Mediterranean migration layers in Sicily and southern Italy

[harena]

The argument at least I make is that there was some gene flow from Roman slavery and it is not specific only to the East Mediterranean, though to answer your question or statement that you mentioned with West Asian and Levantine slaves were only specifically brought to Southern Italy as an argument by some on other forums, I don't think it was only restricted to this area, there is 2 reasons for me one is logical and the other is an example that it could have happened and why Southern Italy. At the time Southern Italy was still vastly Greek speaking, it would make sense for slave owners of the South to get Greek speaking slaves and the East Med, Anatolia, Egypt and Greece/Aegean were Greek speaking in the sense it was like a lingua franca. The second point which I even made on Anthrogenica is take the example of the first Serville War, the leader of the Slave revolt was Eunus a Syrian slave and his partner was Cleon a slave from Cilicia, so we know that Eastern Mediterranean slaves were present at least during this period, how much? We cannot know. Was it only restricted to Southern Italy, definitely not.

Under this scenario, I would expect Rome and nearby urban areas of Central Italy to be among the most affected (sheer demand) parts of Italy but that doesn't seem the case. And in term of proximity/logistics wouldn't North Africa make much more sense for Southern Italy rather than East Med?

 

[Sile]

Actually there's no evidence that the Etruscans came from the East. They could have come from Central Europe for example.
What data did you follow?

last year chat from scholars on the etruscans is that the are a branch of the Umbrians

 

[Azzurro]

Azzurro:

I'm not trying to be condescending or unkind, but I would suggest you do some intensive reading on the history of Rome, particularly as it applies to the Italian peninsula, as you suggest things which don't make much sense given what we know.

Many of the slaves sent to southern Italy went to the vast agricultural latifundia or to the mines. The life span was extremely short: you didn't live long enough to get manumitted and pass on your genes. These enterprises were mostly owned by Roman senators, and the owners and factors would have spoken Latin, as would most of the population of Sicily and Southern Italy and even places like isolated Sardinia, no matter what language they spoke at home. Speaking Latin or even Greek would have been immaterial. They selected for brawn, not language. Slaves were present in infection rich urban centers as well, and their nutrition and living conditions would have been sub-par. There would have been some children born to the owners, but the mothers would have been of varied ethnicities as well as right from the Italian peninsula, as would all slaves: conquered Italics, my own Ligures, Greek speakers from the south, poor people selling themselves into slavery, abandoned infants, of which there were many. There are no accepted numbers for any of this.

To base a theory on the ethnicity of one slave leader or two is not very sensible, is it? Spartacus may have been been Illyrian; so what? This is starting to sound a lot like special pleading and the selective presentation of data. You're also doing a bit of that straw man thing again. I never said there was no gene flow from slaves. I asked whether it was sensible to believe, in the absence of ancient dna, that it significantly changed the autosomal dna, and why no one ever discusses all those German and Gallic and Italian peninsula etc. slaves. For the sake of your reputation I would advise you not to adopt these methods, whether or not they are used by your friends.

Razib Khan comes to some of these conclusions not only because he's a good geneticist, imo, but because he has an admirable grasp of the Roman Era and of European history for a non-historian.

Angela, I will take your suggestion and learn more about Roman history. Its not only slaves either there is retired Auxiliaries and Navy men. I guess will have to wait for some ancient Italian dna to fully know what happened, they should be interesting. I guess we are on different clines of the spectrum in the idea of Italian dna, whatever it turns out to be, I'll be looking forward in knowing the history of my ancestors.

 

[Azzurro]

I didn't ask your opinion about Etruscans.

Merci ah, so don't quote me then if you just want to attack.

 

[Apsurdistan]

The Etruscans might have been a proto Slavic related people.

 

[Azzurro]

The Etruscans were probaby a proto Slavic related people.

No they weren't, their language was completely unrelated to Indo-European or Indo-Iranian, the Etruscans were a mix of Villanovans and Middle Eastern peoples who were related to the Hurrians.

