Population structure in Italy using ancient and modern samples

As far as I know Etruscans incinerated, so no DNA available other than lucky finds or with outliers... I prefer to wait, Reich and co just did that with Ullastret skulls, they were exposed on the streets with their swords, they were like war trophies and are not the usual Iberian incineration, these skulls had some extra CE autosomal, and it could fit Gauls trying to do what they were doing in Italy, the Balkans, or Anatolia, or in France itself the Volci.
 
There are some seriously awful (AWFUL!!!) posts surrounding this topic on a***ro***ica by hateful members with their heavy assumptions. I have no agenda and if a professionally conducted study proves the ancient Romans were anything (South/north Italian, German, Spanish, whatever) I'll live with it.

What does it means?
 
I read the paper and a litte bit of the posts but i'm out of touch with this paper. Can someone make me a little summary of the community conclusions? Especially about Etruscans?
 
What is their explanation for the Roman position in the PCA? Jews, or Syrians this time?

It's definitely interesting though, why are some of the Romans between South Italians and Cypriotes? It looks like a stabilised cluster so any imperial immigration hypothesis is untenable. Greek settlement doesn't work either. This is Mediterranean Bronze Age ancestry 99% sure.

Markod do you think its possible that romans were transylvanian migrants?
 
This is very exciting, yet at the same time frustrating that we have to wait for results. Is there indiciation that Y dna has been tested in this paper?
 
To me it looks like both Greeks & Romans were ancient Mycenaean-like people. (Quite early Eastern immigration to Italy) Etruscans are different, probably usual steppe male (R1b? / eef female mix. I do not understand the journey of the Etruscan & Latin languages in this case.
 
To me it looks like both Greeks & Romans were ancient Mycenaean-like people. (Quite early Eastern immigration to Italy) Etruscans are different, probably usual steppe male (R1b? / eef female mix. I do not understand the journey of the Etruscan & Latin languages in this case.
It's going to be very difficult to make sense of. Most linguists contend that the split within the Italic language family is rather deep, so to find a potential Proto-Italic population we would probably need LBA samples.

The north-south cline in Italy is expectedly very old in any case, and it likely predates Urnfield/Villanova. The Po valley and the Apennine range very different biogeological regions after all, so it's not surprising that they were settled by different peoples. Who of them spoke Italic?
 
It's going to be very difficult to make sense of. Most linguists contend that the split within the Italic language family is rather deep, so to find a potential Proto-Italic population we would probably need LBA samples.

The north-south cline in Italy is expectedly very old in any case, and it likely predates Urnfield/Villanova. The Po valley and the Apennine range very different biogeological regions after all, so it's not surprising that they were settled by different peoples. Who of them spoke Italic?

Even more complicated if Umbrians etc. cluster with Etruscans. Also afaik Etruscan language came to Italy later than IE? Doesn't make a lot of sense.
 
I think these results should push the consideration that etruscan was possibly IE also. Im very excited by it
 
Even more complicated if Umbrians etc. cluster with Etruscans. Also afaik Etruscan language came to Italy later than IE? Doesn't make a lot of sense.

Yeah, that's surprising if true. I would have thought that Italic was spoken by the southerners, because as it stands the southern cluster 'won' and therefore expanded in the imperial area. If all other Italics are 'northern' that would be strong evidence to the contrary.
 
Not if the Moots leaks are correct.

According to those Moots leaks, 40% of the population in Rome in the Republican Era were "Northern Italian like". Not Parma Beaker like, but specifically Northern Italian like. Those people were from Roman burials, not Etruscan ones, at a time when it still made a difference.

So, no, all "Romans", at least not in the pre-Imperial Age, were all homogeneously Southern Italian/Sicilian like. That has to be accounted for...

I hate to agree with Eurogenes about anything, but facts are facts.


The fact that someone is claiming the Umbrians, Samnites, northern Picene are similar to the Etruscans is the confusing part.

