Prehistoric migrations shaped Corsican Y-chromosome

Concerning Corsica, the thing that I find interesting in ancient sources is that Pausanias calls Corsicans 'Libyans'.

I have thought the possibility of a copying mistake. If, for example, where we find Λίβυες (Libues = Libyans) originally there was a Λίγυες (Ligues = Ligurians).
That would have been more consistent with modern ideas concerning the Corsi, but I don't think a mistake like that is very likely.

So, I leave open two possibilities. That the original inhabitants of Corsica were Libyans and also that the Ligurians could have been related to Libyans, too. The idea that Ligurians were 'Indo-European' is relatively popular today, but there is not much to support it.

I haven't read the study yet.

Given their yDna how could they possibly be descended from LIBYANS?

That would also ignore the fact that Corsica was settled from mainland EUROPE.

So, clearly, we're talking about ancient LIGURIANS, who were settled all over Provence, Liguria, other parts of Northern Italy, and looking in the other direction, all the way to Spain.

As for being Indo-European, you're aware, yes, that Ligurians are over 50% downstream R1b? In the mountain refuge areas it reaches 70%. Are you also aware that their culture and artifacts are similar to those of people from North of the Alps?

This is where the confusion arises.
normal_ancient_tribes_in_Liguria_%28Roman_times%29.jpg


Libici are sometimes known as Libui.

It's the same kind of confusion that has led misinformed people to confuse the Veneti and Venedi.

This is a list of the tribes of the Liguri, stretching from Italy to Spain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ancient_Ligurian_tribes


Yes, right, they moved into Liguria from Libya.
 
Given their yDna how could they possibly be descended from LIBYANS?

That would also ignore the fact that Corsica was settled from mainland EUROPE.

So, clearly, we're talking about ancient LIGURIANS, who were settled all over Provence, Liguria, other parts of Northern Italy, and looking in the other direction, all the way to Spain.

As for being Indo-European, you're aware, yes, that Ligurians are over 50% downstream R1b? In the mountain refuge areas it reaches 70%. Yes, right, they moved into Liguria from Libya.

I don't understand your post. What do you know about the Y-DNA of ancient Libyans or Ligurians?
 
Concerning Corsica, the thing that I find interesting in ancient sources is that Pausanias calls Corsicans 'Libyans'.

I have thought the possibility of a copying mistake. If, for example, where we find Λίβυες (Libues = Libyans) originally there was a Λίγυες (Ligues = Ligurians).
That would have been more consistent with modern ideas concerning the Corsi, but I don't think a mistake like that is very likely.

So, I leave open two possibilities. That the original inhabitants of Corsica were Libyans and also that the Ligurians could have been related to Libyans, too. The idea that Ligurians were 'Indo-European' is relatively popular today, but there is not much to support it.

I haven't read the study yet.
Lybians is a synonym of Punics

Bronze Age Corsicans used Northern Italian influenced material culture (Polada) and later Central Italian (Appenninic), this could be the reason of the high R1b U152 frequency there...no idea about R1b U106, they think that it was already there in the Bronze Age too but i doubt

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The Y-chromosome tree of this study is full of errors. It's enough to see that 50 out of 113 in the Pisa sample (or better say Volterra) are all R1b1a1a2a. C'mon, that's very unlikely. Of course they are all R1b but they are more diversified than that. As showed in Grugni 2018 where this sample was already analysed.

Anyway M123 at low frequencies is anywhere in Italy, even in Sardinia. As Boattini showed. M123 very likely exists also among Corsicans, at low frequencies.

the issue is the new program these studies use to determine the marker from the STR they have.......this program has been a problem since the indian paper in late 2017.
at least you know they are R1b
 
So Corsicans are descendants of old Corsicans, mostly....they have continental italian surnames (contrary to sardinians), probably they just adopted them with no gene flow

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roman historian seneca states that the old corsicans descent from ligurians and cantabrians ( north spain ).
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the paper also tries to deflect the theory of liguria-tuscany to isles di elba to corsica to sardinia ( before the great flood ) theory
 
I don't understand your post. What do you know about the Y-DNA of ancient Libyans or Ligurians?

