it but not the whole of it. This is the part I haven't been able to express properly:

What the calculators are good for, in my opinion, is so that you can compare yourself with other people in your area, because it's indeed true that people in certain regions of Italy get similar scores for each of these components. If your scores are in the same ballpark, then you are indeed "typical" for your area of Italy.

I think people confuse genetics, populations and migrations (or settling down) with ethnicity and nationality, both of which imo are social constructs. Sicily has Norman and Vandal influence, but contrary to what the History Channel is portraying, the Normans (rather, the people now known as Normans) weren't all Vikings, or all descendants of Hrolfr/Rollo. Some Vikings settled in Normandy and climbed into the genetic soup that was already in what is now France. I suppose that soup splashed around.
 
@Angela...

That was great. It was definitely worth your effort. I knew only part of it but not the whole of it. This is the part I haven't been able to express properly:



I think people confuse genetics, populations and migrations (or settling down) with ethnicity and nationality, both of which imo are social constructs. Sicily has Norman and Vandal influence, but contrary to what the History Channel is portraying, the Normans (rather, the people now known as Normans) weren't all Vikings, or all descendants of Hrolfr/Rollo. Some Vikings settled in Normandy and climbed into the genetic soup that was already in what is now France. I suppose that soup splashed around.

That's exactly right. Not only were the Normans who arrived in Sicily not all that "Viking like" by that time, but there were very few of them. This was a small group of men who were adventurers and struck it big. Even if there are traces remaining of their yDna in some areas, their autosomal impact must be quite small. (Of course, if one were to check the dna of the baronial families in Sicily, who have been intermarrying for hundreds of years, their results might be different.)

Another thing to keep in mind is that there is indeed a genetic border at the Alps. Are they impermeable? No, of course they aren't. The Celts and the Langobards went around them. However, no Italian is going to get scores like Germans or Scandinavians or the British. We have our own genetic signature.
 
I was surprised that my AncestryDna and 23andMe resulsts were so dissimilar, it left me a little confused.

I heard that 23andMe was more accurate but AncestryDna seemed way more precise according to my prior knowledge and ancestry research.

Do any others have thoughts on this matter or experience something similar?
 
Hi there,

I am a French journalist looking for a woman (preferably living in France or UK, but another European country could do) who had her DNA analysed for health-related reasons -like finding her risks to have a specific disease- and for whom the results had an impact (like making further analysis, changing her way of living etc). I work for Santé magazine, a popular publication on health issues and the story is a piece of about two pages with a picture. The idea is to debate on the right to know one's DNA structure (is it really useful? stressful? ethical?).

You can reach me if you're interested in telling me your story.

Best regards,

Pauline
 
Hi there,

I am a French journalist looking for a woman (preferably living in France or UK, but another European country could do) who had her DNA analysed for health-related reasons -like finding her risks to have a specific disease- and for whom the results had an impact (like making further analysis, changing her way of living etc). I work for Santé magazine, a popular publication on health issues and the story is a piece of about two pages with a picture. The idea is to debate on the right to know one's DNA structure (is it really useful? stressful? ethical?).

You can reach me if you're interested in telling me your story.

Best regards,

Pauline

Hello there Pauline, welcome to Eupedia. I'm no woman but I find that Dna Ancestory has opened doors in history that I've overlooked before getting Dna tested; who knew that there was Wendish assimilation in Germany for example :)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wends

In the end we are all a mix of Ancient Civilizations but in the end we all descend from a common Ancestor in Africa; I guess you could say Adam;Ydna A and Eve;Mtdna L.

For me personally, DNA testing teaches us that no country is Purely decended from just one Ancient civilization but Multiple civilizations.
 
Hi there,

I am a French journalist looking for a woman (preferably living in France or UK, but another European country could do) who had her DNA analysed for health-related reasons -like finding her risks to have a specific disease- and for whom the results had an impact (like making further analysis, changing her way of living etc). I work for Santé magazine, a popular publication on health issues and the story is a piece of about two pages with a picture. The idea is to debate on the right to know one's DNA structure (is it really useful? stressful? ethical?).

You can reach me if you're interested in telling me your story.

Best regards,

Pauline
The older we get the fewer surprises we find in health analyses of our DNA. Pretty much all manifested itself already. I think the biggest interest in it will be for parents of small kids. They might want to raise their kids in accordance to their genetic predispositions and health risks.
 

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