Does that mean the "Republican Era" Romans and the Etruscans were not that dissimilar to one another? Were they two streams of minority admixed steppe people. Did they arrive at different times? Did the Etruscans, like the Basques, just carry a different non IE language, or did the Etruscans adopt another one in situ. Has anyone checked for traces of a substrate language in ancient Ligurian? It's always been difficult to analyze. Could that substrate be in any way similar to Etruscan? Is the substrate at all similar to certain things underlying, say, Iberian. Could certain R1b lines, but not others, have carried more "ancient" or "different" languages?

I know the "elite" from Aegean/Anatolia dominance scenario for the language shift in Etruscans is still alive and well, but it seems slightly odd that the addition of an "elite" group could still result in a people so "northern". I mean, all we have for Etruscans are "elite" burials, so far as I know, and so they would carry this "elite" admixture. Yet still so northern? It would have had to have been a handful. Or perhaps it was adopted from people with whom the Etruscans traded and whom they greatly respected? Is there any other example for something like that?

As Pax has pointed out so often, admixture from Greek admixed people from the south could easily result in Tuscans.
 
Because there is a chance the Latins and the other Italic peoples were G,I,J2b, and some others (some L and E, maybe T).

The Romans were a mix of the Etrucans and Italic people, so more R1b.

Additionally...

Umbrians, Samnites, northern Picene, Brutti plot near which groups?

Look at the present population, approx. 8%+ of Central and Southern Italians are R1s from Slav Markets (Rome was a slave state and had many of the slaves from the Northern celtic regions), 2% of them are from German barbarians (lombards, goths, normans). That is 1/3+ of R1s in Central and Southern Italy. So during early times Central and Southern Italy would have been barely anything R1. You are looking at 20% or less, except for the Etruscan areas (Rome). The Celts to the North did not disappear but became Roman subjects, so is likely true of the Italic tribes, making the Italics likely to be G,I, J2bs, Es. What were the original Germanics? If they were I1, you are looking at a possibility of Italics being not R1 either.

The Romans were Italic and Etruscan. How so with these two groups did Roman end up being from the start lower in R1 (less than 50%).

Seems that some Italic speaking populations had admixture from Anatolia MLBA / Minoan like populations, others did not.

Either from conquest (Italics = R1b) or these were natives still (meaning Italic tribes were not R1b).

Having copper bronze weapons/tools stopped the advance of the celts in Italy. Did the celts act not as warriors, but newcomers/migrants in central and southern Italy? Explaining why there is so low amount of celts in central/southern Italy today. The celts did not rampage Greece or central southern Italy because they were confronted with advanced civilizations with fierce weapons. When the celts confronted the neolithic Europeans, the celts had the weapons to destroy the natives. Not so in Greece and central/southern Italy, their weapons were matched with copper and bronze.
 
Not if the Moots leaks are correct.

According to those Moots leaks, 40% of the population in Rome in the Republican Era were "Northern Italian like". Not Parma Beaker like, but specifically Northern Italian like. Those people were from Roman burials, not Etruscan ones, at a time when it still made a difference.

So, no, all "Romans", at least not in the pre-Imperial Age, were all homogeneously Southern Italian/Sicilian like. That has to be accounted for...

I hate to agree with Eurogenes about anything, but facts are facts.


The fact that someone is claiming the Umbrians, Samnites, northern Picene are similar to the Etruscans is the confusing part.

Does that mean the "Republican Era" Romans and the Etruscans were not that dissimilar to one another? Were they two streams of minority admixed steppe people. Did they arrive at different times? Did the Etruscans, like the Basques, just carry a different non IE language, or did the Etruscans adopt another one in situ. Has anyone checked for traces of a substrate language in ancient Ligurian? It's always been difficult to analyze. Could that substrate be in any way similar to Etruscan? Is the substrate at all similar to certain things underlying, say, Iberian. Could certain R1b lines, but not others, have carried more "ancient" or "different" languages?

I know the "elite" from Aegean/Anatolia dominance scenario for the language shift in Etruscans is still alive and well, but it seems slightly odd that the addition of an "elite" group could still result in a people so "northern". I mean, all we have for Etruscans are "elite" burials, so far as I know, and so they would carry this "elite" admixture. Yet still so northern? It would have had to have been a handful. Or perhaps it was adopted from people with whom the Etruscans traded and whom they greatly respected? Is there any other example for something like that?

