Pliny the Elder-Have they identified his skull?

[Salento]

The Illyrian arrived in Italy 1500 Years before the Greeks, and they mixed with the locals too.
At what point is a Population Label "South Italian", or Greek, or Spanish, ....?
Multiple Tribes, in some case related with each other, migrated, settle, and mingle with the locals.
Everywhere in Europe.
To a less extent maybe the Basques and the Sardinians.
Most Populations are a collections of ancient tribes.
The Greeks too are not exactly the same everywhere in Greece.
The Ratio and Percentage of genes similarity makes a Population.
For example:

 

[Azzurro]

Could you please provide the dates you are using for the Italic tribes who settled in the south and the dates you are using for the Greek settlement, with some academic citations, please.

Btw, the definition of "Italian" people would change depending on the particular time period in question. The same applies to any national group in Europe. When did the English become the English? One could say no earlier than the Anglo-Saxon invasions, and/or the Danish incursions, but then what about the Normans? Should it be dated after them, or was their input too small? See the difficulty? Such discussions are not really useful for genetic discussions.

http://www.academia.edu/Documents/in/Greek_Colonization_Magna_Graecia_and_Sicily_

Academic sources for Magna Graecia.

wikipedia for both Oscan-Italic Tribes and Magna Graecia for dates.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_Graecia

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucanians

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruttians

yes and in the context that Salento was using Southern Italian cannot be defined like Southern Italians today.

 

[Azzurro]

The Illyrian arrived in Italy 1500 Years before the Greeks, and they mixed with the locals too.
At what point is a Population Label "South Italian", or Greek, or Spanish, ....?
Multiple Tribes, in some case related with each other, migrated, settle, and mingle with the locals.
Everywhere in Europe.
To a less extent maybe the Basques and the Sardinians.
Most Populations are a collections of ancient tribes.
The Greeks too are not exactly the same everywhere in Greece.
The Ratio and Percentage of genes similarity makes a Population.
For example:

I am not agreeing or disagreeing with you, you bring up good points, don't get me wrong, I just think you underestimate the Greek heritage of Southern Italians, and that Greek heritage would have made Southern Italians living in that time already different than the Romans.

 

[Salento]

I Never said that there's not Greek's gene in South Italians.
History and Genetics.
When possible, Genes prove or disprove History.
[emoji846]

 

[Azzurro]

I Never said that there's not Greek's gene in South Italians.
History and Genetics.
When possible, Genes prove or disprove History.
[emoji846]

I think this is something we can both 100% agree about , it will be very important we get some Roman dna, also would be very interesting to see what Pliny's Y line will be.

 

[Angela]

Of course, when the Iron Age "Greeks" arrived in the 8th-7th centuries BC, southern Italy was not empty. There were the "Oenotrians,Chones, and Lauternoi", whom some authors identify as pastoralists.

See:
https://www.saylor.org/site/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/HIST301-4.3.2-AncientPeopleoftItaly-FINAL.pdf

Even more interestingly, ancient authors held that at least one group of these people, called "people of the vine", had migrated into the area from the Peloponnese. Shades of the "Greek" paper, yes?

Of course, I'm always rather leery of the pronouncements of ancient authors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oenotrians

In Sicily you have, of course, the Elymians, the Sicani, and the Siculi, all of whose origin is rather obscure and controversial, but some of whom may have been Ligurian or Iberian.

Now, how different any of these peoples were from one another and from the "Greeks" of the first millennium BC immigration is unknown and will remain unknown until some ancient dna is analyzed and compared to that of other areas. It may be extremely difficult to disentangle it all given that they were all heavily "farmer" populations.

There is the further question of how "Indo-European" or Italic the ancient Romans of, say, the Republic, actually were, i.e. was the admixture on the order of what happened with the Mycenaeans, or from 4-16%. Was there a class difference? If that was limited to the upper classes, the "Romans" as a whole might not be all that different from prior populations or indeed from the Greeks.

This is why I refrain from speculating about such things.

I will say that "Romans" who hailed from northern Italy might have been a bit different given that the "Italic" ancestry was probably on a cline in Italy, with more of it in the north, and the North had also been impacted by the "Gallic/Celtic" migrations by this later time.

What I'd really like to know is the make up of people like Vespasian, from Central Italy, of relatively humble birth, but who became a great emperor.

 

[Salento]

I am not agreeing or disagreeing with you, you bring up good points, don't get me wrong, I just think you underestimate the Greek heritage of Southern Italians, and that Greek heritage would have made Southern Italians living in that time already different than the Romans.

Different, but Similar.
Because all the Tribes in Italy carried in them the ancient genes of Pre Bronze Age settlers that began earlier. That DNA was added in the gene poll once those Tribes got to Italy.
That probably happen Everywhere in Europe in places with Pro Bronze Age settlers.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Italy

 

[Salento]

A Clarification.
When I mention the Romans, I'm thinking about the timeline from the 8th Century BC, until the ascension of Emperor Augustus.
Apologies