Genetic and Cultural Differences between Jews and Greeks

[Palermo Trapani]

Riverman: Again, so all the papers that show no significant difference between West and East Sicily, or genetic clustering with Sicily (All) with Mainland South (Parolo et al 2016, Sazzini et al 2016 and Raveane et al 2019) that has been published should be thrown away and the Eurogenes calculator results you ran should be what is accepted. Sorry, I am calling Bull Sh... on that one.

And for the record, West Sicily does not shift Further East, in fact it seems to drift more towards Campania, not East. I have never seen West Sicily plot closer to the Near East or even closer to Greece than East Sicily and East Sicily doesn't either, although I think it may drift closer to Calabria and Puglia, but again, I tend to look at all those G25 deals with a critical lense.

 

[Riverman]

Riverman: Again, so all the papers that show no significant difference between West and East Sicily, or genetic clustering with Sicily (All) with Mainland South (Parolo et al 2016, Sazzini et al 2016 and Raveane et al 2019) that has been published should be thrown away and the Eurogenes calculator results you ran should be what is accepted. Sorry, I am calling Bull Sh... on that one.

And for the record, West Sicily does not shift Further East, in fact it seems to drift more towards Campania, not East. I have never seen West Sicily plot closer to the Near East or even closer to Greece than East Sicily and East Sicily doesn't either, although I think it may drift closer to Calabria and Puglia, but again, I tend to look at all those G25 deals with a critical lense.

Of course not, I'm not megalomaniac. In fact I'm not even good with the G25 tools, so I'm no authority at all. If you say there is a better explanation out there and many sources prove otherwise, I have no problem accepting it. I'm not an expert on Sicilian genetics and no expert on those tools. Just shared what I noticed when trying. To me criticism is the base of learning and improving, for scientists and laymen

 

[Dianatomia]

If you look with a broad, general, and not very educated lens, the Hungarians and the more northern and northeastern French share roughly the same proportions of ancient ancestral groups. They even plot near each other on a PCA, which measures TWO dimensions let's not forget.

Still, Greeks and Jews are closer to each other than Hungarians and French. At the very least, one could argue that they have gotten closer than they were in the beginning. I am not arguing a similar origin. But many Greeks look more like Jews than they do Serbs or Turks. Just a coincidence? Perhaps.

As for the cultures, they started off as conflicting ones. But at the same time, one could also argue that we as modern Europeans have been influenced mostly by Greek philosophy and Jewish Abrahamic religion. These are our fundamental pillars. The bible took shape in Alexandria where many Greeks and Jews were living. Aside from their differences, both influenced each other as well as the outsiders.

 

[ihype02]

I believe he is referring to the iron-age/republican samples, when it was very unlikely that there were the high numbers of immigrants recorded in the imperial era. As for south Italians, in every PCA I have seen actually they are (their edge represented by Sicilians and Calabrians) a little bitsy closer to "central Europe" than the Myceneans were, so frankly I don't see how after the 1000 B.C they shifted from Greece to the Levant. Also the vast majority of papers on Italians found a caucaus related gene flow (that they have in common with Greece and Anatolia) and a minority of North African gene flow in Sicily.

Old Greeks are similar to Sicilians but not in the same level as the old Dalmatians are with the Bergamo. They are clearly shifted towards Minoans. So they can be modeled as mostly Sicilian + lot of Minoan.

 

[real expert]

It really depends on the nature of the discussion. If it triggers a heated argument you get punished not that I like it though.
Afrocentrism is tolerated because people are entitled to their wrong opinion. I mean you could oppose someone's idea that Estrucans were an Anatolian people and still be nice.

Sorry but it's seems that you haven't been recently on anthrogenica. I'm aware of the fact that users who have a racist undertone in their comments or are rude and offensive get quickly banned there. That's not the point. The thing is that nice and harmless people who claimed that Caucasian straight hair that sometimes pops up in Horners correlates with their Western Eurasian admixture, got also banned for violating the Term of service. Why are these people then not entitled to their opinion about phenotype and ethnicity?

 

[ihype02]

Sorry but it's seems that you haven't been recently on anthrogenica. I'm aware of the fact that users who have a racist undertone in their comments or are rude and offensive get quickly banned there. That's not the point. The thing is that nice and harmless people who claimed that Caucasian straight hair that sometimes pops up in Horners correlates with their Western Eurasian admixture, got also banned for violating the Term of service. Why are these people then not entitled to their opinion about phenotype and ethnicity?

