# Population Genetics > Autosomal Genetics >  The Italian Genome-Fiorito et al 2015

## Angela

This is one of the papers I've been waiting for, and it's behind a pay wall. Oh well...

The Italian genome reflects the history of Europe and the Mediterranean basin
http://www.nature.com/ejhg/journal/vaop/ncurrent/suppinfo/ejhg2015233s1.html?url=/ejhg/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/ejhg2015233a.html


*"Abstract*

Recent scientific literature has highlighted the relevance of population genetic studies both for disease association mapping in admixed populations and for understanding the history of human migrations. Deeper insight into the history of the Italian population is critical for understanding the peopling of Europe. Because of its crucial position at the centre of the Mediterranean basin, the Italian peninsula has experienced a complex history of colonization and migration whose genetic signatures are still present in contemporary Italians. In this study, we investigated genomic variation in the Italian population using 2.5 million single-nucleotide polymorphisms in a sample of more than 300 unrelated Italian subjects with well-defined geographical origins. We combined several analytical approaches to interpret genome-wide data on 1272 individuals from European, Middle Eastern, and North African populations. We detected three major ancestral components contributing different proportions across the Italian peninsula, and signatures of continuous gene flow within Italy, which have produced remarkable genetic variability among contemporary Italians. In addition, we have extracted novel details about the Italian population’s ancestry, identifying the genetic signatures of major historical events in Europe and the Mediterranean basin from the Neolithic (e.g., peopling of Sardinia) to recent times (e.g., ‘barbarian invasion’ of Northern and Central Italy). These results are valuable for further genetic, epidemiological and forensic studies in Italy and in Europe."

I really love no information abstracts, don't you? :)


This is the link to the Supplementary Info:
http://www.nature.com/ejhg/journal/v...g2015233a.html

I've gone through it all and I have some thoughts, but it's too late to get into it now. :) I'll just say that although it's better than the Busby effort, some of the choices are still obscure to me, and at least in the supplement there is no clarity as to the direction of the gene flow. Maybe if I can get my hands on the actual paper it will seem clearer, but I also get the feeling, as I did with the Busby paper, that I'm back to a time five years or more in the past before Lazaridis et al or Haak et al and Allentoft et al.

To get started, nothing really new on the PCA front except that Armenians are so removed from other Near Easterners. Turks as well to a certain extent. :
PCA from the Italian Genome Paper-2015.jpgPCA from the Italian Genome Paper-2015.jpg

There's also a graphic on Italian variation. The general cline is as expected, except that Calabrians (Reggio Calabria) are south of some of the Sicilians. That may have to do with the samples chosen for Sicily, which are Trapani and Ragusa. I doubt that there'd be much difference between Reggio and, say, Messina, but some Sicilian posters might know better. Also, there are some samples floating out of the expected cline in north and central Italy. This may have to do with the fact that there has been a certain amount of intermarriage across provincial lines in northern and central Italy starting around the end of the 19th century. I can't see anything in the supplement as to their standards for sample inclusion. Not that it would make much difference, but I don't know why they would have chosen Ferrara for Emilia Romagna. 

Italian variation-The Italian Genome Paper 2015.jpg

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## Fire Haired14

I just made a thread for the same study. Can you delete it?

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## Drac II

The study attempted to date the North African and Middle Eastern DNA among Italians. The summary of the results is found in the file entitled "Supplementary Information". For Northern Italians it is given as being from late Roman times (about 1400 years ago), and for Southern Italians it is given as medieval (about 1000 years ago). The admixture in Central Italians is said to be older, going from back before Etruscan times (about 3000 years ago) to Roman times (about 1800 years ago.) They also attempted to date the Northern/Central European DNA in North Italy, they estimated it to Roman times (about 1700 years ago.)

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## Hauteville

This confirm again that Sicily is genetically close to mainlander southern Italians.

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## Angela

> This confirm again that Sicily is genetically close to mainlander southern Italians.


Yes, indeed. That's the same thing that the dodecad analyses showed years ago, but which some doubted.

I also found it interesting that there is still some minor variation in Sicily. If you go through the supplementary info section's graphics, in particular the Admixture ones, you can see it. I have to think about it some more but I wonder if it is a northwest versus southeast difference given the two areas where they chose to sample. The Boattini et al studies showed more Northern and Central European yDna in the northwest than elsewhere on the island if I remember correctly. 

It's impossible to know how much variation there might be in Calabria if you go down to a fine enough resolution, because they only sampled in Reggio Calabria.

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## Hauteville

The samples are both from North West Sicily (Trapani) and far South East (Ragusa), Basilicata's samples are from both Matera and Potenza. It's quite interesting the position of Latium judging on the fact that on Behar et al Abruzzo samples were distant to Tuscany while the ones from Latium are very close to them. They are from Viterbo who are very close to Tuscany geographically and it was a very Etruscan area.

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## Angela

*
*This is Fire-Haired's comment from a duplicate thread he started*. 


*


> New Study, Italian diversity: Mostly Geography
> 
> The paper is under paywall but there's lots of useful information in the Supplementary information. I made lots of notes from it I'll share later. Basically all the tests, IBD, ADMIXTURE, and PCA, say Italian genetic diversity correlates with geography. There's lots of good info in this study. 
> 
> I think there was an old study way back which found Italy is one of the most genetically diverse countries in Europe. A good question is: How old could this diversity be and what caused it? My guess is the diversity goes back to at least the pre-Roman Iron age, if people for the most part have stayed in their own regions since then. 
> 
> IMO, Italy received immigration from North of the Alps and East Mediterranean after the Copper age, and the populations in Italy before that were "EEF" with little WHG-admixture. We'll need ancient DNA to know the population history.

