Talk on Ancient Italian/Roman DNA over in Stanford.

Oh, I can imagine there is some heart burning. :) There is a deafening silence about it from certain quarters. I'm afraid the late 19th century "anthropologists" and "historians" got this wrong too, just like they got the Mycenaeans wrong, yes?
Technically, though, that's only true in the Imperial period, after, I believe, the incorporation of the southern parts of Italy. In the Republican period you have two groups it seems, one modern day Northern Italian like, and one Southern Italian like. What will be interesting to see is if the "northern" group is more "local" than the southern group, of if there was a division even before all the wars to incorporate the south. I've always believed that the patricians and plebeians were basically the same people, but perhaps not. If they weren't, then the conflicts were "ethnic" as well as "class" oriented struggles for power.
That's true of course, but the only cultures in Iron Age Italy I am aware of are the Apenninic cultures and the Urnfield descended cultures. The latter I strongly associate with Etruscans, but we'll see when we have the samples.
 
I see that same people who suggest that steppe-less Hittite samples are not representative and belong to Hattians now suggest that these Roman samples belong to mercenaries, slaves etc. ;))
 
My guess is that the northern italian like iron age group are the terramare refugees who brought cremation

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It has been denied for a long time by some Italian users that Italy received post neolithic Near Eastern admixture, and based on the results the answer is clearly yes, with that being said modern South Italians would be the closest to ancient Romans while the Northerners have more foreign influence probadly coming from Celtic and Germanic tribes who left a significant genetic impact there but much less in the South.
 
Is anyone really surprised that the Romans were autosomally southern Italian :grin:
if they are , they do not know roman history.
.
do they also know, the Romans conquered Gaul/france, held large areas in Spain and invaded britain at least 2 generations before any attempt to invade alpine lands.
 
My guess is that the northern italian like iron age group are the terramare refugees who brought cremation
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I think the Iron Age is too late - the genetic divide must be between Villanova/Latial and Sub-Apenninic. We'll see which is which when the paper comes out.


Though I think it's important to remember that the vast majority of Italic tribes did not cremate their dead. The Umbrians, Samnites etc. Practiced inhumation in the typically Indo-European style with bronze weapons and elaborate depictions of fight scenes in their necropolises. Some individuals were buried with chariots as well.
 
I see that same people who suggest that steppe-less Hittite samples are not representative and belong to Hattians now suggest that these Roman samples belong to mercenaries, slaves etc. ;))

The ones who had clustered near Syria and Iraqis would be certainly foreigners who came from the eastern part of the Roman empire and the ones who cluster with modern Aegean Greeks like the 3 remedello outlier sample would be similar to ancient Roman samples and maybe even resemble hittite/ Anatolia BA samples also.
 
It has been denied for a long time by some Italian users that Italy received post neolithic Near Eastern admixture, and based on the results the answer is clearly yes, with that being said modern South Italians would be the closest to ancient Romans while the Northerners have more foreign influence probadly coming from Celtic and Germanic tribes who left a significant genetic impact there but much less in the South.
northerners ( north-east ) have danubian culture ( around modern hungary and east austria) plus celtic from south Germany....and also most likely anything north of the sava river
north-west have gallic-celtic with indigenous ligurian
 
I see that same people who suggest that steppe-less Hittite samples are not representative and belong to Hattians now suggest that these Roman samples belong to mercenaries, slaves etc. ;))

We can't possibly know that yet, right?

I mean, she didn't give any clues as to whether certain types were from tradesmen or middle class, "local" people with "local" or "Italian" isotope values, and other types were from Ostia and other ports, where you might expect traders, or from slaves' graves.

Plus, it depends on the period, I think. Republican Era Rome was 60% modern Northern Italian like and 40% Southern Italian like, so I think the mercenary, slave thing is a non-starter for that period. It may be a reflection of the admixture between originally Italic speaking newcomers and the natives. We can't know because we have only one set of samples from southern Italy, and that's from just one corner of Sicily which had some Beaker influence. As Markod said, we need samples from Samnites and further south too, and from Etruria.

I don't know what anyone could mean about "mercenaries" in Rome itself. It must be from someone who knows nothing about Roman history. If by "mercenaries" they mean Roman auxiliaries, then I think it's still a non-starter for a big chunk of the time. Until into the Empire, the legions were primarily composed of people from the Italian peninsula.

The later Imperial period is different, but even then, most of the legions were stationed abroad, not in Italy, and certainly not in Rome.

