Mediterranean migration layers in Sicily and southern Italy

[Pax Augusta]

This is what I think because the Enna sample is indistinguishable from the other Sicilians and Calabrese (except Trapani). They should have sampled Gallo-Italic speakers as well.

They also could have gone to Corleone in Palermo province for that, too. It is a well known town and has Lombard roots.

Only a Corleone neighborhood was Lombard, Corleone has never been a completely Lombard city. The same in Enna.

 

[Pax Augusta]

The paper attempts to explain it as a function of extreme drift because of isolation. I'm not familiar with the Bovesia at all. Is it all that isolated?

Yes, it is. Aspromonte, as you can see, it's a mountainous sub-region.

 

[Hauteville]

The Occitans, are there still many in Calabria?

They live only in one city of Calabria, the name is Guardia Piemontese.

 

[spartan owl]

I wasn't aware that I was.

sorry but i thought you were because of this statement:They're apparently saying they're indistinguishable from the surrounding people,so not descended from Byzantine Greeks.
sorry again but i am biased because i know from personal experience that south italians even if they are fully embracing their ancient greek past tend to think byzantines more like conquerers rather than a part of their ancestry that they should be proud of.

 

[Hauteville]

This is what I think because the Enna sample is indistinguishable from the other Sicilians and Calabrese (except Trapani). They should have sampled Gallo-Italic speakers as well.

They also could have gone to Corleone in Palermo province for that, too. It is a well known town and has Lombard roots.

There are only Ennesi from the city, and Northern Italians in Enna did settled only as a soldiers. Lombard city are Piazza Armerina, Sperlinga, Novara di Sicilia, San Fratello who are not sampled. But they should be investigated as well in the future.

 

[Hauteville]

Greek_AEI seems not only from Dodecaneso. They are called Anatolian and Dodecanese Greeks. The point in the map is a northern position than Dodecanese, maybe they are a mix of Aegean Islanders.

 

[Angela]

The Occitans, are there still many in Calabria?

This sounds like the typical fairy tale about Italy based more on commonplace than on certain data. Italy is over-studied, if other countries were studied like Italy, they would show a diversity in Y-DNA not so different.

I think Italy has always been genetically a diverse country, it's hard to believe that slaves, auxiliaries, merchants and Jewish communities may have completely changed the genome of all Italy.

There are, according to this, very few Occitan speakers left. It's predicted to disappear in a generation.

It was brought by Piemontese Waldensians.
https://www.uoc.edu/euromosaic/web/document/occita/an/i3/i3.html

As to your other comments, I very much agree. It's an unfortunate fact about this hobby and even discipline that it's riddled with racists and Nordicists of various stripes. There are whole sites full of them, They're always obsessed with slaves from Anatolia or the Levant or North Africa, but never mention the hundreds of thousands of Gauls, Germans, Britons, Pannonians and on and on. Nor do they ever explain how this correlates with the Italian cline. Did a memo go out to every slave trader in the Empire: Send all slaves to Italy; furthermore, all West Asian slaves go to Southern Italy, and all Northern and Central European slaves go north Of Rome? Just as an aside, Caesar captured so many Gauls that there was a glut on the market and prices plummeted. Still, it was enough to buy the masses and therefore ultimate power.

Coincidentally, Razib Khan has a blog post up with which I largely agree, and not because of any fellow feeling based on the fact that we're both Cavalli-Sforza nerds and read the same books.

See:

"The Orantes Has Not Mixed Much With The Tiber"
https://gnxp.nofe.me/2017/05/17/the-orantes-has-not-mixed-much-with-the-tiber/

It's well worth reading, including the comments. Note that "North Italians" in his blog post as in the Sarno paper means basically Toscana and north.

 

[Angela]

sorry but i thought you were because of this statement:They're apparently saying they're indistinguishable from the surrounding people,so not descended from Byzantine Greeks.
sorry again but i am biased because i know from personal experience that south italians even if they are fully embracing their ancient greek past tend to think byzantines more like conquerers rather than a part of their ancestry that they should be proud of.

That may just be the people to whom you speak. My husband is southern Italian, was a Classics student at university, and has some ancestors who spoke Grecanico and were Greek Orthodox until a few centuries ago. He's proud of all of it. My region of Italy was part of the reconquest only for a short period of tlme, but in eastern Italy, like Ravenna, for example, the Empire left a rich patrimony.