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## Hauteville

It would be nice to have new ancient samples from everywhere of Italy other than Otzi and Remedello.

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## Angela

> *
> 
> 
> 
> *Fire Haired:
> 
> New Study, Italian diversity: Mostly Geography
> 
> The paper is under paywall but there's lots of useful information in the Supplementary information. I made lots of notes from it I'll share later. Basically all the tests, IBD, ADMIXTURE, and PCA, say Italian genetic diversity correlates with geography. There's lots of good info in this study. 
> ...


Good insights, Fire-Haired. 

I think the paper you're referring to is Ralph and Coop et al. It's not _that_ old; it's 2013! :)

Years ago, Dienekes said that Italian genetics could be explained by a Neolithic substratum that covered the whole area, and then migrations from the north that had a disproportionate effect from north to south, and migrations from the east and south-east that had a disproportionate effect from south to north, created the cline and the clusters we see today. It sounded about right then and it sounds about right now. 

The devil is in the details, however, and it looks like ancient dna is going to be necessary to flesh them out. Certainly, this type of Alder analysis, also attempted by Busby and Hellenthal, just isn't cutting it, although I think this one is better, both because they show a wide variety of possible mixes (none of which are going to be accurate, of course, because they're using modern populations, but still a variety), and they're giving a range of dates, which means it's easier to tie some of this to actual historical events. 

What actually happened, in Italy as in most places in Europe, although perhaps more in Italy, is that there were layers of migrations impacting the same areas that came from the same parts of the world, and Alder can't sort them out. The same thing happened with Iberia. It couldn't sort out if the SSA and North African came in the Mesolithic, the Paleolithic or the Moorish era. The yDna and mtDna paper that just came out that used highly resolved subclades actually did a better job, in my opinion.

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## Angela

> The samples are both from North West Sicily (Trapani) and far South East (Ragusa), Basilicata's samples are from both Matera and Potenza. It's quite interesting the position of Latium judging on the fact that on Behar et al Abruzzo samples were distant to Tuscany while the ones from Latium are very close to them. They are from Viterbo who are very close to Tuscany geographically and it was a very Etruscan area.


Well, they knew enough not to sample from Latina or Frosinone; I think samples from there would have clustered with southern Italians. Choosing where to sample in Lazio is actually a problem, given how much migration there's been to the area from all over the country going back a hundred years in some cases. So, I guess they were stuck with areas closer to Toscana.

I never bought into that whole thing that the Abruzzi and Lazio were so similar. I just thought they were probably sampling a lot of people who had ancestry from the Abruzzi. There's lots of them in Lazio. It's like people from Liguria going to Torino to work. It's been happening for a hundred years, way before the massive 1950s era migrations.

Their Tuscan samples are Arezzo and Siena. I think they should really have included one more from the North West so we could see if there was more overlap with Liguria etc. 

I still don't think Ferrara was the best choice for Emilia Romagna.

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## Hauteville

> Well, they knew enough not to sample from Latina or Frosinone; I think samples from there would have clustered with southern Italians. Choosing where to sample in Lazio is actually a problem, given how much migration there's been to the area from all over the country going back a hundred years in some cases. So, I guess they were stuck with areas closer to Toscana.
> 
> Their Tuscan samples are Arezzo and Siena. I think they should really have included one more from the North West so we could see if there was more overlap with Liguria etc. 
> 
> I still don't think Ferrara was the best choice for Emilia Romagna.


Yeah it's true. Modern people from Latina is mostly Venetian nowadays, while in Rome basically it lives all Italy. Surely the Tuscans from Lucca or Pisa were much more close to Ligurians.

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## Eldritch

Aostan cluster pretty north but i do not understand if they refer to the French Aostans or Italian ones.

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## Angela

> Yeah it's true. Modern people from Latina is mostly Venetian nowadays, while in Rome basically it lives all Italy. Surely the Tuscans from Lucca or Pisa were much more close to Ligurians.


Wouldn't it be a mix in Latina? Venetians plus southerners? Wasn't Latina part of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies until Mussolini? Or am I misremembering?

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## Angela

It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that there's quite a difference genetically between northern and southern Italians, but the fst numbers showed a difference a bit larger than I had been expecting. 

It was noted by Dienekes on his blog post about the paper.

http://www.dienekes.blogspot.com/201...-italians.html

"From the paper:
 The distribution of the pairwise Fst distances between all population pairs is shown in Supplementary Table S3. *The genetic distance between Southern and Northern Italians (Fst=0.0013) is comparable to that between individuals living in different political units (ie, Iberians-Romanians Fst=0.0011; British-French Fst=0.0007), and, interestingly, in >50% of all the possible pairwise comparisons within Europe (Supplementary Figure S7)."


*

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## Hauteville

> Wouldn't it be a mix in Latina? Venetians plus southerners? Wasn't Latina part of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies until Mussolini? Or am I misremembering?


Gaeta yes, but Latina was founded in Fascist period and it was populated with Venetians and some other northern Italians as well.