I haven't seen a similar scenario. But I have seen many banned members there.
I know someone who did a quick little joke, got immediately banned.

 

[real expert]

The Afro-centrists get a pass because the moderators are too cowardly to ban Africans or African Americans.

Italians and Greeks are fair game.

And excuse me, just insisting that they were all wrong about the Etruscans, and politely posting the data to prove it got some really intelligent people banned.

Your comment is spot on.

 

[Leopoldo Leone]

The additional Near East in Sicilian West does not totally surprise me and I have always acknowledged that there is some Levant admixture in Sicily, that obviously is more recent than what was documented in some of the Imperial Roman samples. I get 3% Northern Levant type based on my Ancestry and NATGENO analysis using the overlap between the 2, Ancestry DNA estimate for autosonal, 97% Italian 3% Middle East with the range being from Egypt to Turkey. NATGENO gives me 71% Italic/Southern Europe, 14% West Med, which they label as Sardinian, Corsican and up to mainland Italy drifting across to Iberia, NW Europe 7% and then Anatolia 8%, from Northern Levant to Armenia. From there own site, they test source DNA from 500AD to 10,000 BC roughly.

So the overlap of NATGENO seems for me to be Northern Levant, best I can tell. Which is consistent with 1) Pheonicians coming from there, 2) as Antonio et al 2019 documented, the Imperial period migrants came from the East, not the Western part of the empire, and 3) The Saracens who invaded Sicily were part of the later Abbasids, the general who led the invasion was a Mesopotamian, Asad ibn al-Furat, born in modern Haran, Turkey and the Abbasids were based in Syria (Levant) before moving to Baghdad, which they built.

I have always contended the the ancestry that is Near East in Sicily is mostly Levantine, some could be ancient (Pheonician, maybe some earlier) with some Berber ancestry associated with Tunisian Berbers. The Abbasid dynasty went from Tunisia back to Persia. So I am not one of these people that gets crazy about some Levantine admixture into Sicily via either the Phoenicians and their successors the Carthiginians and the later Saracens.

However, just for the record, I don't care for those Eurogenes models as a general rule, not for any personal reasons, only that they seem to not calibrate with the published Results of Antonio et al 2019. I think Jovialis ran a what I call a "Statistical Horse race" and the Dodecad 13B, Dodecad7 and MDLP16 all produced results more in line with Antonio et al 2019 Figure 2 plots than the Eurogenes calculators. At least that is how I remember it.

Cheers, PT

I think that Anatolia would be a better proxy than north Levant, but I don't even think that's the best explanation for the data: I think that what it captures is a surplus of "levant-like" admixture compared to other Italians, which can be due to the north african element ( which has some natufian) in Sicily (and that makes much more sense geographically and historically). Also I think that it just "built up" during the ages thanks to a limited continued gene flow, and there's no need to search for a precise historical event that caused it (certainly the events aforementioned helped this gene flow, but I doubt it happened mostly during them). By the way that's my way to make sense of the data, so it's an educated speculation. Again this is something that could only be settled by empiric research.

 

[ratchet_fan]

Sorry but it's seems that you haven't been recently on anthrogenica. I'm aware of the fact that users who have a racist undertone in their comments or are rude and offensive get quickly banned there. That's not the point. The thing is that nice and harmless people who claimed that Caucasian straight hair that sometimes pops up in Horners correlates with their Western Eurasian admixture, got also banned for violating the Term of service. Why are these people then not entitled to their opinion about phenotype and ethnicity?

Anthrogenica is turning into what social media sites are : a cesspool where hatred of Europeans is tolerated if not encouraged. They take it one step further and apply it to non European west Eurasians too.

 

[kingjohn]

I just hope this thread
Wouldn't be like the thread in anthrogenica
980 papers ..... amazing but not in a good way

 

[Ygorcs]

Riverman: Again, so all the papers that show no significant difference between West and East Sicily, or genetic clustering with Sicily (All) with Mainland South (Parolo et al 2016, Sazzini et al 2016 and Raveane et al 2019) that has been published should be thrown away and the Eurogenes calculator results you ran should be what is accepted. Sorry, I am calling Bull Sh... on that one.

