Talk on Ancient Italian/Roman DNA over in Stanford.

We have a PCA from Ávila-Arcos et al. showing Etruscans as more northern than modern Tuscans
UozlgX3.jpg


So considering the two populations didn't mingle that much and Romans eventually prevailed in the region without getting much admixture from the more northern population, Etruscans fit perfectly as those "north Italian" samples.


There are many Tuscans who are more northern than TSI sample.
 
I was thinking more of migrations within the Italian peninsula. Come to think of it even the Middle Ages might be too early for the northern shift. Medieval Rome probably wouldn't have attracted many newcomers.

After the sacking and looting of the invasions, Rome was a pit until the late 1400s. It had a couple of thousand inhabitants with shepherds keeping their flocks in the forum. People have no idea how devastating it all was...

Sixtus IV was the one who first started cleaning it up. Leave it to a Ligurian. :)

He had a lot of faults, nepotism among them, but ""You gave your city temples, streets, squares, fortifications, bridges and restored the Acqua Vergine as far as the Trevi..." In addition to restoring the aqueduct that provided Rome an alternative to the river water, which had made the city famously unhealthy, he restored or rebuilt over 30 of Rome's dilapidated churches such as San Vitale (1475) and Santa Maria del Popolo, and he added seven new ones. The Sistine Chapel was sponsored by Sixtus IV, as was the Ponte Sisto,[7] the Sistine Bridge (the first new bridge across the Tiber since Antiquity) and the building of Via Sistina (later named Borgo Sant'Angelo), a road leading from Castel Sant'Angelo to Saint Peter. All of that was done to facilitate the integration of the Vatican Hill and Borgo with the heart of Old Rome. That was part of a broader scheme of urbanization carried out under Sixtus IV, who swept the long-established markets from the Campidoglio in 1477 and decreed in a bull of 1480 the widening of streets and the first post-Roman paving, the removal of porticoes and other post-classical impediments to free public passage."

 
Angela, calm down and abstain from using ad hominem replies. I'm not used to those kinds of forums.
Nah, it means that (60+40)/2=100 North Italians. I know quite well what you thought of when you wrote that. You assumed that North Italians were the R1b rich royals, whereas South Italians were the plebs with whatever is left. Again, a person you love always shares the same ideas of royalty steppe vs peasant locals, despite being contradicted consistently by what he just brushes off as outliers.

"Again, a person you love always shares the same ideas of royalty steppe vs peasant locals, despite being contradicted consistently by what he just brushes off as outliers.
South Italians also have a wealth of Yamnaya admixture and just like the ones in the North they could have easily formed a population continuum (we see wide/loose clusters all the time in Indo-Euros). Then they all mixed with perhaps quite numerous farmer and Iran Neolithic rich locals, to become more or less homogenised by the Imperial period.
,

No, you just frequent sites run by a notorious anti-Semite and anti-Southern Italian who was a denizen of Stormfront for years. Probably still is, just under an assumed name. Please, spare me.

Now you're a mind reader. How about you just read what I write. Do you never actually READ what I post? Or, you just ignore it if it contradicts your preconceptions.

In response to Markod I just posted the percentages of Yamnaya like ancestry for the three major regions of Italy. They're not very different. The differences between the three areas, while they exist, are often exaggerated.

I also just posted above that in response to you, and further upthread pages ago, that we have no idea who those 8 "Republican" samples were.

It could have been a split between Patrician and Plebeian, OR, as I've said three or four times now, the 60% of the population which resembles Northern Italians could include both Patricians and Plebeians. What don't you understand here? How could I be any clearer?

"Again, a person you love always shares the same ideas of royalty steppe vs peasant locals, despite being contradicted consistently by what he just brushes off as outliers."

I have no idea who you're talking about here, but as I just showed that I didn't say what you accuse me of saying, it's irrelevant.

Btw, accusing me of racism is a personal attack, or do you think it's just fine?
 