 

[A. Papadimitriou]

No they weren't, their language was completely unrelated to Indo-European or Indo-Iranian, the Etruscans were a mix of Villanovans and Middle Eastern peoples who were related to the Hurrians.

You are presenting your assumptions as facts. At least make an argument with clear premises and conclusion.

 

[Azzurro]

You are presenting your assumptions as facts. At least make an argument with clear premises and conclusion.

Alright, the Etruscans practiced Haruspicy, the religious ceremony of liver inspection, this was originally practiced by the Sumerians, then picked up by the Hurrians, the Hurrians also introduced it to the various Anatolian peoples. People will argue that they learnt of it when when trading with the Greeks, but as you know as Greek, they didn't not practice Haruspicy, meaning there is a more direct contact. The Etruscan language still not placed under a larger family aside from Tyrsenian does show some connections with Alarodian languages spoken by Nakh peoples (Chechens and Ingush), this theory has been mentioned a few times, an author who writes this is Ed Robertson, Hurrian is believed to be an Alarodian language, so now we have a religious aspect practiced by Hurrians and also a possible connection with language. In the Tuscan samples that were posted on Yfull, some of the R1b, J2a and G suggest a further link with Armenian populations.

 

[Angela]

Angela, I will take your suggestion and learn more about Roman history. Its not only slaves either there is retired Auxiliaries and Navy men. I guess will have to wait for some ancient Italian dna to fully know what happened, they should be interesting. I guess we are on different clines of the spectrum in the idea of Italian dna, whatever it turns out to be, I'll be looking forward in knowing the history of my ancestors.

I tend to think that the impact wasn't major based on logic and everything I know about Roman history, but this is a murky area with not all that much data to go on, so I'm perfectly prepared to accept what the genetic data shows. I'm not emotionally invested in either outcome.

What I find intriguing is that an Italian-Canadian from a Southern Italian background with an admitted lack of knowledge of Roman history would so vehemently and uncritically espouse the theory that most of his ancestors were not only slaves (all humans undoubtedly have ancestors who were slaves of one group or another), but specifically only slaves from the Near East. Since you're southern Italian yourself it can't be that sick Nordicism which wants to paint Southern Europeans as "the other", and, in the immortal words of a prominent blogger "kick them out of Europe". What imbecility...we created Europe.* That's undoubtedly why they attack us the most. We prove everything they say is a lie.

Do you have a particular attachment to that part of the world, or sense of kinship? There's nothing wrong with that or any other personal bias. It's just that we should all strive, in so far as humanly possible, to be objective. I'm sure you agree.

Ed. That was hyperbole. I'm not that nationalistic. I thought I would just delete it, but that wouldn' be honest.

 

[Apsurdistan]

No they weren't, their language was completely unrelated to Indo-European or Indo-Iranian, the Etruscans were a mix of Villanovans and Middle Eastern peoples who were related to the Hurrians.

I just thought the name they called themselves Raseni sounds Slavic. So I just threw it out there to see how people respond. I like to ***** a little bit so what.

 

[Angela]

I wrote this 3 years ago; nothing has really changed that much since. This is about the Etruscan mtDna that has been analyzed.

"I think that the kinds of distinctions he's [ Barbujani-in an Italian speech ]drawing are sort of lost on a lot of hobbyists. As he points out, what the ancient samples he tested tell us, looked at one way, is that of the 27 sequences, 5 were indeed found in Anatolia, but 7 were found in Germany, and only 2 may be found in modernTuscany. So just looking at the results in this way would see a higher correspondence to Germany than to Toscana. (In other interviews and publications he points out that at the level of resolution that they did, and the age of the mtDna lineages, it's impossible to tell if they arrived in Europe in the late Bronze/Iron Age or in the Neolithic thousands of years earlier. )

They then seem to have looked at upstream lineages and compared modern lineages to them through a Bayesian analysis. They found that of the three ancient Etruscan cities of the League where they thought there was the most likelihood of finding Etruscan dna, i.e. Cosentino, Murlo, and Volterra, only in Cosentino was there are indication of population continuity. So, as he says, although the Tuscans may be the closest population to the ancient Etruscans, most of them are not descended from the Etruscans by any measure that they tested, which is mtDna.