And for the record, West Sicily does not shift Further East, in fact it seems to drift more towards Campania, not East. I have never seen West Sicily plot closer to the Near East or even closer to Greece than East Sicily and East Sicily doesn't either, although I think it may drift closer to Calabria and Puglia, but again, I tend to look at all those G25 deals with a critical lense.

G25 doesn't give anyone the idea that West Sicily is significantly different from East Sicily, nor that it is more shifted towards the East Mediterranean than East Sicily in any notable way. I don't know where Riverman took that idea from. The G25 models I'm using here do not indicate that at all. In fact East Sicily appears with higher Levant_N ancestry, while West Sicily gets slighty higher Iran_N, so basically they're even regarding an eastward shift. And they have very similar admixture proportions:

		Distance	GEO_CHG	IRN_Ganj_Dareh_N	Levant_PPNB	MAR_EN	TUR_Barcin_N	WHG	Yamnaya
	Sicilian_East	0,01125	1,4	9,2	14,2	1	48,2	2	24
	Sicilian_West	0,01186		10,4	10,2	2,6	49,2	4,4	23,2

Honestly this is not to defend Davidski as a person or his personal interpretations and cherrypicked models, but I don't think G25 works as inaccurately as some of you assert. In my experience I have got really credible results in the overwhelmingly large majority of models I have personally made and analyzed critically comparing them to what I know from historical sources as well as from published population genetic literature on the subject. In several cases I made my own estimations based on my own models, and only afterwards I read peer-reviewed papers that basically coincided with my main conclusions in almost everything (that happened recently when I was investigating the genetic history of the Roma groups).

Sometimes you get weird and nonsensical admixture proportions if you don't use only the most realistically proximate samples, but they will usually appear in negligible proportions (below 2%). So I won't deny that using G25 has helped me quite a lot to understand the finer details of the samples published in the genetic studies. You just have to not interpret the results literally, but as a guideline... and I should add that in fact even the results published by professional geneticists should be read like that, especially in the case of the less, shall we say, "consistent" geneticists.

It's also a bit naive, IMHO, to believe that the genetic studies always make the best models with the most plausible source populations. I have seen multiple times peer-reviewed genetic studies which honestly I think risked getting very misleading results, for instance including only Steppe + WHG + ANF (which may cause skewed and false results without an independent proxy for CHG/Iran_N-rich groups), or using Levant_N for populations that clearly had no relationship with a Levantine migration.

 

[Ygorcs]

Sorry, I think this is misleading as well. No separate group of Levant PPNB people went to Italy.

If the goal, for whatever reason, is to quantify the amount of "LEVANT" ancestry in southern Italy post the Bronze Age, then we should wait until we have a good set of Bronze Age samples from both Sicily and Southern Italy, and use some proximate sources like actual Syrians etc. from the Levant in the first millennium BC and Empire, as well as samples of Anatolians and Greeks from the same era.

I don't think it's misleading. It's just less proximate and lower resolution because it measures the differential contribution of most divergent ancestral clusters that prevail in modern West Eurasians. I don't see how that's misleading. When we talk about EEF, WHG or Yamnaya nobody believes (I hope) all those contributions came straight from their original locations in totally unmixed form and all at once soon after their expansion process began.

Using Levant_N has the advantage of avoiding the confusion between ANF and CHG/Iran_N that was already present in Italy well before Levant_N appears in the aDNA record there (at least in some non-negligible frequency) and the ANF and CHG/Iran_N present in the heavily Levant_N-diluted Levantine populations of the Bronze Age and Iron Age. You'll probably get much higher Levant_BA or Levant_IA in South Italians and Sicilians if our Balkan and Greek samples are those that we have so far from the same historic period, not necessarily because of actual genetic contribution, but because of a lot more shared ancestry between Levant_BA/IA and Central-South/Southeastern Europe-BA/IA than between earlier, still less intensively mixed groups like Levant_N opposed to EEF.

 

[Ygorcs]

Interesting Data. Do you have the data for Jewish groups living in Iran, Iraq, or Levant or other places to compare them to those that have lived in Europe. Eurogenes K13_updated samples has coordinates for Jewish groups in Georgia, Iran, Kurdistan and Libya, Dodecad 12B has sample coordinates for Jewish groups in Cochin_India, Azerbaijan and Iraq (Which i would think is distinguised from Kurdish_Jews, although they could be closely related).