,
No, you just frequent sites run by a notorious anti-Semite and anti-Southern Italian. Please, spare me.
Now you're a mind reader. How about you just read what I write. Do you never actually READ what I post?
In response to Markod I just posted the percentages of Yamnaya like ancestry for the three major regions of Italy. They're not very different. The differences between the three areas, while they exist, are often exaggerated.
I also just posted above that in response to you, and further upthread pages ago, that we have no idea who those 8 "Republican" samples were.
It could have been a split between Patrician and Plebeian, OR, as I've said three or four times now, the 60% of the population which resembles Northern Italians could include both Patricians and Plebeians. What don't you understand here? How could I be any clearer?
"Again, a person you love always shares the same ideas of royalty steppe vs peasant locals, despite being contradicted consistently by what he just brushes off as outliers."
I have no idea who you're talking about here, but as I just showed that I didn't say what you accuse me of saying, it's irrelevant.
I take what the authors say, without adding any of my own biases and interpretations. I'm familiar with all the studies, which have been referenced here, so I don't feel the need to look at your interpretation. Just wait for the guys who actually work in this field to do their job. There's no need to draw conclusions out of thin air. For example, do you not like that the Imperial Romans are South shifted, whereas the Republican ones plotted at either extremes? Fair enough, wait for more data. There's no point twisting this as if the lack of continuity for North Italian-likes in the Imperial period is due to those plotting with South Italians being some kind of non-Roman outliers. I don't know where from in Italy you come, but in my opinion people in the North are more admixed with foreigners than those in the South. It has always been like that, both then and also now.

I'm done with this.
 
What is this Patrician/Plebian talk? Genetics does not work that way.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson–Hemings_controversy) Free article btw.

Have a good night folk, love you all. "Pleb" or "Patrician".

What on earth do the Patricians and Plebs have to do with the mating of President Jefferson (white, Scots/Irish) with his quadroon slave, Sally Hemings?

Don't say I've never done anything for you:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_of_the_Orders

Whether there was any significant difference genetically between them or whether it was strictly class based or whether one informed the other, we don't know. We need clearly identifiable samples.

Regardless, the division broke down, as I described above, already by the time of Julius Caesar. As I also said above, there was nothing in Italy, that I know of, like the caste system in India, or even like what existed in Sparta.

Some people seem to think that objectively describing a situation means one approves of it. That is not at all the case.
 
I take what the authors say, without adding any of my own biases and interpretations. I'm familiar with all the studies, which have been referenced here, so I don't feel the need to look at your interpretation. Just wait for the guys who actually work in this field to do their job. There's no need to draw conclusions out of thin air. For example, do you not like that the Imperial Romans are South shifted, whereas the Republican ones plotted at either extremes? Fair enough, wait for more data. There's no point twisting this as if the lack of continuity for North Italian-likes in the Imperial period is due to those plotting with South Italians being some kind of non-Roman outliers. I don't know where from in Italy you come, but in my opinion people in the North are more admixed with foreigners than those in the South. It has always been like that, both then and also now.

I'm done with this.

Great.

We don't need people here who don't want to read someone else's posts and would prefer to use their mind reading ability to put words into that person's mouth, or at least have great problems with reading comprehension. Nowhere did I say anything like what you are imputing to me.

I don't know your motivations, and I frankly don't care.

Not that it matters, but I was born in the Lunigiana, northwest Tuscany, with ancestry from Parma in Emilia, La Spezia in Liguria, and the said part of northwest Tuscany where I was born. My genealogy indicates we've been "in place" from the 1400s, when records were first kept. Whatever "admixture" there was was a long time ago. Genetically I plot right between Bergamo and Tuscans, as I should, given my ancestry.

My husband is of Calabrian and Neapolitan ancestry. He hasn't done a family tree, but I would bet his ancestry goes back at least that far in those areas and probably much further back. Genetically, he's a typical Southern Italian.

By ancestry we're both Italian, and that's enough.

Satisfied?

Now go ahead: stereotype us both, or is it only me you want to stereotype and smear? Everything comes down to Balkan politics with some of you doesn't it? Anyone who doesn't buy one of your myths is to be attacked and their views distorted.

WAIT A MINUTE! A light bulb just went off. You were talking about Lazaridis! God forbid someone should think Lazaridis writes good papers. That justifies distorting my views, does it?

How unutterably pathetic. You don't even get what it makes you look like that you don't care what I write; you'd prefer to substitute your psychic understanding of my views! If it weren't so sad it would be funny.
 