I think this may be like the situation discovered in the recent paper about the Lombards in Piemonte . In a few small communities where there was a founder effect, a small group who went to the area and whose descendents basically never moved anywhere else and intermarried only among themselves, you can find some traces of these ancient peoples, but other than that, there is no trace of them.

Given that there is absolutely no record archaeologically of a mass migration into Tuscany around 800 BC, I have my doubts that the common people were anything but Villanovans. Perhaps the upper classes were mixed with newer arriving migrants. Certainly, the civilization shows rapid signs of sophistication in every area, perhaps most particularly in metallurgy. Those people and any unique genetic signature they carried were rapidly absorbed by the Romans, however, along with their culture and accomplishments. The language disappeared.

Of course, this may all change with more fine scale resolution and dating of mtDna lineages, or with ydna analysis, or even better, with a good enough sample for a sophisticated analysis of their autosomes. So far, thought, this is what we have."

My comment can be found here:

http://www.eupedia.com/forum/threads/30476-A-Genome-Wide-Study-of-Modern-Day-Tuscans-Revisiting-Herodotus-s-Theory-on-the-Origi?highlight=Etruscans

 

[Angela]

Also in that thread from me:

"Here are some gems of generalization from the paper:

"however, almost all the studies agree that there is a proportion of their mtDNA pool that could be traced to somewhere in the Middle East, thus testifying to an ancient connection between both regions."

I have news for these guys: so does the mtDna of 80% of Europeans.

Then they resurrect this old chestnut: both humans and cattle reached Etruria from the Eastern Mediterranean area by sea. Hence the Eastern origin of Etruscans, first claimed by the classic historians Herodotus and Thucydides, receives strong independent support”

Yes, plants, cattle, sheep, goats, and the knowledge of what to do with them all came from the eastern Mediterranean. That doesn't prove that a specific breed came in 800 BC!

As to ancient Etruscan mtDna see:
Silvia Ghirotto et al 2013
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%...l.pone.0055519
See the discussion at the Dienekes site:
http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2013/02...tto-et-al.html
As a knowledgeable poster explained, the Etruscan mtDna in this large sample is a mixture of U5 and J. Looks like admixture betwee Neolithic and Mesolithic peoples to me...

Also, these guys should know by now that without resolution of mtDna on a very detailed subclade level, and some agreement on mutation rates, it's impossible to use mtDna to track migration flows precisely.

As for the Armenian connection...

Of course there's more "Caucasus" like ancestry in Tuscans than in northern Italians, but the question is, when did this Caucasus like ancestry arrive in Europe? I'll buy Metal Ages...Oetzi had a little bit already, but this doesn't prove that a specific migration in 800 BC brought it!

Also, there's more in southern Italians yet, and more in Greeks. There's the same amount in Balkan people. Were they all settled in the first millennium BC by people from Anatolia?

Take a look at the "Caucasus" proportion in these groups as per the Dienekes K-12b analysis"
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/...hl=en_US#gid=0
Northern Italians: 22.9
Romanians: 28.4
Tuscans: 30.5
Bulgarians: 30.7
Southern Italians/Sicilians: 36.5
Greeks: 37.4

Do I think it's possible that there was a late movement from Anatolia (first millenium BC) into Central Italy? Yes, I do; it's just that neither ancient or modern mtdna, is going to prove it, and especially not at the level of resolution which currently exists. A comparision of the full genomes of modern Tuscans to other modern populations doesn't prove it either. Who says this isn't Neolithic era? We need a high quality Etruscan genome and the genome of prior inhabitants from the same area.

I do think that there's generally something to be said for an additional Bronze Age gene flow (and later) into Italy not only from the north, but also from the south east.

