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How did the ancient Romans turn into Italians ?
- Thread starter Maciamo
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Fire Haired
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So you are saying that five centuries immigration to ancient Rome, foreign invaders (Goths, Vandals, Lombards, Franks, Byzantines, Germans), then the repopulation of Rome from the 15th century onwards had absolutely no effect on the genetic make-up of modern Rome ?
How much Germanic Y DNA is in Italy today maybe 5% in northern Italy. The Germans made a very little genetic input into Italy. Italians have over 40% R1b S28 which came with italic languages 3,000-3,200ybp. They are defintley not mainly from post Roman people. I know there have been many post Roman conquering and migrations into Italy. Now that we have DNA we know those Germanic people or post Roman people made very little effect on Italy. Modern Italians fit the phiscal features of ancient Romans too based on their dark hair and eyes Romans said themselves. They dark haired unlike Gauls around the alps and Germans. I cant belive where even arguing this. Romans where defintley Italian that does not mean there are many full blooded Roman descendants(i bet could be some) but Romans where Italian they where also a mix of of Italian people. I wonder since Italian descends from Latin like Spanish French, Romanian. That some Italian surnames might trace back to ancient Romans or orignated in ancient Rome i know there have been alot alot of cultural changes in Italy since then but there might be some.
I doubt we will never know if people in the city Rome today are mainly descended of the very first Romans because they where typical Italians if another central Italian group migrates into Italy we wont be able to tell because they have the same Y DNA haplogroups and aust. DNA. Romans in 700bc where probably not the main ancestors of Romans in 1AD and same with Romans in 500AD. But modern Romans are central Italians just like ancient Romans so they basically are the same people.
I agree they are not Italian they orignally did not speak a Italic language, their aust dna is differnt, They have been a seperate people from the rest of Italy for at least 3,000-6,000 years and techbnicalley are not a Italic people because of language and culture.They had to get to Sardine from Italy probably 5,000ybp. They have 36% I2a1a which is western Mediterranean Paloithic Italy also has I2a1a. Also Sardine have the highest amount of Mediterranean in the globe13 test med in Europe almost defintley came with G2a farmers(does not matter if they have only 15% G2a that is just a direct lineage not full ancestry).
They are the closest modern relatives to Otzie the ice man a farmer from Alps Italy who died 5,300ybp. I think they are defintley from Neolithic Italians. My next argument is modern Italians mainly descend from Neolithic Italians but have admixture from Italic tribes who came from the alps and mid easterns from around syria who came in the Greco Roman age through the Mediterranean. I think the base of Italians ancestry is Neolithic Sardine/Otzie like people. Sardine defintley in some way are connected to Italians because that is probably where the orignally came from.
Drac II
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The Germanic and Hunnish invaders in Italy were indeed just a minority, like it usually happens with military invasions, but not so in the case of the immigrants, slaves and freedmen of Roman times, specially from the Eastern parts of the empire (Egypt, the Levant, Anatolia/Turkey, Greece, the Balkans.) Even Roman writers (Seneca, Tacitus, Juvenal, etc.) commented about the large numbers of these foreigners in Italy.
Vallicanus
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Exactly so.
RosenBlues
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First, I think this is a false attribution fallacy. Most psychologists and scientists are still debating whether character traits are results of nature or nurture. Second, the use of the cats and dogs analogy is another fallacy (cant remember which kind though) because they are two different species. Perhaps a better analogy would be a soldier does not usually end up producing works of art (at least not in this day and age).
Though in broad and vague manner, the Italians haven't changed that much. With the Popes, they lead the Crusades and led the age of the Renaissance - so they maintained the militaristic and artistic traits from their Roman times. Perhaps we can't perceive those characteristics in contemporary times due to 'being too close to the origin' if you get what I mean. ^^ Though you can say corruption among Italians haven't ended since Roman times.
Templar
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Germanic people (and especially the Normans)were far more over-represented in the Crusades than Italians lol.
First Crusade leadership:
Godfrey of Bouillon(Frankish knight born in the very edge of North-Eastern France)
Raymond IV of Toulouse(Frankish knight)
Baldwin of Boulogne(Frankish knight born in modern-day Belgium)
Bohemond I (Norman Knight from Sicily)
Robert Curthose (Norman knight from Normandy)
Third Crusade:
Philip II of France (Frankish King born in North-Eastern France)
Richard I of England (Norman King)
Frederick I Barbarossa (Holy Roman Emperor)
I won't mention the leadership of all the other crusades because they weren't as important or successful as the first and third ones.