Other PCAs.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/UUceZx7.png
I still expect the samples to be in in line with modern Italian structure. The Romans would range from Tuscans to Spaniards, conquered Italians being Aegean-like or about the same as Romans.
 
edited-

I figured it out on my own.

Thank you for your help. not
 
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Great.

We don't need people here who don't want to read someone else's posts and would prefer to use their mind reading ability to put words into that person's mouth, or at least have great problems with reading comprehension. Nowhere did I say anything like what you are imputing to me.

I don't know your motivations, and I frankly don't care.

Not that it matters, but I was born in the Lunigiana, northwest Tuscany, with ancestry from Parma in Emilia, La Spezia in Liguria, and the said part of northwest Tuscany where I was born. My genealogy indicates we've been "in place" from the 1400s, when records were first kept. Whatever "admixture" there was was a long time ago. Genetically I plot right between Bergamo and Tuscans, as I should, given my ancestry.

My husband is of Calabrian and Neapolitan ancestry. He hasn't done a family tree, but I would bet his ancestry goes back at least that far in those areas and probably much further back. Genetically, he's a typical Southern Italian.

By ancestry we're both Italian, and that's enough.

Satisfied?

Now go ahead: stereotype us both, or is it only me you want to stereotype and smear? Everything comes down to Balkan politics with some of you doesn't it? Anyone who doesn't buy one of your myths is to be attacked and their views distorted.

WAIT A MINUTE! A light bulb just went off. You were talking about Lazaridis! God forbid someone should think Lazaridis writes good papers. That justifies distorting my views, does it?

How unutterably pathetic. You don't even get what it makes you look like that you don't care what I write; you'd prefer to substitute your psychic understanding of my views! If it weren't so sad it would be funny.

Man, you ought to calm down.
 
Man, you ought to calm down.

Man, don't EVER, EVER put words in my mouth and accuse me of racism again. As if I could be racist about my husband and children. It's disgusting.

You crossed the line big time, buddy, and owe me an apology.

You're on ignore for the forseeable future
 
Another PCA chart with a sample labeled Italian_North:
http://i.imgur.com/6F9849I.png

Like I said, the samples from the Republic to Empire should be in the range of Spaniards (Romans) to Sicilians/Mycenaeans (some Italians who got conquered by Romans).
 
Another PCA chart with a sample labeled Italian_North:
http://i.imgur.com/6F9849I.png

Like I said, the samples from the Republic to Empire should be in the range of Spaniards (Romans) to Sicilians/Mycenaeans (some Italians who got conquered by Romans).
There's no reason to jump to any conclusion about these samples. We don't know their origins or their stories. And there's no reason to conclude that these south Italian samples are those of people who were conquered by Romans, especially since we know nothing about them.

Not trying to pick battles, and you have my thanks for posting what's been found thus far
 
There's no reason to jump to any conclusion about these samples. We don't know their origins or their stories. And there's no reason to conclude that these south Italian samples are those of people who were conquered by Romans, especially since we know nothing about them.

Not trying to pick battles, and you have my thanks for posting what's been found thus far

Many people get some Italian % in their results and connect it to the Ancient Romans.
Each of them had in mind an image of how the Romans were.

Fascinating, and sometimes ugly reactions.
 
Hold on a second, I just remembered something big - does nobody remember that Western Med. island paper due to come out sometime in the next few months by Reich? He said that Sicily had signs of Steppe ancestry during the BA and possibly even before - yet according to this paper, Central Italy only received Steppe sometime just before (or maybe even during, though I think LBA is more likely) the Iron Age.

So what's going on here - how can Sicily have signs of Steppe TWO MILLENNIA before Lazio?!!

I think we need to revisit the Sicilian Bell Beaker sample - was that not just a mix of Iran_N and EEF?

Indeed interesting to see some Iran_N in the Sicilian Beaker, albeit at a somewhat lower share than in Minoan_Odigitria (where it was 13.7% according to Lazaridis et al.). This vindicates the theory suggested by Harrison and Heyd about a 3rd millennium expansion of a cultural network centered around the Mesopotamian early urban societies. This interaction sphere reached the central Mediterranean including Sicily between 2600 and 2200 BC.
Yet it has to be noted that this Sicilian Beaker is still much more Barcin_N than any modern Sicilian, and accordingly, in the PCA of moderns falls into the no man's land between Sardinians and all other Europeans.