The fact remains, however, that the Empire was, in some sense, a conquering state in Italy, even if the goal was to take Italy back. Foreign troops did get sent there. Of course, locals would also have joined to fight the Germans, and later the Saracens, as well as serving in the local militia.

Basically, it was different from the Classical Era when the city states, although settled from Greece, were independent and made decisions in their own self-interest. Belisarius and the highest civilian rulers were making decisions based on the good of the Empire as a whole, not the good of southern Italy. Taxation was ruinous, the administration not always good. Then, while I'm pretty sure the sentiment was, better to be part of the Empire than under the Lombards, The Gothic War devastated Italy more than the Germanic invasions...lots of taxation, lots of devastation, lots of carnage, and then left to the Langobardi and the Saracens.

As to how people identified, I think it probably varied by area. In Liguria, only recaptured for a short time, and never Greek speaking, I think the identification was probably pretty shallow. In southern Italy where it lasted for along time and there were lot of Greek speakers, I' m sure it was deeper.

As to how close the people of Puglia and Calabria of that time (pre-and post Gothic War) were, genetically, to the people or Greece , I don't know. We need a dna.

 

[Hauteville]

Stefania Sarno send me a message about the samples. Ennesi are not of course Gallo-Italic (but soon Gallo-Italics and Franco-Provenzals should be sampled as well) and Greek Islanders are not only from Dodecaneso but a mix of Aegean Islanders. Here the complete text.

url immagine

 

[Azzurro]

The study don't say nothing about recent admixture of Jews or Levantine Slaves. A total myth.

It's not a total myth, its a fact there is some recent Middle Eastern dna in Italians, the only myth is that it is all Bronze Age, its funny how Germanic dna can be viewed as recent but not Middle Eastern is that not hypocrisy?

 

[Azzurro]

The Occitans, are there still many in Calabria?





This sounds like the typical fairy tale about Italy based more on commonplace than on certain data. Italy is over-studied, if other countries were studied like Italy, they would show a diversity in Y-DNA not so different.

I think Italy has always been genetically a diverse country, it's hard to believe that slaves, auxiliaries, merchants and Jewish communities may have completely changed the genome of all Italy.

A typical fairy tale lol? Italy is not overstudied, in comparison to British Isles and Germans, Italians are really under sampled, and Germans and British Isles don't show the same diversity as Italy in terms of Y. I never said completely changed if you look at what I said in the quote that quoted me on I said some, that's a huge difference. Italy has been getting constant gene flow since the neolithic and it really only stopped after Renaissance. With little exceptions of Arbereshe and Molise Croat communities.

 

[oreo_cookie]

To those who think that the Near Eastern in southern Italy is all from the Bronze Age, explain why it (the red component) is higher in southern Italy, especially Sicily and Calabria, than in the Aegean islanders. If anything given that all of the populations, even mainland southern Balkanites, have roughly similar amounts of the Caucasian element but very different for the Near Eastern, suggests to me the former is part of the genetic base and the latter is a more recent, intrusive element.

 

[Azzurro]

To those who think that the Near Eastern in southern Italy is all from the Bronze Age, explain why it (the red component) is higher in southern Italy, especially Sicily and Calabria, than in the Aegean islanders. If anything given that all of the populations, even mainland southern Balkanites, have roughly similar amounts of the Caucasian element but very different for the Near Eastern, suggests to me the former is part of the genetic base and the latter is a more recent, intrusive element.

Makes total sense what your saying, it matches with history and what we are seeing in Y diversity in Italy!! but hey it might be a "Myth" lol

 

[Angela]

It's not a total myth, its a fact there is some recent Middle Eastern dna in Italians, the only myth is that it is all Bronze Age, its funny how Germanic dna can be viewed as recent but not Middle Eastern is that not hypocrisy?

Do you perhaps have a preview paper of the results from ancient Italian dna, results properly analyzed and interpreted, safely hidden underneath your pillow? Or do you have a crystal ball? Perhaps a time machine?


Plus, please do not resort to straw man arguments. Do you know what that is?

I don't see anyone here posting that there is no recent Middle Eastern dna in parts of Italy, depending on how you define "recent". I certainly never have. I don't subscribe to fantasies like those of our Iberian Nordicist former colleagues that you can have centuries of a folk migration by people who aren't poor refugees but who are the ruling power, and excise every last bit of that dna from your country by signing some expulsion orders. I wouldn't be surprised to find a perhaps 5% impact from the Saracens in Sicily and parts of the southern mainland, maybe a bit more. That might be enough to pull SSI a bit away from mainland Greece. We'll see. I assure you that the idea doesn't fill me with horror. Nor does it fill me with horror to think I have ancestry from Crete, quite the opposite in fact. The Minoans and the Etruscans are my favorite ancient civilizations.

