Genetic history of Calabrian Greeks reveals ancient events and long term isolation in

Interesting study. This PCA shows that Calabria is most similar to the Copper & Bronze Age Anatolia and Mycenaean Greece.

Sarno-2021-Calabria-PCA.png


Did I miss something or did they not provide any Y-DNA data?

The report is basically an extension of Stefania previous report and that also failed to provide ydna

https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/210828126.pdf
 
Here is a facial reconstruction of a Greek from Magna Graecia

Pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Parmenides of Elea (c. 515 BC-post-450 BC), by Alessandro Tomasi:

TEEAJ59.png


Elea was an Ionic-speaking Greek colony in what is now southern Campania:

1T94JCl.png
 
Im happy to see this! It strengthens the idea that the extra near eastern affinity found in the south is Caucasus or iranian based.
 
zxex_iran_n.jpg


In the Bronze Age we see the spread of Iranian ancestry in Anatolia, Levant, Greece and South Italy, in the same period that Hittite, Mitanni, Mycenaean and other oldest known Indo-European cultures spread in these lands.
 
I think you are missing the point. The Iranian Farmers and the Caucasus Hunter Gatherers are not Iranians or Caucasians, they are ancient samples found from places called now the Caucasus and Iran and and may have given little ancestry to modern Caucasian groups or Iranian populations. Having affinities is not conclusive of actual ancestry. Also the farmers that went to Europe had livestock that did not originate in Anatolia but much further east. So how did they Anatolian farmers get their sheep and goats? By trading with other Neolithics, of course. And they mixed with each other, that is what humans usually do.

In my Southern European opinion, all these studies are biased by the geneticists' paradigms of what is indigenous, what is European, what is Middle Eastern, and Southern Europeans are always excluded from being the European crowd because they have a lower ancestry from the Eurasian Steppes, and greater Neolithic farmer ancestry. Look at David Reich's clines of European and Near Eastern Ancestry, most Europeans outside the Northern, Western and Central zones are excluded because of the so called extra Near Eastern ancestry. Anyway that is my two cents worth.
 
I think you are missing the point. The Iranian Farmers and the Caucasus Hunter Gatherers are not Iranians or Caucasians, they are ancient samples found from places called now the Caucasus and Iran and and may have given little ancestry to modern Caucasian groups or Iranian populations. Having affinities is not conclusive of actual ancestry. Also the farmers that went to Europe had livestock that did not originate in Anatolia but much further east. So how did they Anatolian farmers get their sheep and goats? By trading with other Neolithics, of course. And they mixed with each other, that is what humans usually do.

In my Southern European opinion, all these studies are biased by the geneticists' paradigms of what is indigenous, what is European, what is Middle Eastern, and Southern Europeans are always excluded from being the European crowd because they have a lower ancestry from the Eurasian Steppes, and greater Neolithic farmer ancestry. Look at David Reich's clines of European and Near Eastern Ancestry, most Europeans outside the Northern, Western and Central zones are excluded because of the so called extra Near Eastern ancestry. Anyway that is my two cents worth.

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 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 sample we've found is either I1 or R1b-U106. I can't believe that a paper purporting to deal with Italian genetics totally ignore yDna. The one thing it's really good for is tracking migrations. There's far too little of either, even in the Veneto, much less in Lazio, to account for a change from people with almost no steppe to people with 30% steppe. It doesn't matter how small the "native" population might have been; 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, mimicking what happened in Hungary.

I really hope the Reich Lab (and Razib Khan in his summary) doesn't make these kind of elementary errors.

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.
 
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 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 sample we've found is either I1 or R1b-U106. I can't believe that a paper purporting to deal with Italian genetics totally ignore yDna. The one thing it's really good for is tracking migrations. There's far too little of either, even in the Veneto, much less in Lazio, to account for a change from people with almost no steppe to people with 30% steppe. It doesn't matter how small the "native" population might have been; 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, mimicking what happened in Hungary.

I really hope the Reich Lab (and Razib Khan in his summary) doesn't make these kind of elementary errors.

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.

I absolutely agree, the Moots paper, and many others are a mine field of fudged narratives. After reading the paper, I tend to discard the oversimplified explanation, that give the wrong impression, and just analyze the hard data, coming to my own conclusions. It seems that some of these authors are chasing after fantasies, rather than going by what the evidence is strictly showing. TBH, It is almost as if that paper was tailored to be read by journalists, for exposure. No matter, because even the authors had to concede that the modeling should not be taken seriously. Yet, that seems to be lost on some people, unfortunately.
 