Do we have ancient dna of the Ligures yet? No, but we have ancient dna from neighboring areas, i.e. Bell Beakers of Parma, and it's R1b. We also do have ancient y dna and autosomal results for Ancient North Africans, and there is NO correlation with the people of the Mediterranean coast of southern Europe other than some shared farmer ancestry. The yDna is E-M78, but NOT E-V13. We probably got that from the Greeks. Unless the Greeks came from Libya too?

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/03/oldest-dna-africa-offers-clues-mysterious-ancient-culture
https://www.mpg.de/11978445/genomic-ancestry-of-stone-age-north-africans-from-morocco

We discussed it all extensively here:
https://www.eupedia.com/forum/threa...occo?highlight=ancient+North+African+genetics

EVERYTHING else about the Ligures, their culture, artifacts, their spread in Europe, indicates that they came from Central Europe, or, let's say, a lot of their ancestry did.

Since you're fond of relying on the ancient writers, you might want to take a look at Strabo on Geography, book 2, chapter 5, section 28. Seneca also opines on them.

The only thing you have for your idea that they are Libyans is your confusion because one Ligure tribe has a name similar to that of the Libyans. Some research on these people would have cleared up your confusion.
 
Lack of money and other reasons, I suppose. Indeed, these samples are all from areas that were important as Etruscan sites, and were collected for their isolation. It's not a coincidence that in this paper among the authors are also mentioned Di Gaetano and Piazza. Piazza is a very influential geneticist, and, concedimi di essere tranchant, not for the academic authoritativeness but because he has been for a long time the chairman of most powerful Italian private foundation focused on genomic research and established by one of the main Italian banks. Almost all the latest researches on the genome of Italians (Di Gaetano, Fiorito, Sazzini ....) are funded by this foundation. And Piazza as geneticist is one of the proponents of the theory of eastern origin of the Etruscans based on the distribution of mtDNA in modern samples, along with Torroni, Semino and others. This theory based on findings on modern samples for many other scholars does not prove anything. Moreover, Piazza's theory has been several times debunked by the researches of the other group of Italian geneticists led by Barbujani, who, unlike Piazza and his collaborators, really analyzed ancient Etruscan samples. Piazza has all the interest, as long as he is influential, to keep the narrative that their findings are still valid. So I suppose these three samples from Volterra, Murlo and Casentino, will still be long used to represent all the Tuscans. At this point I believe that at least a part of these samples is also used in the researches of Di Gaetano, Fiorito and perhaps even partly in the study of Sazzini. If you read the researches, for example, of Fiorito, or the last of Viola Grugni, one understands perfectly the state of subjection in which young Italian geneticists are forced to work.
It is time to overcome this old and obsolete approach of examining distribution of Y-DNA and mtDNA, as you say, to elucidate ancient migrations. And it's time to focus in the analysis of ancient samples. Only a very large number of Etruscan samples - and this applies to any pre-Roman civilization - will help us to understand who they were and where they came from and what prehistorical layers they were made of.
Just to be more explicit about which types of huge mistakes the observation of Y-DNA and mtDNA in the modern population may provoke. 11 years ago Piazza basically stated that G2*- P15, J2a1b*-M67, E3b1-M78, and K2-M70 (renamed T1a-M70) were signal of recent Middle Eastern ancestry and therefore typical Etruscan haplogroups. Today we know that those haplogroups exist everywhere in Italy and in southern Europe (and also in the rest of Europe), and that they can certainly not be considered as exclusively Etruscan haplogroups, and in most cases arrived with the Neolithic revolution and Chalcolithic migrations.
G2a in ancient tuscany and now in this Corsica paper is G2a-L497 ........it is from Tyrol Austria as per this paper
http://www.blutspendezuerich.ch/Med...h resolution mapping of Y haplogroup G(2).pdf
with this....one can even say.....Rhaetians = Tyrolese , tyrolese have G2a-L497 , same as "ancient etruscans" in volterra ( 2017 paper )
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There are many assumptions......equal split between true and not
 
The bulk of the T1a-M70 are ( if the STR are correct )
ArchiveYFull Y-SNPsNews SEARCH
K-M9
LT-L298
T
T-L206
T-M70
T-L162
T-L208
T-CTS11451 * PF5520formed 8800 ybp, TMRCA 8800 ybpinfo
.
.
the other are T1a3-Y11151......no T1a2-L131 was found in this study
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from 2015 for Tuscany the three branches are all noted
La Spezia T1a1 - CTS11451
Siena T1a2-L131
Siena T1a3 Y11151
 
https://www.persee.fr/doc/bspf_0249-7638_2001_num_98_1_12442

Les influences italiques dans la céramique de l'Age du Bronze de la Corse. F.Lorenzi