> l comune di Littoria fu popolato con l'immigrazione massiccia di coloni soprattutto veneti, friulani, emiliani eromagnoli, oggi denominati nell'insieme comunit venetopontine, ai quali furono consegnati i poderi edificati dall'Opera Nazionale Combattenti, similmente a quanto operato nei limitrofi comuni della pianura.


https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latina#La_fondazione

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## Angela

> Gaeta yes, but Latina was founded in Fascist period and it was populated with Venetians and some other northern Italians as well.
> 
> https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latina#La_fondazione


Ah, I see. I was thinking of the provincia of Latina, and so including Gaeta and Formia, and just speculating that if you took samples from the two areas you'd probably get very different results. (given there hadn't been any intermarriage, of course)

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## Angela

Just to go back to the graphic showing all the Italian samples in relation to one another, it's interesting how there really isn't much of a cline within Northern Italy itself, other than Aosta clusering further north. Lombardia, Piemonte, Liguria and Romagna (it's not Emilia at all since it's all from Ferrara) are all jumbled up together. (You like that technical genetic jargon? :))

Why didn't they include a couple of samples from the Veneto, I wonder? I think they might occupy the area where Aosta and the rest of the northern Italians meet. Had they sampled Friulani, they might have been listing off to the east toward Slovenia a bit. 

It's supported by the IBD analyses that they did. Lots of IBD sharing among Northern Italians and between Northern and Central Italians and very little between Southern Italians and people from north of Rome. Fwiw, that's borne out by the analyses that 23andme used to do, but won't be doing any longer, apparently. I have yet to get a match at the default level with anyone from southern Italy. They're all northern Italians, specifically northwest Italians, or Tuscans, with a few odd ducks from Sweden and one with British Isles ancestry.

For those who aren't Italian, they obviously chose people with ancestry only from these specific areas in order to figure out the migrations which have affected Italy. There's going to be a lot of people in modern Italy who have IBD sharing running both north and south, stemming from intermarriages after the large migration from southern Italy to northern Italy during and after the 1950s. It's just that they weren't included in the analysis.

The Italian Genome-Italian variation.jpg

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## Angela

> Aostan cluster pretty north but i do not understand if they refer to the French Aostans or Italian ones.


See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aosta_Valley

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## Angela

The Alder analysis is the weakest part of the paper, I think. For what they're worth, here are the three graphics where any number of "admixtures" and "admixture times" are proposed.

The Italian Genome Paper-Admixture Dates for Northern Italy.jpg

The Italian Genome Paper-Admixture Dates for Central Italy.jpg

The Italian Genome Paper-Admixture Dates for Southern Italy.jpg

Some of the ones for Central Italy make a little more sense...Russians and Druze maybe around 1000 BC? Indo-Europeans arriving around 1800 to 2000 BC but admixture lagging a bit behind?

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## Angela

> The Alder analysis is the weakest part of the paper, I think. For what they're worth, here are the three graphics where any number of "admixtures" and "admixture times" are proposed.
> 
> The Italian Genome Paper-Admixture Dates for Northern Italy.jpg
> 
> The Italian Genome Paper-Admixture Dates for Central Italy.jpg
> 
> The Italian Genome Paper-Admixture Dates for Southern Italy.jpg
> 
> Some of the ones for Central Italy make a little more sense...Russians and Druze maybe around 1000 BC? Indo-Europeans arriving around 1800 to 2000 BC but admixture lagging a bit behind?



From my perspective, some of these results are just silly if taken at face value or perhaps if taken literally is a better way to put it. Look at the chart for southern Italians, for example. We know from prior work and this paper as well that there's a minor North African input into southern Italians. We know that there was Saracen rule from about 700-1000 AD (depending on the area). Looking for the ones in that target date, they came up with Basque and Mozabite, Iberian and Egyptian, Lithuanian and Moroccan and Finnish and Druze. Really? Those were the two populations who admixed? Lots of Basques, Lithuanians and Finns running around in Sicily before the North Africans showed up? :) The North Africans were just the last layer of migration.

For Central Italians it's a bit better. A "Russian" like population and a "Druze" like population might roughly approximate what went on around 1000 BC if the Indo-Europeans didn't arrive there until around 1800 BC and admixture took a little longer? 

For Northern Italians too, Lezghins/Syria 1000 BC might not be too bad? Not good, mind you, just not as bad as most of them.

Or again, because of repeated layers of migration from the same general areas, the dates just represent the latest layer.

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## Danelaw

No the North African admixture is present only in Sardinia, Calabria and Sicily. Calabrian samples are only from Reggio Calabria, so they are clearly mixed with Sicilians.

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## Pax Augusta

> Their Tuscan samples are Arezzo and Siena. I think they should really have included one more from the North West so we could see if there was more overlap with Liguria etc. 
> 
> I still don't think Ferrara was the best choice for Emilia Romagna.


I agree, Ferrara isn't really Emilia and neither Romagna. Neither Arezzo and Siena are the best choice for the whole Tuscany but just good enough for Southern Tuscany. I agree they should really have included one more from the North West Tuscany, Pistoia and Lucca would be good choices.

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## Tomenable

Why do you think is there such a large genetic distance between northern and southern Italians?

Also - is there an intermediary population (central Italians?), or a "very sharp" boundary?