As for slaves, they were present in the Republic and later and in increasing numbers in the Imperial period, as were foreign merchants, and even groups like the Jews. It's hard to know how many would have contributed to the succeeding generations. So much depends on the genetics of groups further south in the Italian peninsula, who would definitely have been incorporated into the population.

Generally speaking, I don't think most slaves had surviving progeny, certainly not miners, or galley slaves, or slaves worked to death in latifundia. Freed slaves of the type who would be working in Rome would only have progeny if they were freed (The Romans didn't have "breeding" farms as happened in the American south: more conquests meant there were always more slaves.), but you would normally be freed in later life, so less of a chance for surviving descendants.

It always amuses me that in the imagination of these people all of the Roman slaves were from West Asia or North Africa. :) Don't they know how many slaves were taken from Gaul, conveniently nearby, and the Balkans, and Germania, and Spain. Selective vision, I guess. :) That's what happens when you approach everything through the lens of your own particular agenda instead of just following the facts.

There's also the fact that urban centers are always the ones most destroyed during wars and invasions. I doubt most of the Imperial residents of Rome survived.

Does this have anything to do with the Collegno samples? I don't think that we can extrapolate from them to all of Northern Italy at that time, although it is certainly true that Rome settled veterans there, and many would have been from southern Italy. As you can see below, the majority of the colonies were in the center. If a good part of the veterans were from southern Italy and Sicily, then that might partly explain the changing demographics. There are few in the Po plain because a lot of it was swamp until the Romans drained it.

500px-Romancoloniae.jpg


That should be added to the video, i.e draining swamps, thus producing more farmland and tamping down malaria. :)

 
It has been denied for a long time by some Italian users that Italy received post neolithic Near Eastern admixture, and based on the results the answer is clearly yes, with that being said modern South Italians would be the closest to ancient Romans while the Northerners have more foreign influence probadly coming from Celtic and Germanic tribes who left a significant genetic impact there but much less in the South.

Perhaps you should re-read the notes on the Republican period, which, after all, was the period of the "creation" of Rome. They were 60% modern Northern Italian like. Also, you're speculating far beyond the data we have.

If you are referring to me, that is complete misinterpretation or deliberate misinformation, and extremely misleading. The truth is quite the contrary. What I said is that it might have started far back in the Neolithic, and might also have come with the Iran Neo like migrations of the Bronze Age. I argued about it constantly with people like Sikeliot and Fire Haired, who used to insist it all came from Near Eastern slaves and Moors. You're welcome to scour the site through the search engine and see if you can come up with anything to the contrary.

The last person who so completely misunderstood people's posts and forgot even his own was Fire-Haired. You don't want to get a reputation for problems with reading comprehension.

As for the "Levantine" signal it was sporadic, remember? It also disappeared. Perhaps it was the Jews leaving? The idea that the western Jews were formed by the admixture of Jewish men and some Italian women, a population which then went to France and the Rhineland, may need looking at again.
 
I didn't get the memo when suggesting that the original Roman founders being north Italian as being "Nordicist", or "Euro-centric". Last I checked, Italy was still Europe, but perhaps it's the fact that north Italians are genetically very close to French and Swiss that ruffled a few feathers. Obviously we're looking at a North-South cline in Italy which still exists and probably began during the LBA/Iron age with the arrival of people from the north/Alps area. Two different groups merging is exactly what this is, with additional Middle Eastern influence in the south in the later periods.
 
Perhaps you should re-read the notes on the Republican period, which, after all, was the period of the "creation" of Rome. They were 60% modern Northern Italian like. Also, you're speculating far beyond the data we have.

If you are referring to me, that is complete misinterpretation or deliberate misinformation, and extremely misleading. The truth is quite the contrary. What I said is that it might have started far back in the Neolithic, and might also have come with the Iran Neo like migrations of the Bronze Age. I argued about it constantly with people like Sikeliot and Fire Haired, who used to insist it all came from Near Eastern slaves and Moors. You're welcome to scour the site through the search engine and see if you can come up with anything to the contrary.

The last person who so completely misunderstood people's posts and forgot even his own was Fire-Haired. You don't want to get a reputation for problems with reading comprehension.

As for the "Levantine" signal it was sporadic, remember? It also disappeared. Perhaps it was the Jews leaving? The idea that the western Jews were formed by the admixture of Jewish men and some Italian women, a population which then went to France and the Rhineland, may need looking at again.