Neither has anyone, including me, said it all came from the Bronze Age. You should read more carefully, and should be careful from whom you take instruction. Going to some people for population genetics information is like trying to get information about astronomy from an astrologer.

The fact remains that in addition to prior work done by academics on certain markers, we now have ancient dna from the Balkans showing that there was genetic flow from the Caucasus/Anatolia into that region beginning not in the Bronze Age but in the Late Neolithic/Chalcolithic. Did you not read the Mathiesen paper? Now that isn't proof the same exact thing happened in Italy, but considering what we know about migration flows in the Med, I'd say it's a good bet. However, we can't be sure about anything until we get the ancient dna.

I am warning both you and Sikelliot once and once only. Spamming of the same comment/opinion/straw man arguments over and over again without data will result in deletion of such posts and infractions. This thread is not going to turn into a repeat of the Greek paper one. You've made your points, such as they are; now move on.

 

[Angela]

Stefania Sarno send me a message about the samples. Ennesi are not of course Gallo-Italic (but soon Gallo-Italics and Franco-Provenzals should be sampled as well) and Greek Islanders are not only from Dodecaneso but a mix of Aegean Islanders. Here the complete text.

url immagine

Thank you Hauteville.

What a pity this group partnered with Spencer Wells. He may be an expert on uniparental markers, but this autosomal analysis could largely have been done ten years ago. It's just like Dienekes' old calculator, only maybe worse. In fact, it's the Geno 2.0 version of autosomal dna, with all of that system's failings. That's also the problem with some of the samples; they're Geno 2.0 self reported ancestry samples, probably mostly from America.

We should be far beyond running modern drifted components through calculators or even applying d-stats to them.

It's actually embarassing.

 

[oreo_cookie]

I am warning both you and Sikelliot once and once only. Spamming of the same comment/opinion/straw man arguments over and over again without data will result in deletion of such posts and infractions. This thread is not going to turn into a repeat of the Greek paper one. You've made your points, such as they are; now move on.

My opinions in this particular thread were stated once each, not repetitively.

 

[Cato]

Southern & Central Italy received Anatolian influences since the Chalcolitic..(ex. https://books.google.it/books?id=bvbzBwAAQBAJ&pg=PT206&lpg=PT206&dq#v=onepage&q&f=false) Gaudo, Rinaldone and other similar Copper Age cultures are traditionaly associated with warrior-shepherds coming from the East Med. of a different stock (tall, short heads..CHG?) compared to the locals (short, long heads..typical EEFs)

Lo studio del materiale osteologico, frammentario e non sempre in un buon stato di
conservazione, ha suggerito la presenza di un substrato mediterranoide di tipo arcaico quale
testimonianza di vecchie popolazioni di ascendenza paleo-mesolitica già presenti su tutto il
territorio italiano (Mallegni, 1985). In particolare si riscontra un’affinità con i neolitici della
Liguria anche se nella Toscana centrale il fenomeno è mascherato dalla presenza di maggior
brachicefalia dovuta ad apporti genetici di popolazioni molto probabilmente dell’Italia
meridionale (Mallegni, 1985).

 

[Pax Augusta]

Southern & Central Italy received Anatolian influences since the Chalcolitic..(ex. https://books.google.it/books?id=bvbzBwAAQBAJ&pg=PT206&lpg=PT206&dq#v=onepage&q&f=false) Gaudo, Rinaldone and other similar Copper Age cultures are traditionaly associated with warrior-shepherds coming from the East Med. of a different stock (tall, short heads..CHG?) compared to the locals (short, long heads..typical EEFs)

Gaudo and, especially, Rinaldone are traditionaly associated with Remedello (EEF), and then, afterwards, with newcomers, warrior-shepherds coming from the Balkans (Vucedol, according to Laviosa Zambotti, southern Balkans according to modern-day scholars), while Remedello differed because it had other influences from Western Europe. These newcomers from the Balkans could have been originally from the East Med/Aegean area, but they first settled in the Balkans.