And if there is a sharp genetic boundary, then roughly where is the dividing line?

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## Tomenable

> Basically all the tests, IBD, ADMIXTURE, and PCA, say Italian genetic diversity correlates with geography.


Sorry but if even Iberians are closer genetically to Romanians, than Northern Italians are to Southern Italians, then we can't say it is "just geography". It correlates with geography only as far as different ancestral ethnic groups settled different geographical areas...

Geographical distance from Iberia to Romania is many times greater, than from Southern Italy to Northern Italy...

And you also wrote, that there is (or was until ca. 1950) almost no IBD sharing between Southern and Northern Italy - why?

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## Angela

> No the North African admixture is present only in Sardinia, Calabria and Sicily. Calabrian samples are only from Reggio Calabria, so they are clearly mixed with Sicilians.


We have no way of knowing that. They didn't include Apulia (which usually just looks southern Italian) or Campania, for example. 

From the evidence of 23andme, and Dodecad, it seems that Sicilians and southern Italians, all southern Italians, cluster together generally speaking, and show the same minority ancestry, although I would speculate that the cline is still there so there's probably slightly less North African as you move north, not that there's much to begin with...much less than you can find in Iberia for example, although it doesn't appear that way here because they don't use samples from all over Spain and Portugal. (That's what the results I've seen seem to indicate as well.) 

I know that's not what some Sicilians themselves have tended to believe, but it seems to be a fact. (I should send this to an old professor of mine from university. He always insisted to his students that he was Sicilian, not Italian, not even southern Italian. Of course, culture is what matters the most, so he might not be swayed by these results. :)

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## Hauteville

> I know that's not what some Sicilians themselves have tended to believe, but it seems to be a fact. (I should send this to an old professor of mine from university. He always insisted to his students that he was Sicilian, not Italian, not even southern Italian. Of course, culture is what matters the most, so he might not be swayed by these results. :)


Those separatists are truly ludicrous  :Laughing:

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## Rethel

> Those separatists are truly ludicrous


And you, Hauteville, are saying this?  :Petrified:

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## Angela

> Sorry but if even Iberians are closer genetically to Romanians, than Northern Italians are to Southern Italians, then we can't say it is "just geography". It correlates with geography only as far as different ancestral ethnic groups settled different geographical areas...
> 
> Geographical distance from Iberia to Romania is many times greater, than from Southern Italy to Northern Italy...
> 
> And you also wrote, that there is (or was until ca. 1950) almost no IBD sharing between Southern and Northern Italy - why?



Sorry, that wasn't my statement; that was made by Fire-Haired. He started a thread after this one was posted, and asked me to close it. I moved his post over here. I'll make it clearer in the post that it is a quote from Fire-Haired. I'll let him explain what he meant by it. 

As for myself, I think what the paper shows is how geographical proximity to very different populations created the Italian cline. I'd go back to Dienekes' comment from years ago. You have a Neolithic base all over the peninsula and islands, and then you have certain kinds of populations coming through or around the Alps and disproportionately affecting the north and center, and southern Balkan, Greek, perhaps Anatolian like populations entering Italy from the south and so having a disproportionate effect on those southern populations. Those differing migrations created the cline.

I don't think that the paper shows that there was _no_ IBD sharing between the Center-North and the South, but there certainly wasn't much of it. I'm not going to bore you by droning on about it, but it's basically because the two areas had very different histories for the last 1500-1700 years. From the fall of Rome in some areas, and the fall of the Lombard kingdoms of the south in other areas, they were only sporadically under the same rulers. The Byzantines took back the south, and then later parts of it were ruled by the Normans, and the Holy Roman emperors; these latter two were definitely not folk movements. Then it was under the control of the Aragonese and the Spanish for centuries. 

The north was under the Holy Roman Emperors and occasionally the French, but the communes very soon asserted their independence, and there was extensive trade and cultural contacts between the different cities and republics of the North and Center, and also with the domains of the Pope in some parts of central Italy. 

Over and beyond the effect of the Saracen invasions and rule of some areas of the south, the two populations drifted apart in those 1500 years.

Anyway, that's how I see it. Other people might have other insights to offer. 




> Tomenable: Why do you think is there such a large genetic distance between northern and southern Italians?
> 
> Also - is there an intermediary population (central Italians?), or a "very sharp" boundary?
> 
> And if there is a sharp genetic boundary, then roughly where is the dividing line?


It depends how you interpret the data, as with anything else. I've always felt that the Center clustered closer to the North, and I think this study supports that interpretation, putting the "dividing line" just south of Rome. I think prior studies have showed the same thing. So, although the Central Italians are a bit "south" of Northern Italians, they're pretty close to them, closer than they are to southern Italians. I think everyone knew that about Tuscans, but it seems it's also true of Lazio. I think Umbria would be much the same.

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## Hauteville

> And you, Hauteville, are saying this?


Hauteville was a dinasty and the kingdom included half of Italy :)
Anyway IRL those ludicrous separatists are like needle in a haystack, maybe the fake americans are different.

Close OT

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## Fire Haired14

It's very weird. IBD between South and North Italians is less than between North Italians and other Europeans. Maybe the tests done for Italy-Italy were differnt than Italy-Other. 