Nobody1
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And who do you think was in the armies of Bohemund and Tancred (First Crusade) -
Fulcher of Chartres - Historia Hierosolymitana
[First Crusade]
Franci, Flandri, Frisi, Galli, Allobroges, Lotharingi, Alemanni, Baioarii, Normanni, Angli, Scoti, Aquitani, Itali, Daci, Apuli, Iberi, Britones, Graeci, Armeni?
Lombards and Apulians were heavily recruited by the Normans in the South;
at every expedition against the Byzantines [Dyrrachium 1091/Thessalonica 1085]; Crusades; Islamic Sicily etc.
Ioannes Skylitzes -
(Normannic conquest of South Italy vs. Byzantines)
Michael was defeated and lost the better part of his army, he shamefully taking refuge in Cannae. Crippled like this he was none the wiser for his wound.....took back into battle his defeated forces together with the Pisidians and Lycaonians who make up the unit of the foederati and fell on the enemy at a place called Horai. Again he was severely defeated by the Franks (Normans) who had now allied with themselves a considerable host of Italians living around the river Po and in the foothills of the Alps.
Thats just the Normannic campaigns look up
Guelph and Ghibellines for the Lombards on their own;
Templar
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I am well aware that many Italians participated in the Crusades, but what I was responding to was the claim that they were LEAD by Italians, which is false. Even the Pope who started the Crusades, Pope Urban II, was born in North-Eastern France.
Nobody1
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Thats true;
none of the leaders were Italians (Lombard/Apulian);
i think there was one Bishop from Lombardy with a peasant army
- but killed in Anatolia against Seljuq Turks;
Templar
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Vallicanus
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The only important Italian Crusading leaders were the Montferrat (Monferrato) dynasty from Piedmont who may have mixed with the French.
Nobody1
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Noman
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First off the great works were done by Greek slaves who were much smarter than most of their masters. Second, the upper class was all etruscan and nothing to do with the rest, where all the genius of leadership came from. Thirdly they were forced to rise up to the occasion several times, which is what led to their discipline and cohesiveness for a long time. That combined with a few brilliant leaders of the caesar line is what propelled them to the top.
Then they had the problem of too much success, a huge proletariat on the dole, an ever decaying and more dissolute and outof touch upper class.
And of course it's been almost completely depopulated and replaced in the north. Then once again. Then a couple times in the south and struggles with the guelfs and ghibbolines that tore apart any last shred of cohesiveness. Then the venetians and genoans running everything in such a way as to turn everyone against each other and undermine christianity to boot, and taking on so many mercenaries again they practically speaking changed the character of the country again.
And of course the delightful rule of the duke of anjou, fallowed by the italian vespers and rule by aragon.
So no there's cohesion of any kind, and probably zero genetic continuity, and the great works of romans weren't due to the local italian population anyway.
Then they had the problem of too much success, a huge proletariat on the dole, an ever decaying and more dissolute and outof touch upper class.
And of course it's been almost completely depopulated and replaced in the north. Then once again. Then a couple times in the south and struggles with the guelfs and ghibbolines that tore apart any last shred of cohesiveness. Then the venetians and genoans running everything in such a way as to turn everyone against each other and undermine christianity to boot, and taking on so many mercenaries again they practically speaking changed the character of the country again.
And of course the delightful rule of the duke of anjou, fallowed by the italian vespers and rule by aragon.
So no there's cohesion of any kind, and probably zero genetic continuity, and the great works of romans weren't due to the local italian population anyway.
Angela
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The Etruscan kings once ruled Rome, but were kicked out. The Romans absorbed the Etruscans; notably, for example, we know that Claudius married an Etruscan noblewoman, but that hardly means the Romans were really just Etruscans. It's very clear that the Latin clans were still alive and well at that period, and that these peoples (the Etruscans and the Romans) spoke different languages, from totally different language families, and that the Indo-European Latin language prevailed.
As to the precise genetic differences, what I would say is that we don't have any "Roman" dna of that period, or any period for that matter, and as I've posted before, the only Etruscan dna we have is some HVRI values which could just as well have been in place since the Neolithic. So, everything is basically conjecture. The Italici, of which the Romans were one group, may have been significantly different from the Etruscans when they first arrived in the peninsula; we just don't know. What seems obvious, however, even if both groups came from elsewhere during the Bronze Age, or early Iron Age, (for the Etruscans there is absolutely no archaeological evidence of a mass migration at this time, so it would have to have been a small group that formed an elite) is that they would have mingled with the pre-existing population, and then with each other.
As to "replacement" in Italy, the actual science doesn't support any such hypothesis; quite the contrary. Rather, it paints a picture of continuity since about the middle of the first millennium B.C., a continuity that is rare in Europe. I don't know why so many people seem to be unaware of the latest research using IBD analysis.