Among the main cultures of the early Aeneolithic Central Italy, the facies of Rinaldone shows many elements of correlations with the contemporaneous cultural assemblages of the nearby Balkan district. The aim of this paper is to re-assess the picture of chronological synchronisms, as well as the affinities of the pottery assemblage, of the early Aeneolithic Rinaldone culture, that has been matter of specific studies in the last five years (Cultraro 2001; Cazzella 2003). The new picture shows the close affinities among the early Aeneolithic cultures and the Late Chalcolithic Period of the Epirus and South Balkans, date in calibrated chronologies to the last part of the fourth Millennium B.C. (literal)

http://data.cnr.it/data/cnr/individuo/prodotto/ID185125

 

[Azzurro]

Do you perhaps have a preview paper of the results from ancient Italian dna, results properly analyzed and interpreted, safely hidden underneath your pillow? Or do you have a crystal ball? Perhaps a time machine?


Plus, please do not resort to straw man arguments. Do you know what that is?

I don't see anyone here posting that there is no recent Middle Eastern dna in parts of Italy, depending on how you define "recent". I certainly never have. I don't subscribe to fantasies like those of our Iberian Nordicist former colleagues that you can have centuries of a folk migration by people who aren't poor refugees but who are the ruling power, and excise every last bit of that dna from your country by signing some expulsion orders. I wouldn't be surprised to find a perhaps 5% impact from the Saracens in Sicily and parts of the southern mainland maybe more. We'll see. I assure you that the idea doesn't fill me with horror. Nor does it fill me with horror to think I have ancestry from Crete, quite the opposite in fact. The Minoans and the Etruscans are my favorite ancient civilization.

Neither has anyone, including me, said it all came from the Bronze Age. You should read more carefully, and should be careful from whom you take instruction. Going to some people for population genetics information is like trying to get information about astronomy from an astrologer.

The fact remains that in addition to prior work done by academics on certain markers, we now have ancient dna from the Balkans showing that there was genetic flow from the Caucasus/Anatolia into that region beginning not in the Bronze Age but in the Late Neolithic/Chalcolithic. Did you not read the Mathiesen paper? Now that isn't proof the same exact thing happened in Italy, but considering what we know about migration flows in the Med, I'd say it's a good bet. However, we can't be sure about anything until we get the ancient dna.

I am warning both you and Sikelliot once and once only. Spamming of the same comment/opinion/straw man arguments over and over again without data will result in deletion of such posts and infractions. This thread is not going to turn into a repeat of the Greek paper one. You've made your points, such as they are; now move on.

That's a very strong statement, I said some, I don't know what ancient Italian dna looks like, at the moment my guess its going to be mainly WHG like Iberian and French ancient samples (for neolithic).

By recent I mean post Bronze Age, Iron Age/Antquity some additional later during the Medieval ages. Why should it fill you with horror? Many great civilizations came from the East, and I like the Etruscans and Minoans as well, I want to know the truth and follow the data.

Angela it is not you who is the problem, you follow the data and are very well educated in History, your very reasonable.

It is someone on this board who is an actual racist and has an entire website promoting his and the few that think like him ideas (I don't know how many from that site are here), which is what I don't like, they attack many ethnicities and brush off any dna input that came post Bronze Age for the majority, its just not right and fallacious. The truth is what is important, whatever the truth is, that is what should be followed.

Yes I read the paper, I found it excellent, I think the upcoming West Asian Bronze Age paper will be important as well, I totally agree with you that ancient dna will solve most debates topics, until then we can speculate with the information we are presented with.

 

[New Englander]

I modeled my Italian ancestry using Eurogenes 15K Euro_test_v2 by using the formula Me = 4/(2X)+ (Sephardi + Irish) = Italian score.
I than factored out "Irish" as 25% of the total score and got this (It+J)

Conclusions are that My Italian brings more West Med, West Asian, and Atlantic, with very minimal North Sea, while my Jewish ancestry is mixed with Eastern European, but has a much higher Red Sea score. Eastern European is not accounted for in Jewish proxy, so it distorts the Italian results. This would also mean MENA admixture will be slightly higher than calculated for (Italian).

Results (Italian) (It + J) rounded to nearest 10th.

East med (30) (31)
Atlantic (16) (15)
West med (18) (17)
West Asian (17) (16)
North Sea (-0.255) (2)
East Euro (9) (7)
Baltic (5) (4)
Red Sea (4) (6)
South Asian (2) (2)