The Levant Neolithic geneflow appeared after the bronze age, it didn't dissapear but the continuous gene flow from the Levant has stopped after the middle ages. Nobody is talking about Jews here. South Italians have considerable post neolithic Near Eastern admixture, no one can deny that it's obvious if you compare Sicilians to North Italians or even Tuscans the difference is significant both genetically, culturally and physically vise. Some slaves had come from the Near East, but most weren't slaves but free people who came as Christian 'Greeks' from the Eastern byzantine empire, many were Hellenized Syrians, Arameans, Assyrians, Armenians these people later assimilated into the Italian gene pool whether you like it or not but the ME gene flow is undeniable in Italians, especially in Southerners. The nordicist minority who keeps chanting that Italians are closely related to Southern French, and the dark Spainards are muh "North African" compared to Sicilians, especially the Maltese who have a special name called the Nordicum Maltese won't sleep for weeks. After the 1001 post on their miserable site on the internet which has intended from the beginning to demonstrate that Southerners don't look like Lebanese seem to fail understanding science, genetic and history and their fair tale of homogeneous Italic unity seems to collapse.
 
I didn't get the memo when suggesting that the original Roman founders being north Italian as being "Nordicist", or "Euro-centric". Last I checked, Italy was still Europe, but perhaps it's the fact that north Italians are genetically very close to French and Swiss that ruffled a few feathers. Obviously we're looking at a North-South cline in Italy which still exists and probably began during the LBA/Iron age with the arrival of people from the north/Alps area. Two different groups merging is exactly what this is, with additional Middle Eastern influence in the south in the later periods.

There are only 8 Iron Age samples. The bulk is from the Empire.

The two groups didn't merge, one replaced the other.
 
The Levant Neolithic geneflow appeared after the bronze age, it didn't dissapear but the continuous gene flow from the Levant has stopped after the middle ages. Nobody is talking about Jews here. South Italians have considerable post neolithic Near Eastern admixture, no one can deny that it's obvious if you compare Sicilians to North Italians or even Tuscans the difference is significant both genetically, culturally and physically vise. Some slaves had come from the Near East, but most weren't slaves but free people who came as Christian 'Greeks' from the Eastern byzantine empire, many were Hellenized Syrians, Arameans, Assyrians, Armenians these people later assimilated into the Italian gene pool whether you like it or not but the ME gene flow is undeniable in Italians, especially in Southerners.

You really do have a reading comprehension problem. Read my post again. I never denied post Neolithic gene flow from the Near East.

As for the rest it's your old ravings, completely unsupported by this paper and with no actual proof whatsoever. You might want to go over the notes once again. The changes didn't take place after the establishment of the Eastern Empire but before. The Hellenthal papers based on modern samples and positing "Near Eastern" gene flow in Late Antiquity has been falsified. The ROLL OFF program upon which they relied, and purporting to date gene flow has been proved wrong again, that's if they were even able to discern which group was the NEW group. As I said at the time, what they might have been seeing was Gallic and Germanic geneflow INTO a very southern European population. That would fit with this ancient dna and that from Collegno.



I used to think you were Sikeliot or Azzurro, but they're smarter than this. You must be Drac. Go back to Stormfront where you belong. Those morons have been totally discredited and are irrelevant.

Ed. This is where we addressed the Hellenthal hypotheses.
https://www.eupedia.com/forum/threa...ddle-age-admixture-event?highlight=Hellenthal
 
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Since we only have 8 Iron Age samples, and we have a good number of samples from port cities, none from the south except from a small area with Beaker influence, and none from Northern Italy except Remedello and Parma Beaker, I think a great deal of caution is warranted.

We're only talking about Lazio here. I don't know if 8 samples is enough to draw hard and fast conclusions about Republican Rome, but it might be suggestive of two populations. From the limited information we have, perhaps it was a question of patricians (more "Italic" ancestry) and plebeians, or maybe it was a case of indigenous Romans and new citizens from further south in Italy. How can we possibly know at this point?

How can we know, also, how much samples from port cities or slave samples skewed the "average"? Hellenized Anatolian merchants and Greek ones as well might be artificially changing the balance.

As for the "sporadic" Levantine intrusion, that "tail" toward Syria disappears. I don't know why. We can't know why until we have more info about the samples.

We need to see the paper, and they need to provide not only detailed burial information but isotope information so we know the rough percentages of movement from within the peninsula versus from without, even with all the limitations of isotope analysis.
 