So it would be interesting to see what is, for lack of a better term, direction of causality (I am using this purely in a statistical context). So what is the Y and what are the X variables. Did those Jewish groups in your data move closer to European groups by virtue of ancient immigration from the Levant to Europe, making them closer to Southern Europeans, or is it vice versa.

If you can run your models for those other Jewish Groups, and present the data, I would be interested to see how Southern Italian/Sicilians admixture proportions compare to those other Jewish Groups since my ancestors are all from West_Sicily, Trapani, Palermo and Agrigento (1 Great Grandfather born in mountain village here).

I don't have Cochin, Azeri and Kurdish Jews in the G25 database, but there are several others, so I will include all the average population DNA samples from Jewish groups. I included Hövsgöl_BA as a proxy for some Northeast Asian-related admixture that might help indicate an indirect gene flow via some Turkic or even Scythian introgression. Interestingly, only Northeastern European Ashkenazi get some of it (Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Poland). Virtually all of them have some non-negligible Yamnaya-related admixture, so perhaps not all of the steppe signal in Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews comes from admixture with Europeans only after they settled in Europe. Moroccan and Libyan Jews perhaps unsurprisingly look very Sephardic-like.

Target	Distance​ ​ ​	GEO_CHG​ ​ ​	IRN_Ganj_Dareh_N​ ​ ​	Levant_PPNB​ ​ ​	MAR_EN​ ​ ​	MNG_Hovsgol_BA​ ​ ​	TUR_Barcin_N​ ​ ​	WHG​ ​ ​	Yamnaya​ ​ ​
Italian_Abruzzo	0,008367​ ​ ​	0,2​ ​ ​	8​ ​ ​	11,4​ ​ ​	0​ ​ ​	0​ ​ ​	50,2​ ​ ​	0,6​ ​ ​	29,6​ ​ ​
Italian_Apulia	0,009989​ ​ ​	2​ ​ ​	7,6​ ​ ​	11,6​ ​ ​	0​ ​ ​	0​ ​ ​	51,2​ ​ ​	0,2​ ​ ​	27,4​ ​ ​
Italian_Basilicata	0,008519​ ​ ​	1,6​ ​ ​	8,4​ ​ ​	11,8​ ​ ​	0​ ​ ​	0​ ​ ​	50,6​ ​ ​	0​ ​ ​	27,6​ ​ ​
Italian_Calabria	0,011421​ ​ ​	2,2​ ​ ​	10,6​ ​ ​	10​ ​ ​	1​ ​ ​	0​ ​ ​	53,2​ ​ ​	0​ ​ ​	23​ ​ ​
Italian_Campania	0,009185​ ​ ​	2​ ​ ​	9,4​ ​ ​	14,8​ ​ ​	0​ ​ ​	0​ ​ ​	48,4​ ​ ​	0​ ​ ​	25,4​ ​ ​
Italian_Lazio	0,011445​ ​ ​	0​ ​ ​	6,8​ ​ ​	12,4​ ​ ​	0​ ​ ​	0​ ​ ​	49,6​ ​ ​	2,6​ ​ ​	28,6​ ​ ​