The high NW African IBD with South Italy(inclu. Sardinia) clearly points towards recent NW African ancestry there. Turkey, including West Turkey, doesn't have high IBD with Tuscany or nearby regions. If Estruscans came from west Turkey, preserved much of their Anatolian blood, and Tuscans have stuck to their region, you'd expect high IBD with Turkey. But maybe IBD can't detect admixture from so long ago.

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## Hauteville

> Sorry, that wasn't my statement; that was made by Fire-Haired. He started a thread after this one was posted, and asked me to close it. I moved his post over here. I'll make it clearer in the post that it is a quote from Fire-Haired. I'll let him explain what he meant by it. 
> 
> As for myself, I think what the paper shows is how geographical proximity to very different populations created the Italian cline. I'd go back to Dienekes' comment from years ago. You have a Neolithic base all over the peninsula and islands, and then you have certain kinds of populations coming through or around the Alps and disproportionately affecting the north and center, and southern Balkan, Greek, perhaps Anatolian like populations entering Italy from the south and so having a disproportionate effect on those southern populations. Those differing migrations created the cline.
> 
> I don't think that the paper shows that there was _no_ IBD sharing between the Center-North and the South, but there certainly wasn't much of it. I'm not going to bore you by droning on about it, but it's basically because the two areas had very different histories for the last 1500-1700 years. From the fall of Rome in some areas, and the fall of the Lombard kingdoms of the south in other areas, they were only sporadically under the same rulers. The Byzantines took back the south, and then later parts of it were ruled by the Normans, and the Holy Roman emperors; these latter two were definitely not folk movements. Then it was under the control of the Aragonese and the Spanish for centuries. 
> 
> The north was under the Holy Roman Emperors and occasionally the French, but the communes very soon asserted their independence, and there was extensive trade and cultural contacts between the different cities and republics of the North and Center, and also with the domains of the Pope in some parts of central Italy. 
> 
> Over and beyond the effect of the Saracen invasions and rule of some areas of the south, the two populations drifted apart in those 1500 years.
> ...


Of course, after the Ostrogothic Italy and Byzantine wars, the nation was divided into many parts and the Pope has always done by intermission between North Italy (Kingdom of Lombardy, independent towns, Serenissima Veneziana, Genoa) and South Italy (Kingdom of Sicily who was as well divided for a certain time in two parts in the war between Aragones and Angevins). Probably there weren't so much contact between North and South or they were present in minor number, like merchants etc.

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## Angela

> Those separatists are truly ludicrous


I may have given the wrong impression. He wasn't really a separatist in a political sense at all, just very proud of what he saw as the particular history and culture of his island. He wasn't a crank or eccentric at all, just very attached to his island. 

A sense of campanilismo that encompassed the whole island, perhaps. :)

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## Angela

> Of course, after the Ostrogothic Italy and Byzantine wars, the nation was divided into many parts and the Pope has always done by intermission between North Italy (Kingdom of Lombardy, independent towns, Serenissima Veneziana, Genoa) and South Italy (Kingdom of Sicily who was as well divided for a certain time in two parts in the war between Aragones and Angevins). Probably there weren't so much contact between North and South or they were present in minor number, like merchants etc.


Well, this is all simple to us, but other Europeans and certainly Americans have no idea of the consequences of the invasions and the Gothic War for Italy, or how fractured and broken it was for so many hundreds of years. That all contributed to the substructure that we see in the genetics.

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## Pax Augusta

> Turkey, including West Turkey, doesn't have high IBD with Tuscany or nearby regions. If Estruscans came from west Turkey, preserved much of their Anatolian blood, and Tuscans have stuck to their region, you'd expect high IBD with Turkey. But maybe IBD can't detect admixture from so long ago.


We already discussed about it many times. We can't completely rule out that there was a small migration of a supposedly religious elite from Anatolia related to the Etruscans without a substantial genetic impact, but it is now extremely clear that the vast majority of the Tuscans are not descended from this but from Villanovians who were part of the Etruscan ethnos.

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## Hauteville

> Well, this is all simple to us, but other Europeans and certainly Americans have no idea of the consequences of the invasions and the Gothic War for Italy, or how fractured and broken it was for so many hundreds of years. That all contributed to the substructure that we see in the genetics.


That map summarize the fracture between South and North of Italy. The Papal state has prevented the unification of Italy in 1200 on an idea by Federico II.

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## Angela

> It's very weird. IBD between South and North Italians is less than between North Italians and other Europeans. Maybe the tests done for Italy-Italy were differnt than Italy-Other. 
> 
> The high NW African IBD with South Italy(inclu. Sardinia) clearly points towards recent NW African ancestry there. Turkey, including West Turkey, doesn't have high IBD with Tuscany or nearby regions. If Estruscans came from west Turkey, preserved much of their Anatolian blood, and Tuscans have stuck to their region, you'd expect high IBD with Turkey. But maybe IBD can't detect admixture from so long ago.


It's not a high level. You can see that from the Admixture runs. It's the fact that the segments are _long_ that shows it was relatively recent. They're showing IBD into the first millennium BC, so it should show up, you're right. Ralph and Coop went back to approximately 2500 BC.

