Riverman: RE post 228. Thanks for the transparency in stating what you think clearly. Ok, so my question is do you think the 4 Myceneans in the Lazaradis et al 2014 paper harboring only 4% to 16% Steppe ancestry are outliers? Do you think the Proto-Greeks you are referring to who brought in Indo_European languages from the Balkans into ancient Greece are going to be higher in Steppe admixture, or maybe about the same as what the 4 Myceneans in Lazaradis et al 2014 found.
So put another way, do you think the ancient Greek samples, particularly the Myceneans in Lazaradis et al 2014 are to Southern European shifted?
I have no strong opinion on that, but clearly they won't all score the same way. They might be pretty average though. Let's say the Balkan Proto-Greeks were already half-half and then they mixed up with locals, this would result in the higher steppe level Mycenaeans playing the ballpark of one quarter. So something like 16 % steppe ancestry doesn't sound too far off.
There surely will be Greeks with more, or with less.
It doesn't really matter. What matters most is: How much steppe ancestry was there before the MBA-LBA transition, how much will be there afterwards. That's all that matters for this concrete question.
Germanic people did not shift Central Italians north.
Do you mean they pulled them South?
Well, of course they did pull them North. Even if people argue the uniparentals are too low, they are still significant on a low level, with the lowest of all estimates. So they had an effect, probably just not the big one some people propose.
But most of the newcommers were concentrated in big cities like Rome so these Imperial Romans had less Italic ancestry than other Italians from other regions. So as time passed by they became more Italic and therefore more northern.
Agreed, but then again: We don't know the actual effect of both on the total population. Its still guesswork and might differ from region to region.
Simply take for example, hypothetically, in Early Slavic period of Dalmatia you might see a tail to Poland and after 2 centuries you might see fully homogenous Croatian profiles.
Might be not as clear cut as you suggest it is. You need a proper reference for the locals, the newcomers and the additional gene flow which might have taken place.
My conclusion: This debate is not over yet, but some claims (just some quarters, not important for Italy as a whole) are being falsified by now. It mattered even for areas like Viminacium and Linz, Upper Austria. Levantine shifted and exotic individuals will pop up as far as the Netherlands and Western Germany too.
It was a real thing, it had an effect. Talking about haplogroups, we can still find some of those more exotic haplogroups in all those places to this day in the modern autochthonous population. So its not all gone. Even on the contrary, due to later migration, it spread to areas outside of the Roman zone.
To think that this was possible in areas like Western Germany, but didn't matter for areas like Italy, is not parsimonious. That's all I'm saying. Exact percentages are a completely different matter, both for the Germanic, the Levantine, the provincial, the Albanian etc., etc. admixture. And I firmly believe it won't be the same everywhere. That's already visible by looking into the uniparentals.