Having spent some time going over the graphics I think I can answer some of my questions. If I'm going wrong here, people, please let me know. This is the graphic.
Yes, they included all the Antonio et al samples, northern, Anatolian like, Levant like etc. They also included, as you can see, all the other Italian groups from the Chalcolithic forward, and all of the Anatolian samples from "Ancient", which I assume is Neolithic, through the Bronze Age all the way to the Byzantine period.
There are not very many Iron Age samples from Anatolia.
What this team focused upon, which sample sets are indeed bolded, are the Antonio et al samples from the Imperial City of Rome, and what is labeled TUR_RomByz. I haven't checked every one of those samples to see what percentage was from the Roman Era and what percentage was from the later Byzantine Era. Does anyone know?
I suppose one could say that both groups are very "cosmopolitan". A few are quite "northern like", some are very Levantine like, while many have much less, and you even have a few who are Armenian like.
Lazaridis goes to some lengths to talk about the "outsiders" who could be found in Anatolia in the days of the Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire.
I would submit that the same is true of the Imperial City of Rome: lots of outsiders who did not all necessarily contribute to the genetics of Early Medieval Italians, for example. At any rate, this rather broad, general analysis certainly wouldn't answer that question.
I think it's instructive, however, to also look at the Anatolian Bronze Age or even the TUR_Anc, which I believe is Anatolian Neolithic. Both Rome Imperial and Eastern Rom/Byzantium overlap a lot with those more ancient groups. How does that prove that all of the people from the Imperial City of Rome who overlap with all of those groups came to Rome specifically "from" Anatolia, in the first three centuries of the Empire?
I'm not saying it didn't happen. I just don't see how this proves it. I also think the conclusion is pre-mature.
As I pointed out in my first post here above to which I am responding, I think it would be crucial to include Aegean Bronze Age samples, and even more importantly, Aegean Iron Age samples, when or if they have them, and certainly the Greek Marathon sample, and the two Empuries samples, to see if they too could possibly be the source of this signal in Imperial Rome. Sicilian Bronze Age should also be in the mix, and, when we have them, samples from Greek colonists to Southern Italy.
I still believe the following:
"Using the term "lived" around Rome in the Imperial period is questionable, imo. We're talking about samples not just in Rome itself but also in Ostia, a port city where transitory seamen and merchants would "live", but only for limited periods of time."
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The same would apply to Byzantium, of course, unless we are to believe that in Anatolia proper there were people with such high levels of Levantine ancestry. It's possible that the samples he's using for Byzantium are not, indeed, just from Anatolia proper. All of the samples would have to be examined to see what percentage are strictly from Anatolia proper.
Also, I still hold with the following:
"Indeed, in terms of Anatolia, there were, as we all know, numerous Greek settlements there, inhabited by people who were, I agree, probably a mixture of Greek and western Anatolian. Were the samples used to compare to Imperial Roman samples from this group of people?"
If his samples for EasternRom/Byzantium are mostly from those heavily Greek influenced areas, then are they precisely "Anatolian", or rather a mixture of Greeks and Anatolians, which is why, indeed they spoke Greek. That is, not because they adopted it as a lingua franca, but as the language of their ancestors, a la Herodotus himself, half Carian that he was.
So, was it 100% Anatolians who went in such large numbers to the City of Rome, or was it Anatolians, Greeks, Greek/Anatolians, and yes, some Levantines. Whether they all stayed and changed the genetics of, say, Lazio, permanently is another issue.
I also would like to address this statement that the Anatolians were the "engine" of the Roman Empire. Perhaps they were the engine of the Eastern Roman Empire/Byzantium, but I certainly wouldn't go so far in talking about the western Roman Empire. In fact, there would have been no Western or Eastern Roman Empire without the legions of Roman, which originally and for all the initial large conquests were made up of people from the Italian mainland and its islands. Nor could it have existed without the roads they built, which facilitated trade, although the larger part was probably by sea. Roman culture would certainly never have existed without the borrowings from Etruria, and, of course, from Greece itself, including certainly, Ionian Greek City-States from Anatolia, but hardly further inland, and with the most respect given, from everything I know, to Athens. The upper classes of Rome very early on taught their children Greek, indeed, but that was to understand Greek philosophy and literature and science. Yes, the people from the Aegean and all the areas where Greeks had established colonies spoke Greek, and so it became a common language certainly in the eastern part of the Empire and in parts of Italy itself, but let's not forget that the peoples of the conquered areas in Western Europe spoke Latin derivatives, not Greek ones, so let's not exaggerate.