Italian_Molise	0,008322​ ​ ​	0​ ​ ​	7,4​ ​ ​	6​ ​ ​	0​ ​ ​	0​ ​ ​	55​ ​ ​	0,2​ ​ ​	31,4​ ​ ​
Italian_Tuscany	0,009911​ ​ ​	0​ ​ ​	3,4​ ​ ​	2​ ​ ​	0,2​ ​ ​	0​ ​ ​	57,6​ ​ ​	3​ ​ ​	33,8​ ​ ​
Sicilian_East	0,011247​ ​ ​	1,4​ ​ ​	9,2​ ​ ​	14,2​ ​ ​	1​ ​ ​	0​ ​ ​	48,2​ ​ ​	2​ ​ ​	24​ ​ ​
Sicilian_West	0,011859​ ​ ​	0​ ​ ​	10,4​ ​ ​	10,2​ ​ ​	2,6​ ​ ​	0​ ​ ​	49,2​ ​ ​	4,4​ ​ ​	23,2​ ​ ​
Ashkenazi_Belarussia	0,009279​ ​ ​	0​ ​ ​	10​ ​ ​	21,6​ ​ ​	0,6​ ​ ​	0,8​ ​ ​	38,2​ ​ ​	0,6​ ​ ​	28,2​ ​ ​
Ashkenazi_Germany	0,008873​ ​ ​	0​ ​ ​	11,6​ ​ ​	23,6​ ​ ​	1,8​ ​ ​	0​ ​ ​	39​ ​ ​	0​ ​ ​	24​ ​ ​
Ashkenazi_Lithuania	0,011039​ ​ ​	0​ ​ ​	10,8​ ​ ​	20​ ​ ​	1​ ​ ​	0,8​ ​ ​	39,4​ ​ ​	0,2​ ​ ​	27,8​ ​ ​
Ashkenazi_Poland	0,011727​ ​ ​	0​ ​ ​	9,8​ ​ ​	19,8​ ​ ​	1,2​ ​ ​	0,6​ ​ ​	40,6​ ​ ​	0​ ​ ​	28​ ​ ​
Ashkenazi_Russia	0,012730​ ​ ​	0​ ​ ​	8,8​ ​ ​	17,6​ ​ ​	1,4​ ​ ​	1,2​ ​ ​	41​ ​ ​	0​ ​ ​	30​ ​ ​
Ashkenazi_Ukraine	0,012675​ ​ ​	0​ ​ ​	9,8​ ​ ​	17,8​ ​ ​	1,4​ ​ ​	0,8​ ​ ​	41,6​ ​ ​	0,6​ ​ ​	28​ ​ ​
Georgian_Jew	0,022531​ ​ ​	13​ ​ ​	26​ ​ ​	32,2​ ​ ​	0​ ​ ​	0​ ​ ​	19​ ​ ​	0​ ​ ​	9,8​ ​ ​
Iranian_Jew	0,023837​ ​ ​	4​ ​ ​	34,2​ ​ ​	33,4​ ​ ​	0​ ​ ​	0​ ​ ​	20​ ​ ​	0​ ​ ​	8,4​ ​ ​
Iraqi_Jew	0,025009​ ​ ​	8,6​ ​ ​	31​ ​ ​	37,8​ ​ ​	0​ ​ ​	0​ ​ ​	20,2​ ​ ​	0​ ​ ​	2,4​ ​ ​
Italian_Jew	0,009133​ ​ ​	0,4​ ​ ​	12,2​ ​ ​	27,2​ ​ ​	2​ ​ ​	0​ ​ ​	37,4​ ​ ​	0​ ​ ​	20,8​ ​ ​
Libyan_Jew	0,011723​ ​ ​	1,2​ ​ ​	17,6​ ​ ​	24​ ​ ​	7​ ​ ​	0​ ​ ​	39,2​ ​ ​	0​ ​ ​	11​ ​ ​
Moroccan_Jew	0,016452​ ​ ​	0,6​ ​ ​	12,8​ ​ ​	19,6​ ​ ​	8​ ​ ​	0​ ​ ​	41,4​ ​ ​	0​ ​ ​	17,6​ ​ ​
Mountain_Jew_Chechnya	0,027303​ ​ ​	0,4​ ​ ​	32,6​ ​ ​	31,4​ ​ ​	0​ ​ ​	0​ ​ ​	21​ ​ ​	0​ ​ ​	14,6​ ​ ​
Romaniote_Jew	0,009351​ ​ ​	5​ ​ ​	12,4​ ​ ​	31,6​ ​ ​	1,2​ ​ ​	0​ ​ ​	33,2​ ​ ​	0​ ​ ​	16,6​ ​ ​
Sephardic_Jew	0,012200​ ​ ​	0,8​ ​ ​	15,4​ ​ ​	19,2​ ​ ​	3,4​ ​ ​	0​ ​ ​	43​ ​ ​	0​ ​ ​	18,2​ ​ ​
Syrian_Jew	0,015231​ ​ ​	9,4​ ​ ​	16,6​ ​ ​	31,2​ ​ ​	1,4​ ​ ​	0​ ​ ​	29,6​ ​ ​	0​ ​ ​	11,8​ ​ ​
Tunisian_Jew	0,014117​ ​ ​	3,4​ ​ ​	15,8​ ​ ​	25,8​ ​ ​	6,6​ ​ ​	0​ ​ ​	39​ ​ ​	0​ ​ ​	9,4​ ​ ​
Yemenite_Jew	0,048281​ ​ ​	0​ ​ ​	20,6​ ​ ​	79,4​ ​ ​	0​ ​ ​	0​ ​ ​	0​ ​ ​	0​ ​ ​	0​ ​ ​
Average	0,014348​ ​ ​	2​ ​ ​	13,9​ ​ ​	22,1​ ​ ​	1,5​ ​ ​	0,1​ ​ ​	39,1​ ​ ​	0,5​ ​ ​	20,7​ ​ ​

