Since I've read on Anthrogenica that someone while speaking evidently of Eupedia referred to a "hysterical madwoman", I do not feel the need to be particularly diplomatic when I'll comment on the particularly idiotic claims I've seen on that site.
The usual suspects giggled that "even on Dodecad Sicilians do not overlap with Mycenaeans and ancient Greek samples", feeling that this vindicated their opinions, but it isn't our fault if they lack understanding: I challenge anybody to prove that Jovialis or others ever claimed that south Italians overlap with Mycenaeans or that they are identical, given that it has been known since years that Mycenaeans plot
close to south Italians, specifically below them (though in
some PCA format they are on top of south Italians or more eastern compared to them), and the important point is about
closeness to ancient Greek/Mycenaean samples,which suggests at least a large degree of continuity, no
completely null genetic inputs from other areas, so it is really more telling of their intellectual capacities when they debunk basically their own strawmans than ours. Also, the closeness isn't just a "visual illusion" created by the PCA, since it has been repeated in many and many papers that I needn't linking again that among modern populations the
most similar to ancient Mycenaeans and Greeks are modern south Italians and Greeks (especially to the extent they have less slavic admixture).
The most important point is
closeness and
similarity, which strongly suggest a certain degree of continuity, and this is what is important to keep in mind when commenting the following confident claim by a known anthrogenica user:
Let's explicate what such a claim entails, shall we?
In short this just means that no matter what empirical evidence emerges about the previous inhabitants of Italy, he will ALWAYS hold to his belief because he believes that the inhabitants of Italy have been replaced by "post-classical Greeks" from the Hellenistic East, so they bear very little if at all bearing about the genomics of modern Italians (southern especially), so it isn't really a problem that IA inhabitants of Sicily were already shifted towards modern Sicilians compared to Latins and that with the pull of ancient Greeks they start to approximate modern Sicilians even more, for they might have been as well Pigmies or Mongols and still they would have just "poofed" into thin air.
When asked what makes them believe that Italy got repopulated by "post-classical Greeks from the Hellenistic East", it seems to me that either they believe that the mere fact that south Italians aren't
exactly identical to ancient Greeks is enough to justify their belief or they keep citing G25 (or both), but the first point is nothing short than a logical fallacy- and I shouldn't expect less from people that show themselves not to be particularly bright- and the second begs the question of the trustworthiness of G25, especially
over official papers, furthermore on the first point one can add that whatever the following changes might have been south Italians aren't shifted towards the Levant or ancient Anatolia compared to those ancient Greek samples (rightward on the x axis), and the pull is evidently on another direction (upward in the Y axis), but I realise that they wouldn't even accept this point because it doesn't matter at all wherever ancient Sicilian samples might have plot- since they were replaced.
I realise that in order for, say, post classical Sicilians to plot exactly with ancient Greeks it would require a 100% replacement of IA Sicilians with Greeks, which I do not deem plausible, and I concede that it isn't as for now clear what else happened between the centuries that saw the "shift" of the Italian cline from its IA position to its modern one that overlaps the ancient Balkans, but the weightiest point to keep in mind is that
NOTHING AT ALL even remotely supports the claim that ancient Italians were replaced by "east meds" who later got pulled northwards by Germanics, so that modern south Italians have more "east med" and Germanic ancestry than IA Italian (from Latin-like to Sicily_IA -like) ancestry, repeatedly asserted as a doubtless truth.
As for the J2 speculations, J2a clades has been found in Italy
since the calcolithic, for heaven's sake:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982221005352
As a last note: when an user on Anthrogenica itself notices that J1 in south Italy is at 5% according to academic papers but at 7-8% according to
the personal database of another anthrogenica user, doesn't it ring a warning bell that someone isn't being a honest broker?
The holder of that personal database of samples is Sikeliot, who has shown over and over again that he is a dishonest broker who chooses from among the samples he got duplicitously from unsuspecting and naive 23andme users to support whatever claim he chooses to make. There are a lot of people in this hobby who have psychological issues which affect their "analyses" of ancient dna, but anyone who has been around a while knows exactly how troubled he is. I'll leave it at that.