If the "Etruscans" _did_ come from northwest Anatolia, they might have been a male elite. The paper that provided a PCA for ancient Etruscans showed them as generic Southern Europeans, maybe even pretty Balkan like, not West Asian as in Turkish, Anatolian or Armenian at all.* 

There might have been a Bronze Age migration by way of the Balkans that carried ANE and high farmer levels but very little WHG. I've been proposing for a long time that the Indo-European migrations weren't a case of one specific group that somehow exponentially increased in population and then went out and invaded and admixed with native groups, but a case of "related" populations spreading in different directions, sometimes after a certain amount of back migration. So, some of the "Indo-Europeans" that came to Italy from the east may not have been exactly the same autosomally as the Indo-Europeans who arrived from the north. 

We should know soon, when we get ancient Greek and Italian genomes from the relevant periods.

*Ed. For anyone who is unaware of it, the inhabitants of modern day Turkey are not genetically the same as the ancient Anatolians, because, among other reasons, they have "Turkic" admixture which arrived in the Middle Ages.

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## Danelaw

> Sorry, that wasn't my statement; that was made by Fire-Haired. He started a thread after this one was posted, and asked me to close it. I moved his post over here. I'll make it clearer in the post that it is a quote from Fire-Haired. I'll let him explain what he meant by it. As for myself, I think what the paper shows is how geographical proximity to very different populations created the Italian cline. I'd go back to Dienekes' comment from years ago. You have a Neolithic base all over the peninsula and islands, and then you have certain kinds of populations coming through or around the Alps and disproportionately affecting the north and center, and southern Balkan, Greek, perhaps Anatolian like populations entering Italy from the south and so having a disproportionate effect on those southern populations. Those differing migrations created the cline.I don't think that the paper shows that there was _no_ IBD sharing between the Center-North and the South, but there certainly wasn't much of it. I'm not going to bore you by droning on about it, but it's basically because the two areas had very different histories for the last 1500-1700 years. From the fall of Rome in some areas, and the fall of the Lombard kingdoms of the south in other areas, they were only sporadically under the same rulers. The Byzantines took back the south, and then later parts of it were ruled by the Normans, and the Holy Roman emperors; these latter two were definitely not folk movements. Then it was under the control of the Aragonese and the Spanish for centuries. The north was under the Holy Roman Emperors and occasionally the French, but the communes very soon asserted their independence, and there was extensive trade and cultural contacts between the different cities and republics of the North and Center, and also with the domains of the Pope in some parts of central Italy. Over and beyond the effect of the Saracen invasions and rule of some areas of the south, the two populations drifted apart in those 1500 years.Anyway, that's how I see it. Other people might have other insights to offer.It depends how you interpret the data, as with anything else. I've always felt that the Center clustered closer to the North, and I think this study supports that interpretation, putting the "dividing line" just south of Rome. I think prior studies have showed the same thing. So, although the Central Italians are a bit "south" of Northern Italians, they're pretty close to them, closer than they are to southern Italians. I think everyone knew that about Tuscans, but it seems it's also true of Lazio. I think Umbria would be much the same.


Samples from Chieti, Abruzzo cluster with Sicilians so not.The authors should have got more samples from different regions.

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## Danelaw

> We have no way of knowing that. They didn't include Apulia (which usually just looks southern Italian) or Campania, for example. From the evidence of 23andme, and Dodecad, it seems that Sicilians and southern Italians, all southern Italians, cluster together generally speaking, and show the same minority ancestry, although I would speculate that the cline is still there so there's probably slightly less North African as you move north, not that there's much to begin with...much less than you can find in Iberia for example, although it doesn't appear that way here because they don't use samples from all over Spain and Portugal. (That's what the results I've seen seem to indicate as well.) I know that's not what some Sicilians themselves have tended to believe, but it seems to be a fact. (I should send this to an old professor of mine from university. He always insisted to his students that he was Sicilian, not Italian, not even southern Italian. Of course, culture is what matters the most, so he might not be swayed by these results. :)


From the Supp Info."The North-African component is detectable in the Italian sample, especially in Sicily, Calabria, and Sardinia and it is distinguishable from random noise: 5.42% (2.99% - 7.85%) in South Italy and 4.66% (2.22% - 7.11%) in Sardinia. "Basilicata has comparable level of North African admixture as the rest of the peninsula, while the Calabrians are only from Reggio so not representative of Calabria who is likely similar to Basilicata.

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## Angela

> From the Supp Info."The North-African component is detectable in the Italian sample, especially in Sicily, Calabria, and Sardinia and it is distinguishable from random noise: 5.42% (2.99% - 7.85%) in South Italy and 4.66% (2.22% - 7.11%) in Sardinia. "Basilicata has comparable level of North African admixture as the rest of the peninsula, while the Calabrians are only from Reggio so not representative of Calabria who is likely similar to Basilicata.


Let's try to focus shall we? THERE ARE NO SAMPLES IN THE STUDY FROM CAMPANIA OR APULIA OR INDEED FROM ANY PART OF CALABRIA OTHER THAN REGGIO. 


It doesn't analyze those areas, so no real conclusions can be drawn based on _this study_ as to how much North African they would show. 

What we can do is look at other studies of southern Italians, studies both academic and private. Those studies SUGGEST that these other southern Italian areas would have some amount of North African, but perhaps on a south/north decreasing cline. 

As to your prior post, why wouldn't someone from the Abruzzi place next to southern Italians? They _are_ southern Italians, from everything I've ever seen of their genetic make-up.

I agree that in a place as diverse genetically as Italy they should have had more samples.