As Pax has pointed out so often, admixture from Greek admixed people from the south could easily result in Tuscans.

That's possible I guess, but it would imply that the majority of Imperial Romans derive their ancestry from an unknown Eastern Mediterranean or Aegean population, no?
 
There are some seriously awful (AWFUL!!!) posts surrounding this topic on a***ro***ica by hateful members with their heavy assumptions. I have no agenda and if a professionally conducted study proves the ancient Romans were anything (South/north Italian, German, Spanish, whatever) I'll live with it.

Anthrogenica is perhaps the most ridiculous forum because users take themselves very seriously, pretend to be expert even when they're clearly not, and support each other against those who think otherwise.
 
That's possible I guess, but it would imply that the majority of Imperial Romans derive their ancestry from an unknown Eastern Mediterranean or Aegean population, no?

I'm just thinking out loud. :)

Obviously, this is all conjecture on my part until we see the Etruscan sample(s) and can compare them to early Republican Era samples, as early as possible. Once we have that comparison, things will be much clearer.

The next question, even before the one as to why the Imperial Era Romans are more “homogeneously southern”, is why there’s a more “southern” group within the early days of Rome at all.

I would think the first order of business would be to compare those samples and the Imperial ones first to each other and then to samples from southern, more Greek areas of Italy at the same or slightly earlier times.

I've been repeating ad nauseam for years that I thought that migration from Greece to Italy began all the way back in the Helladic Era.

I also have said and still believe that it’s quite possible that there was population movement south to north in Italy very early, as there has been in modern times starting in the late 19th century but particularly from the 1950s to today. More rural areas are not affected, but in cities like Milano and Torino half the school children are of southern extraction.

If that doesn’t work, then one can consider other possibilities.
 
To me it looks like both Greeks & Romans were ancient Mycenaean-like people. (Quite early Eastern immigration to Italy) Etruscans are different, probably usual steppe male (R1b? / eef female mix. I do not understand the journey of the Etruscan & Latin languages in this case.

I think that's a bit unlikely from a genetic and linguistic pont of view. I think that the explanation is simply that the EEF+Steppe+Extra CHG/INF in the Romans eventually became very similar to that of the Mycenaean Greeks. But the process until then was different in each of those populations. When I model Italians and Greeks using Global 25 Datasheet on nMonte, using many steppe-derived European reference populations, ancient and modern Greeks seem to clearly "prefer" Yamnaya and CWC samples, whereas Italians from Tuscany and Bergamo clearly "prefer" Bell Beaker samples. The much closer relationship of Italic to Celtic (and we might add Lusitanian too) and the pretty divergent and even archaic nature of the two in relation to "later" splits from the LPIE dialect continuum cannot be overlooked, either. If I had to guess, I'd put the ultimate origin of Italo-Celtic between France/Belgium and West Germany/Netherlands, and that of Italic somewhere in the vicinity of Northeastern Italy, in the vicinity of the Alps, maybe Austria, Slovenia or Hungary.
 
Here's a comparison, with the PCA from the study of the thread:

wEB9YWY.png


EeHjBLk.png
 
Many Romans are south of southern Italians. Would Germanic admixture be sufficient to explain the subsequent northern shift? How much Germanic Y-DNA is there in southern Italy, 5-10%?

Apulia:

E: 22%
J2a: 20%
G: 15%
R1b: 13%
J1: 8%
I2: 8%
I1: 6%
T: 5%
R1a: 5%

Basilicata:

J2a: 24%
G: 21%
E: 16%
R1b: 16%
J1: 7%
I2: 7%
T: 5%
I1: 2%
R1a: 2%

Calabria:

G: 24%
J2a: 18%
E: 18%
R1b: 16%
R1a: 8%
J1: 8%
I1: 5%
T: 2%
I2: 1%

(from Ftdna)

R1b might be both local and foreign, E-V13 too as we have seen.
 

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