Wonomyro, in fairness metageographical apportioning is always very subjective. I have met quite a few people (mostly familiar with Dalmatia) who'd consider Croatia a(n at leas partially) "Mediterranean" country as you said but it's true that from a genetic perspective, Croats fit in more as "Central-East" European. They're about as "northern" as the French, just in a more steppe-heavy direction.
Angela, the Thracian appears more northern than the South Italians and Sicilians, about as northern as the Greek sample average used in the dataset (dominated by mainland + some islands + maybe a couple Anatolians) who are equidistant to IA and BA and less southern than Tuscans who are a bit closer to BA. Its overal distance is shortest to those (Tuscans > Sicilians/South Italians > Greeks), then Albanians who are also slightly more northern on average and are overall closer to Balkans_BA. The Mycenaeans we have are of course very southern as we already knew and by pure distances, closest to the southernmost Europeans (South Italians, Sicilians, Maltese, Aegean islanders, Cypriots, European Jews).
In general, the distances of Southern Europeans to their respective regional ancient samples seem about the same as northern Europeans to the Bronze-Iron Age locals, who have also moved towards the south and west apparently. Basically, nothing remained exactly the same it seems and modern Europeans are much closer to their neighbors than their distant linguistic/cultural/ethnic ancestors (quelle surprise).
And yeah I get your overall point about back-and-forths which must be the case but it does currently seem like the
overall trend down to modern times is towards 'easternization' and depression of the local EEF/EEF-WHG in favor of steppe-heavy+extra Caucasus in all of Southern Europe. I generally agree with your apparent scheme of Bronze Age steppe/northern intrusion (with more "outliers", greater heterogeneity) -> Iron Age predominance of local population with admixture from the former -> subsequent admixture in more unified periods and periods of great disturbance like during the Volkerwanderung (this is something Lawrence Angel argued back then about Grece, via his cranial series). Something similar seems to have happened in Northern Europe with the initial very steppe-heavy intrusions like CW giving way to more WHG/EEF-heavy populations by the Late Bronze Age then subsequent decrease in WHG to modern times due to contacts with the south(?).
But as you said, we need much more sampling to hash all this out. The Lombard paper is quite interesting if one focuses more on the topic it tries to elaborate on (and which it does quite successfully I think) than make some
wild guesses until the samples are released and we have even more of them for sure. Well, I guess I failed too. :embarassed:
Well, it's a pleasure discussing this with someone who has a) read the paper, and b) is prepared to discuss it rationally and without some agenda guiding the discussion, and c)sees what the paper is proposing and what it's not proposing, and d) sees the complexity of it all.
Just to reiterate, there is no doubt, imo, that those "southern" samples are local. Whether all northern Italians of that time had a similar autosomal structure, or we just happened to land on some particularly "southern" ones with recent, but not too recent ancestry from other places (the strontium isotope signature is "local"), I don't know, and neither does anyone else.
You know, I've spent my entire professional life having a sword dangling over my head ready to drop if I one time lied, or lied by omission, or said something was a fact if it wasn't, or attempted to prove anything without a solid foundation of facts to back it up. I just can't get used to the way certain, indeed, a lot of people, in this "hobby" operate.
Hey, I think they were Jews, no, they were Syrian Catholics, never mind that no proof is presented, no concrete data that any Syrian Catholics had a settlement anywhere in the area, hey, no, they were Etruscans, like we have a carefully analyzed genome of the elite Etruscans or average Etruscans. This is like college bull sessions, not quasi academic analysis. People think they can put forth any, yes,
wild speculation based on absolutely nothing other than their, yes, "
wild" imaginations and perhaps a favorite agenda, and everybody is supposed to pretend to take it seriously.
Sorry, I can't do that. If you have no proof, no data points, I'm not interested, it's all malarkey, and if you prevaricate, watch out.
Ok, now back to the Iron Age Thracian. Are you basing that assessment on something other than the PCA you showed me? Or, is the PCA not oriented with top as north, bottom as south, left as west and right as east? If it is, and even if it's late, isn't the Thracian-Iron Age Balkan sample not very far north of the Mycenaean and a shade further south than the most southern Italians. I used a ruler, too! See how hi-tech I am?
@Wonomyro,
You can hold any view you want, but to hold a contrary view is not an insult. I will continue to call it as I see it.