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## Angela

> That map summarize the fracture between South and North of Italy. The Papal state has prevented the unification of Italy in 1200 on an idea by Federico II.


Very nice. People have focused so much in recent years on admixture and fst analyses that they forget about drift and how important it is in forming these clusters and in driving up fst differences. 

That's what I meant when I said that reading this paper and the Busby/Hallenthal ones I feel like I'm back in the era before Lazaridis, Haak, etc. We're only getting half the picture here because the more sophisticated analyses weren't done.

What I'm trying to say is that I think the fst figures are exaggerating the differences somewhat. Some of it is just a function of the long separation between the two groups.

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## Fire Haired14

IBD states, Fiorito 2015

The IBD variation in Italy seems too simple. Almost everything follows a geographic pattern, and it's most North-South. 

The highlights for IBD Italy-West Eurasia are.....

*.*High IBD between NW Africa and South Italy. 
*.*High IBD between North Europe and North Italy.
*.*High IBD between NE Europe and Basilicata
*.*Low IBD between West Asia and Italy. 

The Highlights for IBD Italy-Italy are....

*.*NE Italy and Central Italy share a lot of IBD. Variation within the two regions also follow geography, they share the most with their nearest neighbors. 
*.*Some of NE Italy shares a lot of IBD with South Italy.
*.*South Italy for the most part shares most IBD with each other.

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## Fire Haired14

The Italy-only ADMIXTURE at K=2 has a Sardinian and mainland Italy component. At K=3 it has South Italy, North Italy, and Sardinia components. I don't understand why Central Italians score mostly a mixture of North+South Italy, but in IBD don't show a relation to South Italy. Maybe it's because they don't have recent common ancestry with South Italy, but share more distant ancestry.

In West Eurasia ADMIXTURE. 
At K=3, there's a NW African component(yellow), ENF component(red), and North European component(green). South Italians and Sardinians score a little NW African. Sardinians score the most in ENF, then next South Italians, next Central Italians, then last North Italians. Most of the rest is in North European component.

At K=4, there's a NW African component(yellow), West Asian component(red), Sardinian component(dark green), and North European component(green). The same pattern as in K=3 exists. However most North European-green and ENF red of K=3 in Italy becomes Sardinian-dark green. The West Asian component follows the same pattern the ENF component did earlier. 

*Conclusion*: ADMIXTURE, IBD, and PCA are giving the same message. Even when the ADMIXTURE/PCA are Italy-only. 

The message is....
Most variation in Italy is North vs South.
Italy is mostly EEF. But also has recent North European and West Asian ancestry. And there's NW African ancestry in South Italy+Sardinia.

But I'm confused why in ADMIXTURE Italy scores more of West Asian-centered components than any other Europeans, but in IBD no signs of recent West Asian admixture pop up. I'm trying to fit Italy-genetic into the box of EEF-WHG-Steppe, it might not be that simple.

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## Angela

> IBD states, Fiorito 2015
> 
> The IBD variation in Italy seems too simple. Almost everything follows a geographic pattern, and it's most North-South. 
> 
> The highlights for IBD Italy-West Eurasia are.....
> 
> *.*High IBD between NW Africa and South Italy. 
> *.*High IBD between North Europe and North Italy.
> *.*High IBD between NE Europe and Basilicata
> ...


Fire-Haired, we can't get careless here. You keep on talking about North East Italians. There are _no_ north East Italians in this study. There's just Northern Italian samples and Central Italian samples and some Southern Italian samples. If anything, the samples skew North/Northwest Italian and North Central Italian. It might be a good idea to correct your post so that other people don't get confused. They're going to think we're talking about Friulani or those far Northeastern isolates that they tested. 

As to "high IBD sharing", high is a relative term. The "sharing" between North Africans and the southern Italians analyzed in this study results in an average admixture of 5.42% in south Italy, and 4.66% in Sardinia. I don't know why that's a surprise. If you look at the non E-V13 "E" in Sicily, for example, you could estimate that you'd get this kind of result.

This is how the authors put it in the Supplement: "Shared IBD haplotypes across Europe and the Mediterranean basin: the total length W and the average length L of the shared IBD segments between each of the eleven Italian regions and the other populations considered in the study are shown in Table S4. Two inverse gradients were observed, taking into account the IBD segments shared between Italians and the other populations. Specifically, a south to north trend was observed for the IBD segments shared between the North Africans and Italians, whereas the opposite direction was detected for the IBD segments shared between Italians and the other European populations.(Table S4A)."

I said it less elegantly in some posts above. I don't know what's so surprising about it. It's exactly the same thing that Ralph and Coop found two years ago using a different method. It's also in complete accord with everything we know about Italian pre-history and history.

What did you expect that this should seem so unusual and too simple? With whom did you expect us to have IBD sharing? 

As to the time of admixture, they have this to say: "The IBD segments shared between the Italians and the other European populations are longer than the IBD segments shared between Italians and Turkish/Middle Eastern individuals, indicating that the admixture events between Italians and other Europeans are the most recent."

How could it be clearer? The IBD segments between Italians and Turkish/Middle Eastern individuals are very old, perhaps mostly Neolithic, some perhaps Bronze Age. The IBD segments shared with other European populations stem from the Indo-European migrations, the Celtic migrations, and perhaps to a minor degree, in some areas, in my opinion, to the Germanic invasions. The North African element was the last one, minor, and entered mostly southern Italy.*




> Fire-Haired: Italy is mostly EEF. But also has recent North European and West Asian ancestry. And there's NW African ancestry in South Italy+Sardinia.


