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I just posted this on the Calabrian thread. For those not reading it:
"I agree with you except for the fact that Modern Iranians and Caucasians do indeed have a lot of Iran Neo ancestry, along with Anatolian farmer. The gene flow went both ways. The fact is that a wave of that ancestry spread into Anatolia and mixed with the Anatolian farmers living there. Perhaps through Anatolians it spread south into the Levant, eventually even reaching North Africa. It definitely spread into the Central and Western Mediterranean, again, as I've said over and over again, as an admixed group. There is absolutely no evidence from history of a movement to Italy or Greece, for that matter, from the Caucasus itself.
In terms of Italy in, say, the Bronze and Iron Age, I'm not sure if all of it came via the Greeks or if some of it came directly from Anatolia itself. (It certainly didn't go to Etruria, as the Etruscans clearly came from Central Europe, which 90% of the internet said was fantasy when I and a few others insisted on it here and on anthrogenica; one of the many things they and eurogenes got wrong about Southern Europe.) In isolated places like southern and southwestern Sardinia in the Iron Age, some of it may have come with Phoenicians. Perhaps a bit arrived in the same way in Northwestern Sicily. The rest of Sicily and the mainland are different.
The Moots paper, other than providing the ancient samples, tends to confuse rather than clarify the issue of what happened in Imperial Age. Once we get Southern Italian samples and Greek samples from the Iron Age, we'll know better how much Iran Neo/CHG, for example, arrived in Italy with the Greeks and then could have very likely moved northward.
The problem with Moots is that it assumes every single burial sample is a long term resident of Rome, i.e. Roman or at least Italian. That's manifestly a simplification. Not every person who "looks" like a Levantine or even an Anatolian on a PCA would have become a long time settler whose progeny contributed to the local genomes. We can see that with some of the samples from the post Imperial period whom we've analyzed and who are manifestly northern European visitors to Rome. Had they done some isotopic testing we might have a clearer idea of who was "local" and who was not. Added to all this, in the period in question, some Romans still practiced cremation, so the sample is not representative.
Then, there's the question of the big demographic change even earlier than the end of the Empire. Rome was gradually abandoned as the seat of Empire. Everything shifted either to Constantinople or to Northern Italy. That's why the "tail to the east" ended. The traders left.
There is indeed also the period of the Germanic invasions. The problem with attributing much of the change to them, the popular back to the beginning scenario particularly in the north, is that every Germanic invader sample we've found is either I1 or R1b-U106. I can't believe that a paper purporting to deal with Italian genetics totally ignored yDna. The one thing yDna is really good for is tracking migrations. There's far too little of either I1 or U106, even in the Veneto, much less in Lazio, to account for a change from people with almost no steppe to people with 25-30% steppe. It doesn't matter how small the "native" population might have been due to plague, invasion, the Gothic Wars etc.; the "Germanic" ydna would have to be higher than it is. Not to mention that the Langobards numbered around 100,000 people even according to their own scribes, and the Goths were even smaller in number. The arrival of the Visigoths mimics, imo what happened in Hungary with the arrival of the "Huns".
I really hope the Reich Lab, and Razib Khan in his summary, don't make these kind of elementary mistakes.
Now, if someone shows the Germanics carried a lot of R1b U152 then that's a different story.
I'd also like to see samples from the Italian countryside and mountains from the Late Imperial and Post Imperial Era. When cities collapse, people from the periphery move down and repopulate them.
We need more data.
Northern Italian Neo-Nazis, like their brethren from other countries, may want to believe that they have tons of "Germanic" dna from the invasion period, but that really "is" a fantasy.
Non si fa il proprio dovere perchè qualcuno ci dica grazie, lo si fa per principio, per se stessi, per la propria dignità. Oriana Fallaci