I saw a speculation on Anthrogenica this morning about the proto-Indo-Europeans possibly carrying a lot of "Anatolian" like or "Near Eastern" like ancestry. (The mtDna of the Yamnaya people looks totally "Neolithic" from the evidence of that thesis. Perhaps the full genomes will show something different, but then that would mean that they left all their own women at home, or they didn't like them very much.)

It would certainly be interesting if Dienekes was onto something back in the day when he speculated that the proto-Indo-Europeans had their origin in the Armenian Highlands. Perhaps they remained more "Anatolian" like or Caucasus like in the southern regions, even if in the more northern areas they were different."

There might have been an elite migration from the Aegean given the sophistication of Etruscan metallurgy and indeed of all aspects of their culture, including their art in comparison to what was present in Europe at that time.

"As for admixture analyses, I am no longer enamored of them, despite the fact that I used one upthread. Even before Lazaridis et al, it was clear that they obscure ancient genetic flows as much or perhaps more than they elucidate them. They are just geographical "poolings" to steal a term that I very much like. Or perhaps they are like artifacts of the algorithm in a way...

I definitely have said, and I believe, that J2 in Italy is late Neolithic at the earliest, and probably Bronze Age or later. Other than the proposed direct flow from Anatolia for the Etruscans, it would have been mediated through the Greeks, imo, or at least I don't know of any other possible source in terms of Tuscany, other than by way of the Balkans."

I would add I think Crete might have something to do with it.

This was 3 years ago. The only new thing is this PCW from an as yet unpublished paper:

 

[oreo_cookie]

The Etruscans were probaby a proto Slavic related people.

This makes absolutely no sense. Whether they were Middle Eastern or not is one thing, but there is no evidence they were related to Slavs at all. Their closest linguistic relatives lived both in the Alps and on the North Aegean island Lemnos.

 

[Hauteville]

Why not? Maybe Aegeans received further CHG-rich gene flow from Western Anatolia at some point. Their inflated CHG compared to both Southern Italy and Greece/Balkans could be responsible for their shrunken near-eastern component, which would otherwise fall in line nicely with Southern Italians.
Actually Crete already looks comparable in near-eastern affinity to several SI samples (e.g. Trapani, Matera, Lecce, etc.), and this with all its extra Caucasus-related stuff.
However this is just one of the possible scenarios and I have no strong opinion about this anyway; also making this kind of broad assumptions based on modern populations with their complex history and background is rather silly and inconclusive. We simply need more ancient genomes to get the full picture.

Yes, take a look on the complete admixture analysis and not only in K4

caricare immagini

 

[harena]

Yes, take a look on the complete admixture analysis and not only in K4

Ok, it doesn't look like Italians got much influx if at all from neareastern slaves, especially in the north like Azzurro claimed. Red component at k10 is nil here.
Southern Italy, Iberia and Greeks might still have some, though at least for S. Italy and Greece nothing you wouldn't expect given their position hence not necessarily related to slaves/post-Roman influx.
If Italy ever got input from slaves, I reckon they would have been overwhelmingly Illyrian/Thracian. Purple component peaking in Albania looks evenly distributed across the peninsula including the North (signal looking almost as strong as in Serbia) while it drops like a rock in France.
I'm wondering if all this could be somehow related to the Etruscans/Raeti, does anyone know where the N. Italian reference sample is from? If from Tuscany or North Italy proper like Triveneto/Piedmont/Lombardy?

 

[Azzurro]

I tend to think that the impact wasn't major based on logic and everything I know about Roman history, but this is a murky area with not all that much data to go on, so I'm perfectly prepared to accept what the genetic data shows. I'm not emotionally invested in either outcome.

What I find intriguing is that an Italian-Canadian from a Southern Italian background with an admitted lack of knowledge of Roman history would so vehemently and uncritically espouse the theory that most of his ancestors were not only slaves (all humans undoubtedly have ancestors who were slaves of one group or another), but specifically only slaves from the Near East. Since you're southern Italian yourself it can't be that sick Nordicism which wants to paint Southern Europeans as "the other", and, in the immortal words of a prominent blogger "kick them out of Europe". What imbecility...we created Europe.* That's undoubtedly why they attack us the most. We prove everything they say is a lie.

