MUST the usual suspects exaggerate everything to support their agenda and their past ludicrous claims?
I would direct people to results from 23andme. "Middle Eastern" is defined by 23andme as what other companies call "Caucasus" or Northern West Asia, i.e. Turkey, Iran, Armenia, the Caucasus countries. "North African" is not just North Africa proper, but also Arabia, Jordan and Palestine. I have been pointing that out for 7 years, but some people think if you repeat misinformation long enough, people will believe it.
I share with a load of Calabrians and Sicilians.
The Sicilians sometimes get 4-5% or so of "North African", which is the total of North Africa AND the Levant. That makes sense to me because the perhaps "North African" and "Levantine" ydna might come to about 10% in Sicily, but it was again a heavily male mediated migration, so I think it makes sense it would get whittled down.
That's more proof to me that by not having a SWAsian reference for a component that's been in Italy for thousands of years, they wind up exaggerating the amount of North African in Sicilians. I highly doubt it's above 10%, and it's probably somewhere around 6-7% maximum if I had to guess.
As for Calabria and other parts of Southern Italy, there's no way a few thousand Muslim soldiers sent to Bari or Napoli and then killed or expelled from there are going to import all this North African into Southern Italy. This is supported by the fact that Calabrians tend to get much lower North African than Sicilians at 23andme, under 1% in some cases, and other Southern Italians even less. Both groups can get double digits of additional "Northern West Asian". For Calabrians it can go from 10-20%, but that's a separate issue.
(Every time I share some actual fact about Italian history I see it repeated and distorted on other sites. Hell, a lot of the time they use my exact words to describe the occurrence, but then distort the significance.)
If some people knew anything about Italian history they'd also know that there was just as much and probably a lot more gene flow going from Southern Italy (especially Calabria) into Sicily than the other way around, starting in the Middle Ages, but continuing into pretty recent times, as for example after the devastating earthquakes in Messina, when a lot of Calabrians moved in to help resettle the area. It's for that reason that I said until I was blue in the face that you couldn't make much of the genetics of the Messina area.
As for the Etruscans, I think they will show CHG/Iran Neo, and I think there will be some J2 in the population. Whether there was a specific elite migration to Tuscany from the east I don't know. Hopefully, the ancient dna should clarify matters. However, I think we should be able to put to bed the notion that all the CHG/Iran Neo that came into Italy (and into Greece and the Balkans and parts of Spain as well) came with the Etruscans and all came in the last millennium BC. or even later. I've been saying for five years and more that given that it was already in Otzi, who was Copper Age, it must have started long before the first millennium BC, perhaps in the late Neolithic-Chalcolithic- early Bronze, and given it was all over the Balkans, could not have been unique to Italy.
That's it. I don't see anything yet that says I was wrong, although if I was, that's fine too. You can't be right all the time.