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thanks
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anything of the Vanaceni or Venacini in italian.
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The most northerly promontory is occupied by the Vanaceni; next to whom come the Cilebensii, then the Licnini, Macrini, Opini, Simbri, and Comaceni, and furthest to the S. the Subasani”
 
Lybians is a synonym of Punics

Bronze Age Corsicans used Northern Italian influenced material culture (Polada) and later Central Italian (Appenninic), this could be the reason of the high R1b U152 frequency there...no idea about R1b U106, they think that it was already there in the Bronze Age too but i doubt

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Pausanias uses that term for a population distinct than those he calls Iberians, those he calls Hellenes, those he calls Carthaginians and those he calls Trojans etc. (he says though that Carthaginians used Iberian and 'Libyan' mercenaries, that's probably the reason we shouldn't expect significant Phoenician proper admixture in Sardinia)

Well, I don't associate R1b with proto-Indo-Europeans. For example, concerning Torrean civilization I would consider a scenario where the natives (pre-BA menhir builders) were R1b-U106 and the intrusive element belonged to G-L91, for example. (The reality would have been certainly more complex, that means possibly more haplogroups involved at least)


That study says
Sub-clade R1b1a1a2a1a2b-U152 predominated in North Corsica whereas R1b1a1a2a1a1-U106 was present in South Corsica. Both SNPs display clinal distributions of frequency variation in Europe, the U152 branch being most frequent in Switzerland, Italy, France and Western Poland. Calibrated branch lengths from whole Y chromosome sequencing [44,45] and ancient DNA studies [46] both indicated that R1a and R1b diversification began relatively recently, about 5 Kya, consistent with Bronze Age and Copper Age demographic expansion. TMRCA estimations are concordant with such expansion in Corsica.

So, they cite Haak, Lazaridis etc to support that 'R1a and R1b diversification began relatively recently' but, really, I am not sure if "TMRCA estimations are concordant with such expansion in Corsica." This is not how I see it but I can be wrong. I may have understood something wrong. I don't know.


image
 
Pausanias uses that term for a population distinct than those he calls Iberians, those he calls Hellenes, those he calls Carthaginians and those he calls Trojans etc. (he says though that Carthaginians used Iberian and 'Libyan' mercenaries, that's probably the reason we shouldn't expect significant Phoenician proper admixture in Sardinia)

Well, I don't associate R1b with proto-Indo-Europeans. For example, concerning Torrean civilization I would consider a scenario where the natives (pre-BA menhir builders) were R1b-U106 and the intrusive element belonged to G-L91, for example. (The reality would have been certainly more complex, that means possibly more haplogroups involved at least)


That study says


So, they cite Haak, Lazaridis etc to support that 'R1a and R1b diversification began relatively recently' but, really, I am not sure if "TMRCA estimations are concordant with such expansion in Corsica." This is not how I see it but I can be wrong. I may have understood something wrong. I don't know.


image

the TMRCA of each Haplogroup mapped is not an indication of when it arrived in Corsica, but when that marker formed ...most likely elsewhere
 
Corsica had not Beakers (except a fragment in the South) so the R1b intrusion must be a Bronze Age thing

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the TMRCA of each Haplogroup mapped is not an indication of when it arrived in Corsica, but when that marker formed ...most likely elsewhere
edit
or maybe it is when they arrived
the T are
CTS11451 and as per the new ( now ) Yfull v 6.04
T-CTS11451 * PF5520formed 8800 ybp, TMRCA 8800 ybp
.
which fits close enough to TMRCA of the T-M70 noted on the map.......................if this system is correct , then haplo T is the oldest on the island as per this paper
 