Ralph and Coop et al: http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.1001555
The discussion at Discovery: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/?p=20961#.Uhef6T_pxdE
This doesn't mean, of course, as Razib takes pains to point out, that there wasn't significant population substructure dating from that time, because there was, owing perhaps the most to the Celtic migrations in the north and the Greek colonization in the south.
It also doesn't mean that Italians don't all cluster together, however, as indeed they do, and which can be seem on any academic PCA plot. You don't have all these Italians clustering in Greece or Spain or France or Switzerland, the way that the lines are blurred between, say, the Low Countries and England, or the Scandinavian countries and England. You can go all the way back to Lao et al, and his finding that one of the major breaks in the European cline (another one being near Finland) can be located at the Alps. Within Italy itself, there is a lesser break in the cline just south of Rome, which may indeed be due to the Greek colonizations which I mentioned, but which could also be a result of some small influences from the Moorish kingdoms of Sicily and the southern part of the peninsula, and then to the fact that these provinces formed part of the general area of The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies for so long, and therefore what gene flow was experienced was largely confined to that area until perhaps fifty years ago. Despite the delusions of the followers of Lega Nord, there is no genetic evidence of any distinct population of "Padanians" who live north of the Po. Rather, except for the slight break south of Rome, Italian genetics is basically clinal except for some small genetic isolates.
What has to be remembered is that Italy has maintained high population densities since the Neolithic. (more Cardial in some areas, and more Danubian in others, but any rate, it does not seem that it experienced the type of population crash that took place in the LBK, or even in the Balkans) The Italici then appear all over the peninsula and into Sicily, with their new Indo-European languages. On top of those layers, you have the migrations of the first millennium B.C. of the Greeks into the south, and the "Celtici" or "Galli" into the north. (Whether they were substantially different genetically from the earlier Italici or the mysterious Liguri is a whole other discussion that I don't think can be answered at this time. What should be remembered, however, is that if the historical sources are correct, many of these late "Gallic" migrations ended in slavery for the invaders, while some of them, like the Boi who settled Bologna, left for Dacia or France. I don't mean to imply that some of them did not remain, but I think their influence can be overblown.) Following this, you have a concerted policy by Rome to settle all parts of Gallia Cisalpina, which means basically Italy from the Alps to the Rubicon with colony after colony of Roman settlers. The Romans knew what they were about in terms of pacifying and unifying the peninsula.
That is basically the ethnogenesis, so far as I currently understand it. What the Ralph and Coop study shows, if they are correct, and nobody seems to have challenged them yet, is that there were no further *major* gene flows into Italy, with the possible exception of some from the Moors in Sicily in particular, and perhaps in lesser degree in some other areas of the south. The Germanic invasions, seem to have had little influence autosomally, and the Slavic ones virtually none. (They maintain that the same is true for the Iberian peninsula) If people are looking for total population replacement, they need to look to the population history of northern Europe.
As to cultural matters, there are numerous full length books and scholarly papers on the intertwined cultures of Rome, Etruria and Greece that would clarify matters for anyone interested in the subject.
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Noman
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But Julius Caesar was actually etruscan and therefore so was Octavian, and they were the ones who made rome what it was. And they weren't the only ones. They had red hair, how much like a modern roman is that?
We pretty much know that etruscans were neolithic farmers and we pretty much know that G haplogroup was neolithic farmers, and we have a fully G tribe that claims they were etruscans who got separated from their fellows. So that's about as wrapped up as it can be given the time.
Ah population genetics. Long story short they are basically saying that the people there today are like themselves and not like other people who are elsewhere, but if there's something which was lost it won't measure that, and that's the only thing that matters. And problem is, simply looking at haplogroups in italy says a completely different story. Or knowing enough history for that matter.
http://italydna.blogspot.com/2007/01/r1b-in-italy.html
Spot the normans, spot the goths, spot the jews, spot the arabs. None of those groups were part of original rome.
So the invaders who had similar haplogroup to most of the invadees didn't completely change their makeup? And the invaders who'd been invaded by the invadees and vice versa for 3k years or so had similar autosomal dna? That's not a big shock.
However like I said, and is the case in monarchies and empires we know about, it was a small minority running things and that minority has never been a big percentage of the whole.
Furthermore the whole of mediterranean has undoubtedly crept in its sutosomal genetics. Especially towards darker hair and skin to protect from the sun.
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Noman
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In short you can make a case there's similarity to what rome was when it fell, which is largely because it imprinted itself all over the mediterranean anyway. Not much of a case it's similar to when it started, though.