Do you have a particular attachment to that part of the world, or sense of kinship? There's nothing wrong with that or any other personal bias. It's just that we should all strive, in so far as humanly possible, to be objective. I'm sure you agree.

Ed. That was hyperbole. I'm not that nationalistic. I thought I would just delete it, but that wouldn' be honest.

I have taken courses on Roman history and watched several documentaries, Mary Beard's documentaries I find are really good personally, but I am not as knowledge as let's say you are or some others. I loath Nordicism and White Supremacists, I am far from a racist, I am open to all. I have friends of different backgrounds and faiths.

Yes I do, for one I have Converso Jewish heritage on both sides of the family, and I grew up not only with people of Italian descent but of different backgrounds, I always felt a special bond with Lebanese people, to me we are very similar, I find more in common with Lebanese than French, but maybe that's me. I guess I would be a Pan-Mediterraneanist for me I see similarity in all Mediterranean peoples whether they are from Southern Europe, North Africa or the Levant, I don't believe in this genetic barrier of the "Mediterranean" as some wish to be true, I think we all have some of eachother's dna.

 

[Azzurro]

I just thought the name they called themselves Raseni sounds Slavic. So I just threw it out there to see how people respond. I like to ***** a little bit so what.

There's no issue with that, but check before you state something, because some people do get offended by comments of that nature. Can I ask how does Raseni sound Slavic? You know that the Etruscans predate the Slavs by 1000 years.

 

[Angela]

I have taken courses on Roman history and watched several documentaries, Mary Beard's documentaries I find are really good personally, but I am not as knowledge as let's say you are or some others. I loath Nordicism and White Supremacists, I am far from a racist, I am open to all. I have friends of different backgrounds and faiths.

Yes I do, for one I have Converso Jewish heritage on both sides of the family, and I grew up not only with people of Italian descent but of different backgrounds, I always felt a special bond with Lebanese people, to me we are very similar, I find more in common with Lebanese than French, but maybe that's me. I guess I would be a Pan-Mediterraneanist for me I see similarity in all Mediterranean peoples whether they are from Southern Europe, North Africa or the Levant, I don't believe in this genetic barrier of the "Mediterranean" as some wish to be true, I think we all have some of eachother's dna.

All either commendable or your own private business, but it shouldn't influence your analysis of data, as, imo, it clearly does.

I'd get my money back from those teachers of Roman history if I were you.

 

[Azzurro]

All either commendable or your own private business, but it shouldn't influence your analysis of data, as, imo it clearly does.

It probably does, but all Mediterranean peoples do share some dna, of course to varying degree, some little and some more.

 

[Angela]

Ok, it doesn't look like Italians got much influx if at all from neareastern slaves, especially in the north like Azzurro claimed. Red component at k10 is nil here.
Southern Italy, Iberia and Greeks might still have some, though at least for S. Italy and Greece nothing you wouldn't expect given their position hence not necessarily related to slaves/post-Roman influx.
If Italy ever got input from slaves, I reckon they would have been overwhelmingly Illyrian/Thracian. Purple component peaking in Albania looks evenly distributed across the peninsula including the North (signal looking almost as strong as in Serbia) while it drops like a rock in France.
I'm wondering if all this could be somehow related to the Etruscans/Raeti, does anyone know where the N. Italian reference sample is from? If from Tuscany or North Italy proper like Triveneto/Piedmont/Lombardy?

When Sikelliot/Oreo Cookie first posted that screen shot of the Admixture analysis I hadn't yet read the full paper in detail; I just thought it showed what an abysmal job they'd done.

I still think this is just a glorified Admixture calculator based on drifted modern populations, but if you're going to cite it, it's clearly dishonest to use a K=4 run.

@ Sikelliot/Oreo Cookie,

The next time you try to mislead readers here by deliberate distortion and selective presentation of data there will be severe consequences. GET MY DRIFT?

I have neither the time nor the inclination to check every damn thing you post, so be warned.