Well, now you've insulted me Ygorcs, which I'm sorry about. No, I'm not Southern Italian, but my husband is, and I couldn't give a you know what if he turned out to be a quarter Jewish or Syrian or Palestinian or whatever, and neither could he. Not that he doesn't have his own prejudices. All he said is don't tell me I've got German or French. Not PC, but that's what he said. As for the claims that people make about Southerners having some Palestinian blood or whatever, all he says is too bad, they're the ones not sitting on any oil, right?
It wasn't my intention to insult you, Angela. Sorry if it came across as that personally. I don't actually think you deny Levantine connections in Italians (ancient or modern ones) not nearly as strongly as some others, though I do think you sound perhaps a little too scarred by the previous discussions with racist and white supremacist members, so you sometimes jump in the conversation already taking as an a priori certain assumption that
every discussing Italian ancestry and mentioning anything that is not present in the majority of Europeans to the north of Italy are part of some longlasting conspiracy to deny the "Europeanness" of Italians.
Some people just need to calm down, and instead of tackling those racists and xenophobes by playing their game say what I, for one, say when people comment that white Brazilians are not
reeeally white because they usually have some Amerindian and African ancestry, too. I won't deny that, I simply say something like: "yeah, so what? We're all the much better and more unique for it, or do you think we'd care about it? It's true, but you're stupid if you think that's a bad thing." Period.
I'm tired of the general amnesia and denial, denial of all the things Davidski said and all his Polish buddies and the Iberians who came on this thread to spout it too. As to the latter maybe they felt it took the heat off them.
Why else should Poles, and Russians, and Iberians, and Brazilians, and French people be so obsessed with the ancestry of Italians? Why don't they concentrate on the admixture in their own ancestry?
Well, I don't speak for anyone else, but in my case (and I guess that of other Eupedia members too) I think you know me well enough to have already seen me participating in discussions on the ancestry of populations all over the world. It just happens that Italians and Italy are particularly important as a nation in Europe and as the source of a lot of the most impressive portions of European (and actually all Mediterranean Basin's) history, so we all should indeed be interested in its genetic history.
You shouldn't find that offensive. Not all people are Davidski and those stupid, you know. Now that's what I think is an insult: no one can dare say something about Italian ancestry here that he or she is
immediately and a priori accused of being a pal of Davidski, Sikeliot and whatnot.
I must say that has become really tiresome and disappointing. Should we simply ignore Italy and Italians for good in this forum, leave it only to the people of Italian background, and, as you say, just concentrate on our own nations? (about that, by the way, I thought population genetics was something that interested everyone who likes History, not just a hobby for people who want to strengthen their individual or national ethnic identity, but maybe I got it wrong and I am actually a tiny minority in forums like these).
Oh, and did it ever occur to you that if the fit for southern Italians is really good WITHOUT using a LEVANT NEOLITHIC source, then maybe it's because that ancestry is already accounted for in, say, the Anatolian Bronze ancestry? Or are all these academics on a mission to negate Levantine ancestry in Italians too. If you think that about Italian academics then you know nothing of Italian academia.
Have you missed all my comments in this and other threads reminding other Eupedia members that
Levant_N-related admixture is not the as
Levantine people and in fact Levant_N may have and probably did arrive in Italy indirectly via previously strongly Levant_N-admixed populations in the East Mediterranean and North Africa, not straight from the Levant? Have you also missed my repeated comments that people are always confusing
Levantine-N-related ancestry with
similarity to modern Levantines, who are actually less than 50% Levant_N in average (IIRC), so not good proxies for them at all? I honestly don't get this contradiction: you all are willing to say South Italy and Sicily seems to have a strong connection with ABA, and at the same time deny any non-negligible Levantine_N admixture in them. Those two statements negate each other.
So, yes, I did occur to me, and I've actually been saying that for a long time, though I also do think a little direct Levantine contribution (either Levant_N, Levant_BA or Levant_IA, maybe several minor migration waves accumulated over time) did also take place.