It's also interesting to note that he lacks the Levantine admixture that's so prominent in modern Sicilians. So we can safely say that this arrived later. Though a lot is still possible with this terminus post quem of 2500/1900 BC...

And finally, as the Barcin_N got strongly reduced, the Iran_N got reduced by the same amount too. Which means a lot of additional Iran_N had to migrate to Sicily afterwards. The Iran_N that is already in the Beaker doesn't explain all of the Iran_N in modern Sicilians.

Chances are, archaeologically, that this Iran_N in the Sicilian BB was actually from the Aegean, and not straight from Mesopotamia.

In early Metal Age times influences from the Aegean spread westward to Sicily, Sardinia, Italy, and Spain, reaching also the smaller islands of the western Mediterranean. This maritime diffusion was probably carried by seafarers in search of new sources of metal as well as markets for their products, and the traders and adventurers followed the old Megalithic routes. In the beginning the bringers of metal and the Late Megalithic colonists may well have been the same people.The evidence of the racial composition of the Copper Age sailors who reached Italy and the Italian islands is simple and direct. The moderately tall, long-headed, mid narrow-nosed Megalithic people who were implanted, during the Late Neolithic, upon the smaller Mediterranean type which had preceded them, were followed, during the Aeneolithic by other, of the same kind, in the company of equally tall brachycephals. The latter resembled the people of the same Dinaric head form in Cyprus, Crete, and the Aegean, and without doubt formed a westward extension of the same movement.


In Sicily, which probably received metal earlier than most of the mainland or the islands farther west, Copper Age skulls of one series from Isnello are all of general Mediterranean type, with the Megalithic variety predominant, as shown by excessive skull lengths, moderate vault heights, and narrow noses. The mean stature for twenty-four males, presumably of this type, was 169 cm. Other Sicilian series, however, do include brachycephals, as at Chiusella and Villafratti, with cranial indices ranging as high as 91. These form, however, no more than one-third of the total Aeneolithic series from Sicily. In the true Bronze Age which followed, the incidence of these brachycephals increased.


In Sardinia a large series of sixty-three Copper Age skulls from Anghelu Ruju includes sixteen per cent, or ten individuals, of the new brachycephalic type, while the others resemble the long heads of Sicily. The group as a whole, irrespective of head form, was tall. The racial composition of Corsica during these periods is known only through the presence of one small, short-statured, long-headed female skeleton of either Neolithic or Aeneolithic age, and two brachycephalic crania from the Bronze Age. It would be interesting to supplement this survey of the Italian islands with a study of the crania found in the elaborate burial chambers of Malta, of late Neolithic or early Metal Age date, but the excavators of these vaults, professional and otherwise, literally threw away what was probably the longest unified series of human crania ever found, numbering over seven thousand. We are told that these early Maltese were "Mediterraneans," and know little else about them.


On the mainland of Italy, Aeneolithic skeletons, which are found mostly on the western side of the central portion of the peninsula, belong to the same types found on the islands, but brachycephals are more abundant, being equal in number to the dolicho and mesocephals. Some of the Aeneolithic Italians of the Campagna and of Latium were very tall and large headed, with both mesocephalic and brachycephalic fortes. In Istria, at the head of the Adriatic, the Dinaric population which is dominant in that peninsula today had begun to arrive in the Copper and Bronze Ages, judging by a series of six female crania which bear definite indications of this type, such as flattening of the occiput, narrow face, and projecting nasal bones. The new invaders may, therefore, have travelled up the Adriatic as well as over the Tyrrhenian Sea.


Reviewing the Italian material, on both metrical and morphological grounds we may determine that the round-headed racial type which came into the middle Mediterranean with the introduction of metal was of a general Dinaric character, and without doubt came from Asia Minor and the Aegean, where it first appeared in the last centuries of the third millennium B.C. Since the metal ages of the middle and western Mediterranean were later than those farther east, the chronological aspect of this theory presents no contradictions.

Coon associated the early spread of the Eneolithic into the West Med. as being proto-Bell-Beaker, with Bronze Age migrations deriving from Anatolia. I tend to agree.