 

[Angela]

Riverman: Again, so all the papers that show no significant difference between West and East Sicily, or genetic clustering with Sicily (All) with Mainland South (Parolo et al 2016, Sazzini et al 2016 and Raveane et al 2019) that has been published should be thrown away and the Eurogenes calculator results you ran should be what is accepted. Sorry, I am calling Bull Sh... on that one.

And for the record, West Sicily does not shift Further East, in fact it seems to drift more towards Campania, not East. I have never seen West Sicily plot closer to the Near East or even closer to Greece than East Sicily and East Sicily doesn't either, although I think it may drift closer to Calabria and Puglia, but again, I tend to look at all those G25 deals with a critical lense.

My goodness; right out of Sikeliot's handbook. Of course Eurogenes, and Riverman, know better than all the academics and than even some other modelers. He must have access to all of Sikeliot's handpicked samples gleaned from all over the internet who claim all their ancestry is from x, y, z, place, and we're supposed to believe they are telling the complete truth or even know. How silly of us not to recognize it.

 

[Palermo Trapani]

G25 doesn't give anyone the idea that West Sicily is significantly different from East Sicily, nor that it is more shifted towards the East Mediterranean than East Sicily in any notable way. I don't know where Riverman took that idea from. The G25 models I'm using here do not indicate that at all. In fact East Sicily appears with higher Levant_N ancestry, while West Sicily gets slighty higher Iran_N, so basically they're even regarding an eastward shift. And they have very similar admixture proportions:

		Distance	GEO_CHG	IRN_Ganj_Dareh_N	Levant_PPNB	MAR_EN	TUR_Barcin_N	WHG	Yamnaya
	Sicilian_East	0,01125	1,4	9,2	14,2	1	48,2	2	24
	Sicilian_West	0,01186		10,4	10,2	2,6	49,2	4,4	23,2

Honestly this is not to defend Davidski as a person or his personal interpretations and cherrypicked models, but I don't think G25 works as inaccurately as some of you assert. In my experience I have got really credible results in the overwhelmingly large majority of models I have personally made and analyzed critically comparing them to what I know from historical sources as well as from published population genetic literature on the subject. In several cases I made my own estimations based on my own models, and only afterwards I read peer-reviewed papers that basically coincided with my main conclusions in almost everything (that happened recently when I was investigating the genetic history of the Roma groups).

Sometimes you get weird and nonsensical admixture proportions if you don't use only the most realistically proximate samples, but they will usually appear in negligible proportions (below 2%). So I won't deny that using G25 has helped me quite a lot to understand the finer details of the samples published in the genetic studies. You just have to not interpret the results literally, but as a guideline... and I should add that in fact even the results published by professional geneticists should be read like that, especially in the case of the less, shall we say, "consistent" geneticists.

It's also a bit naive, IMHO, to believe that the genetic studies always make the best models with the most plausible source populations. I have seen multiple times peer-reviewed genetic studies which honestly I think risked getting very misleading results, for instance including only Steppe + WHG + ANF (which may cause skewed and false results without an independent proxy for CHG/Iran_N-rich groups), or using Levant_N for populations that clearly had no relationship with a Levantine migration.

Ygorcs: Oh I new it was BS argument from jump. Thank you for chiming in. Much appreciated. More to the point, what is the underlying philosophy at some of these other blogs to try to say well, West Sicily is this, East Sicily is that. I have never seen any published paper that has even remotely suggested that West, Central, East Sicily in terms of Ancestral source populations and admixture are statistically significantly different from each other nor mainland Southern Italy. And I trust your running G25 than some at these other sites, your model matches the extant published papers on Sicilian Genetics.