Here is a facial reconstruction of a Greek from Magna Graecia

Pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Parmenides of Elea (c. 515 BC-post-450 BC), by Alessandro Tomasi:

TEEAJ59.png


Elea was an Ionic-speaking Greek colony in what is now southern Campania:

1T94JCl.png

Parmenides could fit in modern Southern Italy.


Anyone that still denies the Ancient Greeks were not very similar to Southern Italians, is just fooling themselves.
 
^^I think it could be said that Greco-Roman civilization, is not only a cultural synthesis, but an ethnic one as well. IMHO The genetic-cline in Italy was primarily formed by the melding of ancient Italic (& Etruscan) and Greek peoples. The rebirth of this high civilization, had become the beacon of ambition, and stirred the hearts of many Italian patriots, thinkers, and artists, of the subsequent eras. In their hearts they knew they were connected to these people by blood.
 
I should have been more specific. All the ancients were very divergent from each other, WHG, EHG, CCG, Anatolian farmers, Levantine farmers, Iranian farmers, and so on, more divergent from each other than a general West Eurasian European is from a general East Eurasian. Modern populations in West Eurasia are very genetically close to each other, Europeans, Near Easterners, West Asians, North Africans are much closer to each other than to those Ancients except when you get to the Bronze Age.
 
I think you are missing the point. The Iranian Farmers and the Caucasus Hunter Gatherers are not Iranians or Caucasians, they are ancient samples found from places called now the Caucasus and Iran and and may have given little ancestry to modern Caucasian groups or Iranian populations. Having affinities is not conclusive of actual ancestry. Also the farmers that went to Europe had livestock that did not originate in Anatolia but much further east. So how did they Anatolian farmers get their sheep and goats? By trading with other Neolithics, of course. And they mixed with each other, that is what humans usually do.

In my Southern European opinion, all these studies are biased by the geneticists' paradigms of what is indigenous, what is European, what is Middle Eastern, and Southern Europeans are always excluded from being the European crowd because they have a lower ancestry from the Eurasian Steppes, and greater Neolithic farmer ancestry. Look at David Reich's clines of European and Near Eastern Ancestry, most Europeans outside the Northern, Western and Central zones are excluded because of the so called extra Near Eastern ancestry. Anyway that is my two cents worth.

However Iranians and Armenians are also Indo-European people but it seems to be clear that they are not the same ancient IE people who lived in the Caucasus and Iran in the Bronze Age and earlier.

As Maciamo said, "This PCA shows that Calabria is most similar to the Copper & Bronze Age Anatolia and Mycenaean Greece", and as you see it also shows after them the most similar ones are the Copper & Bronze Age Armenia and Iran.

In the Iron Age most of people who lived in Iran, South of Caucasus, Anatolia, Greece and South of Italy were Indo-Europeans, and all of them had high percentage of Iran_N/CHG ancestry.

Look at the schematic summary of Admixture Graphs in this study:

mwbg_italy.jpg
 
Northern Apulia, Northern Basilicata, Benevento area and Abruzzo were not colonized by Greeks but if I m not wrong they cluster with Southern Greeks, and Aegean islanders. What's the possible explanation?

Inviato dal mio POT-LX1T utilizzando Tapatalk
 
Here is a facial reconstruction of a Greek from Magna Graecia

Pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Parmenides of Elea (c. 515 BC-post-450 BC), by Alessandro Tomasi:

TEEAJ59.png


Elea was an Ionic-speaking Greek colony in what is now southern Campania:

1T94JCl.png

That is interesting.

Reconstruction of the Face of a 5000-year old Woman in iran: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/217650594480238924/

The face of a 5000 year old Iranian woman has been recently reconstructed with the latest scientific archaeology methods of by Iranian researchers.

pguh_woman.jpg


She reminds me of Sophia Loren.

266w_loren.jpg
 
^^I think it could be said that Greco-Roman civilization, is not only a cultural synthesis, but an ethnic one as well. IMHO The genetic-cline in Italy was primarily formed by the melding of ancient Italic (& Etruscan) and Greek peoples. The rebirth of this high civilization, had become the beacon of ambition, and stirred the hearts of many Italian patriots, thinkers, and artists, of the subsequent eras. In their hearts they knew they were connected to these people by blood.

