It's good that the science can confirm the absolute bleeding obvious.
Southern Italians and Sicilians clustering with the Peloponnese and Aegean islands - well knock me down with a feather, I'll be buggered! What a revelation!
We know there's a continuum from Cyprus through the Greek Islands to Southern Italy and Sicily.
We know that populations established in an area for hundreds (and even thousands) of years result in DNA which is very, very difficult to dislodge without major events.
In the case of Southern Italy and Sicily, one such major event was the establishment of Greek colonies starting around 750BC which came to be known as Magna Graecia, absorbing most of the original populations over a period of some 500 years or so.
Obviously DNA aligns very closely between Southern Italy/Sicily and the Aegean to the present day, which quite clearly is the Magna Graecia effect and quite clearly we talking substantially about shared DNA going back to the classical age.
The changes to Sicilian DNA have been tiny since that event.
Even with how close North Africa is to Sicily, and the periods of shared history, such as 150 years of Saracen rule, the impact on Sicilian DNA has been tiny. I show up as being 2% North African. My GedMatch calcs throw up Greek over and over and over (Eurogenes K13 below).
The main complication is not so much the obvious Greek input into Sicilian DNA, or the differing inputs, but the shared DNA which might exist from Sicily's original inhabitants (Elymian, Sicani and Siculi), some of whom may have passed through the Aegean, and/or Anatolia, and/or the Caucusus, and may already have shared DNA with the Greeks, or related peoples. In fact, for mine, it is this latter question which is the most intriguing of all: why exactly do Sicilians throw up links to Anatolia and the Caucusus? Surely one or more of the Elymian, Sicani or Siculi carried this?
Population | | K13 | | | | |
East_Med | 32.02 | | | | | |
West_Med | 21.60 | | | | | |
West_Asian | 17.55 | | | | | |
North_Atlantic | 16.11 | | | | | |
Baltic | 7.62 | | | | | |
Red_Sea | 1.72 | | | | | |
| | | | | | |
Using 1 population approximation: | | | | | | |
1 South_Italian @ 5.035903 | | | | | | |
2 Central_Greek @ 5.834502 | | | | | | |
3 East_Sicilian @ 6.550463 | | | | | | |
4 Italian_Abruzzo @ 8.940369 | | | | | | |
5 West_Sicilian @ 9.769127 | | | | | | |
6 Ashkenazi @ 9.952132 | | | | | | |
| | | | | | |
Using 3 populations approximation: | | | | | | |
1 50% Central_Greek +25% Cyprian +25% Italian_Abruzzo @ 4.608373 | | | | | | |