I wonder if bronze age Corsicans were closer to Sardinians than modern Corsicans are. The Corsi were a tribe who lived in Southern Corsica and North Eastern Sardinia during roman times, and the Romans had to deal with their frequent rebellions. During the Middle bronze age some constructions similar to the more rudimentary forms of nuraghi (like those in the upper row) were developed in Southern Corsica, however they never evolved into the evolved type of nuraghi (tholos nuraghi and complex tholos nuraghi) which were built in Sardinia during the recent bronze age, and neither did the bronze age Corsicans build other structures similar to those of the nuragics like the holy well and spring temples (recent and final bronze age), megaron temples (recent and final bronze age), antis temples (recent and final bronze age) or the ritual fountains and pools (recent/final bronze age), their burials however were similar to some of those used in North-Eastern Sardinia (tafoni), but they lacked the monumental giants' tombs that were present all over Sardinia since the early/middle bronze and throughout the recent bronze age. When talking about the Corsi ancient authors would say they were related to the Ligurians, an interesting account also reports that it was the Corsi who founded Populonia. Some other differences I can think of: while in Sardinia thousands of nuragic bronze sculptures were found (final bronze age/early iron age) I don't recall any being found in Corsica, but I have to say that some nuragic votive bronzes were found there however, like the typical bronze quivers as well as some more practical bronze objects like the nuragic double axes. Another difference is the construction of large sanctuaries in late bronze age Sardinia which are absent in Corsica.
37812551_1931876700185598_7127883340249563136_n.jpg
 
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I don't think that coastal Sardinians are much different from Corsicans..someone should make a PCA with Corsicans and the Sardinian samples from Chiang...

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Well, there is a difference, but not a "huge" difference between the inhabitants of places near Ogliastra and the people of Cagliari on the coast, for example.

"As an alternative visualization of pan-Mediterranean population structure, an analysisusing the ADMIXTURE software inferred four ancestral components, with one componentassociated primarily with Sardinians and Southern Europeans (“red”), and remainingcomponents corresponding to North African (“blue”), Middle East and Caucasus (“purple”), andNorthern Europeans (“green”) (Figure 4C; see Figure S3 for results at other values of K). TheArzana individuals contained 100% of this red component and Sardinians from Cagliaricontained 93% of this red component."
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2016/12/07/092148.full.pdf

I'd be surprised if the northern part of Corsica was 93% of the "red" component (the Cagliari percentage), especially given their yDna profile. It's always been my impression that the settlement of these two islands was "predominantly" (not solely) from north to south if we're talking about large "folk" migrations.

Now, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the southern tip of Corsica is more like the northern tip of Sardinia, but given that the language spoken in the northern tip of Sardinia is a Corsican dialect it would seem the influence went mainly from Corsica to Sardinia.

Of course, to really answer these questions we need autosomal dna, which for some inexplicable reason they didn't do. You'd also have to include the Ligurians.

It would be particularly interesting to get autosomal data on Corsicans from the most isolated mountain refuges, as was done for Sardinians and see the differences there, both between the refuge populations of Corsica and Sardinia, and the regional differences within Corsica itself.

Sardinia_Language_Map.png
 
The thing is, Corsica never really had a big population, so later migrations probably changed the DNA of its inhabitants a lot. While most people think of Sardinia as a scarcely populated island, during the bronze age it was actually densely populated if you put it into context, especially compared to most of Europe, by looking at the density of monuments and settlements built in the spawn of a few centuries you can get an idea, so the later migrations didn't affect the locals' DNA as much, one of the reason why it became scarcely populated later on might be malaria which became endemic by the punic era, and the most fertile places in Sardinia also happened to be filled with lagoons and swamps. This explains things a lot better than the "isolation" theory because throughout prehistory and ancient history Sardinia yields many more traces of exchange and interaction with foreigner cultures than Corsica does.
 
Their conclusion is that modern Corsicans are direct descendants of ancient Corsicans, more or less..i don't know why they didn't test at least 2 or 3 ancient individuals, how much does it cost?

IMO the Bronze age R1b immigrants had a bigger impact in Corsica because it was smaller and less populated compared to Sardinia.

South Corsicans seems different to Gallurese Sardinians regarding Y DNA frequencies. No idea how much "steppe admixture" South Corsicans have, Gallurese are 9% circa steppe plus some WHG and the rest the usual EEF

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Their conclusions are worth nothing, since they seem to be based only on yDna. Even if they did an autosomal analysis they'd need an ancient Corsican genome to draw that conclusion.

Sorry to say it about a paper that includes Roy King and Underhill, but it seems like work by shoemakers.
 

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