I didn't get the memo when suggesting that the original Roman founders being north Italian as being "Nordicist", or "Euro-centric". Last I checked, Italy was still Europe, but perhaps it's the fact that north Italians are genetically very close to French and Swiss that ruffled a few feathers. Obviously we're looking at a North-South cline in Italy which still exists and probably began during the LBA/Iron age with the arrival of people from the north/Alps area. Two different groups merging is exactly what this is, with additional Middle Eastern influence in the south in the later periods.

Northern Italians are actually genetically closest to Iberians, not the French, although if we had samples from Provence that might be the exception. They are similar ONLY to the Italian speaking Swiss, NOT the German or French Swiss. Switzerland is very stratified not only linguistically but ethnically. Nor are we talking here about the people of the Veneto or Friuli, since they are undoutedly using the academic samples from Bergamo and perhaps Piemonte.

So, sorry to disappoint, but still a Southern European population with a respectable chunk of "West Asian" in the old calculators.

Ed. For our Iberian friends on other sites, I'm sorry to disappoint, but none of the Iron Age Republican samples are "Iberian" or "French" like ....they are Northern Italian like. :)
 
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or the Danubian admixed Terramare...

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could be, but the expansion of cremation in Europe is linked to somewhat related IE languages in this case, Italic, Celtic, Lusitanian, Ligurian, and what more.
 
I think we perhaps should review the dates for the expansion of Roman control. Most of it was done before the advent of the imperium under Augustus.

This shows the expansion year by year very clearly, and also helpfully lists the appearance of the great generals. The expansion began in earnest in the mid-300's B.C., but the height of the Empire and the Pax Romana was much later.


I would think there's enough glory to cover both periods. :)
 
You really do have a reading comprehension problem. Read my post again. I never denied post Neolithic gene flow from the Near East.

As for the rest it's your old ravings, completely unsupported by this paper and with no actual proof whatsoever. You might want to go over the notes once again. The changes didn't take place after the establishment of the Eastern Empire but before. The Hellenthal papers based on modern samples and positing "Near Eastern" gene flow in Late Antiquity has been falsified. The ROLL OFF program upon which they relied, and purporting to date gene flow has been proved wrong again, that's if they were even able to discern which group was the NEW group. As I said at the time, what they might have been seeing was Gallic and Germanic geneflow INTO a very southern European population. That would fit with this ancient dna and that from Collegno.



I used to think you were Sikeliot or Azzurro, but they're smarter than this. You must be Drac. Go back to Stormfront where you belong. Those morons have been totally discredited and are irrelevant.

Ed. This is where we addressed the Hellenthal hypotheses.
https://www.eupedia.com/forum/threa...ddle-age-admixture-event?highlight=Hellenthal

IRON AGE TO REPUBLICAN PERIOD (700-20BC)
Note: Separated from previous period by 1000 year gap.
Fewer samples, of those that exist 60% overlap with North Italy, 40% overlap with South Italy and Sicily, centroid of overall cluster in central Italy but no samples occur there, very wide spread.
EHG appears, Levant N Appears for the first time, sporadic and inhomogeneous distribution, Iran_N increases further.

IMPERIAL PERIOD
Dense cluster centroid between Greeks, Cypriots, South Italians/Sicilians, and Syrians, closest to Sicilians. Long tail stretching from central cluster to Syrians and Iraqi Jews. Couple of Northern-shifted samples overlapping N Italy, France, Spain.
Iran_N increases further, Levant N again sporadic and inhomogeneous.


LATE ANTIQUITY
Tight cluster centroid in S Italy, in the same place as in the previous period. Southern tail to Middle East disappears. N Italian, Northern European and NW European outliers exist.

AFTER
Resemble modern central Italians.

The Near Eastern like outliers dissapeared after the antiquity because they were later absorbed into the genepool, it's not the same as the Near Eastern aka. Levant N admixture dissapeared rather widespreaded into furthern north and became more balanced out with less regional differences, well Sicilians have around ~20% Levant Neolithic like admixture while Northerners have less than 5%.
 
Well, if the long tail to Syrians and Iraqi Jews appears in the Imperial Period, Levant_N having been found in non-significant proportions before, and that tail disappears by the Late Antiquity, then it seems to me that those people did not represent the bulk of the indigenous population and probably were not representative of the people who lived beyond the walls of the port towns and metropolises. It seems to me then that the average, general population was genetically like South Italians. The "northern shift" in most of South Europe after the Late Antiquity seems to have been a consistent pattern in many regions.
 

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