My rule of thumb for any calculator is that if the thing does not calibrate with published research, then I defacto reject the calculator results. It is not even a consideration. All these DNA researchers if they have some questions about the statistical analysis and want another opinion can walk across their campuses to the Math Stat Department, the Economics Department, the Statistics Department, etc and get statistical experts to review their results.

Thanks again for running this analysis, I greatly appreciate it.

 

[Palermo Trapani]

My goodness; right out of Sikeliot's handbook. Of course Eurogenes, and you, know better than all the academics and than even some other modelers. You must have access to all of Sikeliot's handpicked samples gleaned from all over the internet who claim all their ancestry is from x, y, z, place, and we're supposed to believe they are telling the complete truth or even know. How silly of us not to recognize it.

Who me, I am rejecting the Eurogenes playbook. I have never run G25 in my life.

 

[Angela]

Who me, I am rejecting the Eurogenes playbook. I have never run G25 in my life.

I meant Riverman. My grammar got tangled up. I fixed the original post.

 

[Palermo Trapani]

I meant Riverman. My grammar got tangled up. I fixed the original post.

Ok, thanks for the clarification. I appreciate it Angela. I got little pissed off earlier at the direction of this thread and went played golf for 18 holes, just got back and I was like what is going on, I got confused with Riverman! So again, thanks for the quick clarification.

 

[Angela]

If you read the ancient sources, its quite evident that there was a true mass immigration from the East and South. So I doubt isotopes would be a solution, because many were there for generations already. However, as far as I know, the good thing about this sample is that there are also more Northern shifted individuals and in the end they balance things out for the most part. I also don't think there was one Imperial Roman genetic profile, but many dependent on social class and exact region, for Rome itself even neighbourhood. Also, I think that its this mixed Imperial background with a predominance of Greco-Roman, Eastern shifted individuals, which comes closest to the source population for the ancient European Jews. I doubt it was the senatorial class, a Tuscan countryman or the Germanic mercenary, but exactly those people which lived in the urban neighbourhoods.

Also if modelling Italians based on this, you get meaningful results as well I'd say, but this can be debated of course. Simple trial:
View attachment 12242

I'm not satisfied with Latini in particular, I would like to have a better reference for the average pre-Imperial Italic, but it might suffice for now and Imperial Roman includes a significant portion of it anyway.

I have been studying Roman history for decades, and I can tell you there is no source which is reliable in terms of how many people came from X place and stayed versus merchants, seamen, politicians, craftsmen hired for one reason or another came for a while and left. It doesn't exist. Despite what the Bible says, whatever census was done in various places did not have the specificity of ours, and whatever records existed were lost. People can speculate all they want, but it's all worthless.

There's no way of knowing any of that with any specificity. To pretend otherwise is fraudulent.

Beware the claims of people who talk a lot but have no hard data to show. They were the same ones, Sickeliot among them, who were convinced, and tried to convince others, that there was a mass migration of people from the Levant, under the auspices of the Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire, into Italy after the fall of the Western Empire. What a pity for them that the genetics showed that in actuality that "tail" into the east actually disappeared at that time. Convinced a lot of people, though, people who knew nothing of Byzantine history, and who didn't understand that as the Empire declined, the foreign merchants, seamen, craftsmen, etc. moved east to the new center of power: Byzantium.

 

[Jovialis]

I have been studying Roman history for decades, and I can tell you there is no source which is reliable in terms of how many people came from X place and stayed versus merchants, seamen, politicians, craftsmen hired for one reason or another came for a while and left. It doesn't exist. Despite what the Bible says, whatever census was done in various places did not have the specificity of ours, and whatever records existed were lost. People can speculate all they want, but it's all worthless.

There's no way of knowing any of that with any specificity. To pretend otherwise is fraudulent.

Beware the claims of people who talk a lot but have no hard data to show. They were the same ones, Sickeliot among them, who were convinced, and tried to convince others, that there was a mass migration of people from the Levant, under the auspices of the Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire, into Italy after the fall of the Western Empire. What a pity for them that the genetics showed that in actuality that "tail" into the east actually disappeared at that time. Convinced a lot of people, though, people who knew nothing of Byzantine history, and who didn't understand that as the Empire declined, the foreign merchants, seamen, craftsmen, etc. moved east to the new center of power: Byzantium.

Indeed, the hard data is actually on our side, rather than their's.

But of course they will just dismiss it, which is pathetic to say the least.