That is an Indo-European civilization, ancient Persian also knew they were connected to Greeks by blood.

Herodotus, The Histories, Book 7, chapter 150: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Hdt.+7.150

Such is the Argives' account of this matter, but there is another story told in Hellas, namely that before Xerxes set forth on his march against Hellas, he sent a herald to Argos, who said on his coming (so the story goes), [2] “Men of Argos, this is the message to you from King Xerxes. Perses our forefather had, as we believe, Perseus son of Danae for his father, and Andromeda daughter of Cepheus for his mother; if that is so, then we are descended from your nation. In all right and reason we should therefore neither march against the land of our forefathers, nor should you become our enemies by aiding others or do anything but abide by yourselves in peace. If all goes as I desire, I will hold none in higher esteem than you.” [3] The Argives were strongly moved when they heard this
 
The trouble with that PCA diagram Maciamo posted from the study is it is really disingenuous. They used a limited number of modern reference samples, and in terms of DNA studies, old hoary ones. Example, the Adeghe, the 8 Tuscans (TSI), the 13 Bergamo Italians and so on. Those samples come from the beginning of those type of dna studies and there are other more up-to-date reference samples. The TSI samples are different from a much larger later Tuscan reference sample, which shows using small number can be unrepresentative of the whole. Also the Adeghe come from Northern part of the Caucasus which is not the Mediterranean just because the Greeks colonized all the Black Sea coast does not make it the Mediterranean, and ancient North Caucasians were more like modern Armenians and Georgians i.e not effected by Russian and Ukrainian admixture. It is better to have a PCA of all Europeans, all Near Easterners (not just the boring Druze, and Palestinians) and all the West Asians. The smaller samples draws the groups closer to each other than in reality.

I consider this study flawed for those reasons, and disingenuous.
 
Northern Apulia, Northern Basilicata, Benevento area and Abruzzo were not colonized by Greeks but if I m not wrong they cluster with Southern Greeks, and Aegean islanders. What's the possible explanation?

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These people certainly moved around when Italy was unified under the Romans, I doubt they stayed fixed in one place according to where their colonies were.

But also, it is likely that the native population, prior to the arrival of the Greeks, were already very Greek-like. Due to prehistoric migrations from the southern Balkans. These people were also relatively high in CHG.
 
Northern Apulia, Northern Basilicata, Benevento area and Abruzzo were not colonized by Greeks but if I m not wrong they cluster with Southern Greeks, and Aegean islanders. What's the possible explanation?

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wEB9YWY.png


Also, Sicilians are parallel to Southern Greeks, and Aegean Islanders, to the "west" of them.


Apulia, Basilicata, Benevento area and Abruzzo are to the "North" and "West" of them.
txlDMex.jpg
 
Northern Apulia, Northern Basilicata, Benevento area and Abruzzo were not colonized by Greeks but if I m not wrong they cluster with Southern Greeks, and Aegean islanders. What's the possible explanation?

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and neither was Lucania and Bruttian areas in southern Italy had any Greeks ...................these tribes branched out from southern samnite groups whose origins are umbrian

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucania

The Greeks that came to stay in itlay where mostly corinthian Greeks with their powerful fleet
 
and neither was Lucania and Bruttian areas in southern Italy had any Greeks ...................these tribes branched out from southern samnite groups whose origins are umbrian
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucania
The Greeks that came to stay in itlay where mostly corinthian Greeks with their powerful fleet
The DNA and Isotopic study on imperial Vagnari stated that the locals, found in the Roman estate were natives to the region. Nevertheless, even if all of these tribes remained in place during that time, they were likely scrambled during the fall of the Roman Empire and resettlement of cities and towns. Greek-like people were all over the Empire, even in Collegno in Late Antiquity.
 
I find very interesting to see how Abruzzo and Molise have a stronger component "mediana" (purple) than what I would have initially thought. Like if they cluster in the middle between Lazio and Campania-Puglia-Lucania. It's one of the first papers that I have read and probably will need to read again and again to be sure that I really got it right.

You could model them as half-Barese/half-Umbrian, according to this paper.

The purple, brown, and yellow components are all considered Southern Italian genetically, in that paper. Which is also consistent with AncestryDNA's broad component for Southern Italians.
 

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