Although there seems to be little doubt in the minds of the archaeologists that the Bell Beaker culture developed in Spain, and although eastern Mediterranean brachycephals came there at about the same time, the manner in which the physical type and the culture became identified with each other is still obscure.

During the Early Bronze Age, after the efflorescence of the Bell Beaker people, Spain became a great center of metallurgy and trading activity, rivalling the Aegean in importance. The colonists from the east, who had originally located themselves in Spain merely as miners and forwarding agents of metal, now settled down to producing the finished products of the Bronze Age in Spain itself, for local sale, since disorders in the Mycenaean and Minoan realms had apparently cut them off from their homelands. Furthermore, the introduction of fresh cultural elements from the east suggests that new people had joined them.

Anybody want to take up bets about R1b-L51 brachycephals being this first metal age wave, and pred. J2a1 being the second? What's less clear, though, is what the source of trace Steppe in Copper Age Sicily is. I'd imagine it's distantly related to Armenia_ChL, but I'm not sure.
 
Hold on a second, I just remembered something big - does nobody remember that Western Med. island paper due to come out sometime in the next few months by Reich? He said that Sicily had signs of Steppe ancestry during the BA and possibly even before - yet according to this paper, Central Italy only received Steppe sometime just before (or maybe even during, though I think LBA is more likely) the Iron Age.

So what's going on here - how can Sicily have signs of Steppe TWO MILLENNIA before Lazio?!!

I think we need to revisit the Sicilian Bell Beaker sample - was that not just a mix of Iran_N and EEF?



Chances are, archaeologically, that this Iran_N in the Sicilian BB was actually from the Aegean, and not straight from Mesopotamia.



Coon associated the early spread of the Eneolithic into the West Med. as being proto-Bell-Beaker, with Bronze Age migrations deriving from Anatolia. I tend to agree.

That was my suspicion. Till I read that comment(the "not even Anatolian_BA") from the PHD attending the event.
But only the paper itself will give us any more room for confirmation.
 
Another PCA chart with a sample labeled Italian_North:
http://i.imgur.com/6F9849I.png

Like I said, the samples from the Republic to Empire should be in the range of Spaniards (Romans) to Sicilians/Mycenaeans (some Italians who got conquered by Romans).

We'll have to wait and see. However, I don't see what Spaniards have to do with it. If the report is correct, 60% of the samples overlap with Northern Italians, not Spaniards.

Again, we really don't know who these people are, and there are only 8 samples from the Republican period, so we have to be cautious.

For the Board, once again, since it seems it didn't register.

If the presenter of this paper really said or meant that there was no Levantine Neolithic in any other Bronze Age samples, she is just incorrect. Perhaps it was just a misstatement.

"Plus, he's just wrong about the Anatolian Bronze Age, or this PHD student is wrong. I vaguely recall seeing a posting about their beloved Global 25 or whatever it is which showed exactly that. It showed high levels in Crete too if I recall correctly. Did a lot of Jewish slaves get sent there too? :)

More importantly, Lazaridis found it and published about it in his Mycenaean paper. Goodness, one has to remember what has been published or people could tell you just about anything.

"Bronze Age AnatoliaThe population from Bronze Age southwestern Anatolia does not form a clade with any single (N=1)population of the All set (p-value for rank=0 < 1e-25). It cannot be modelled as any 2-way mixture(Table S2.8), with the best ones involving a mixture of Anatolian Neolithic and either Iran Neolithicor Caucasus hunter-gatherers. This population can be modelled as a 3-way mixture (Table S2.9) of~62% Neolithic Anatolian, ~32% Caucasus hunter-gatherer (CHG), and ~6% Levantine Neolithicancestry. This extra Levantine Neolithic ancestry parallels the PCA (Fig. 1b) that shows that theBronze Age Anatolian sample is to the “east” (towards the Levant) relative to the Minoans andMycenaeans."

"In addition to the common Neolithic Anatolian and eastern (Caucasus/Iran-related) ancestry, theMycenaeans also had extra ancestry related to eastern European hunter-gatherers and UpperPaleolithic Siberians, while the Bronze Age southwestern Anatolians had extra ancestry related toLevantine Neolithic populations."

This is from the supplement, people, often more important than the paper. Page 32, table 2.9.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/art...MC5565772/#SD1"

"
 
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