Generally correct, in my opinion, except as to recent Turkish/Middle Eastern ancestry, if that's what you mean by West Asian admixture. That doesn't seem to be the case according to this IBD analysis and likewise the one done by Ralph and Coop. 

A proportionally less WHG Indo-European group with a good amount of "Teal" _might_ be a different story.

Ed.*While the last migration was from the "Saracens", that doesn't mean that _all_ the North African is from them. I think some of it arrived earlier.

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## Fire Haired14

@Angela,

I don't know exactly how IBD works. I'm pretty sure overall closeness can make IBD scores high. So, that can help explain longer-IBD segments with Europeans than any West Asians. IBD doesn't support West Asian ancestry but ADMIXTURE and PCA does. A way to test if there is Balkan ancestry is get IBD stats from Balkans, this study only had Romanians. I think I might ask for some people online to do IBD stats this study didn't do.

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## Angela

> Fire-Haired, we can't get careless here. You keep on talking about North East Italians. There are _no_ north East Italians in this study. There's just Northern Italian samples and Central Italian samples and some Southern Italian samples. If anything, the samples skew North/Northwest Italian and North Central Italian. It might be a good idea to correct your post so that other people don't get confused. They're going to think we're talking about Friulani or those far Northeastern isolates that they tested. 
> 
> As to "high IBD sharing", high is a relative term. The "sharing" between North Africans and the southern Italians analyzed in this study results in an average admixture of 5.42% in south Italy, and 4.66% in Sardinia. I don't know why that's a surprise. If you look at the non E-V13 "E" in Sicily, for example, you could estimate that you'd get this kind of result.
> 
> This is how the authors put it in the Supplement: "Shared IBD haplotypes across Europe and the Mediterranean basin: the total length W and the average length L of the shared IBD segments between each of the eleven Italian regions and the other populations considered in the study are shown in Table S4. Two inverse gradients were observed, taking into account the IBD segments shared between Italians and the other populations. Specifically, a south to north trend was observed for the IBD segments shared between the North Africans and Italians, whereas the opposite direction was detected for the IBD segments shared between Italians and the other European populations.(Table S4A)."
> 
> I said it less elegantly in some posts above. I don't know what's so surprising about it. It's exactly the same thing that Ralph and Coop found two years ago using a different method. It's also in complete accord with everything we know about Italian pre-history and history.
> 
> What did you expect that this should seem so unusual and too simple? With whom did you expect us to have IBD sharing? 
> ...


I qualified my comment about the impact of the Germanic invasions because I'm a bit skeptical of their claim that this is the source of the IBD sharing between North and Central Italians and other Europeans. They place way too much faith in the ability of Alder to date admixture events, in my opinion, and perhaps they've been influenced by Hellenthal and Busby et al. They shouldn't be; there are a lot of flaws in those papers. 

Plus, most telling in my opinion is that if there was a lot of admixture from this event we'd see a lot more I1, U106, R1a or even N. It's not there to a large degree although there's indeed some, and particularly toward the Veneto, which is generally how they entered Italy.

I'm also not totally convinced by their "West Asian Etruscans" argument. I have no problem with an elite migration coming from northwest Anatolia and/or the north Aegean. If it had been large, however, we wouldn't have generic Southern European or Balkan looking samples from elite Etruscan burials. You would also expect to see some IBD sharing between Tuscans and Turkey/other Middle Easterners, and it doesn't seem to be there.

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## Aaron1981

> I qualified my comment about the impact of the Germanic invasions because I'm a bit skeptical of their claim that this is the source of the IBD sharing between North and Central Italians and other Europeans. They place way too much faith in the ability of Alder to date admixture events, in my opinion, and perhaps they've been influenced by Hellenthal and Busby et al. They shouldn't be; there are a lot of flaws in those papers. 
> 
> Plus, most telling in my opinion is that if there was a lot of admixture from this event we'd see a lot more I1, U106, R1a or even N. It's not there to a large degree although there's indeed some, and particularly toward the Veneto, which is generally how they entered Italy..


I agree. I recall an aDNA study a few years back from NE Italy...Unfortunately I didn't track the citation, but I believe the authors believed it was a Germanic settlement during Roman times. There was a Roman "pin" on one of the skeletons. I recall the YDNA being R1b, I1, and E1b...and some others, but the remains were predicted on haplotype rather than SNP. Hopefully another research team gets the funding and can pick this one up again. I'd love to see the results using SNPs.

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## Alan

[QUOTE=Fire Haired14;470172you'd expect high IBD with Turkey. But maybe IBD can't detect admixture from so long ago.[/QUOTE]

Or just maybe West Anatolia had a strong population replacement from Etruscan to modern times. Such as let's say the Turkish expansion.

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## Angela

I don't think most people remember the "West Asian" scores for Europeans produced by Admixture programs. All of these come from Dodecad.

Central and Eastern Europeans get about 11 to 14.5% for West Asian:
Germans 11.2
Dutch 12
Poles 12.3
Russians 13.2
Mixed Slavs 13.6
Hungarians 14.5

Northern Italians fit right in there, coming in with 14.1, a little bit_ less_ than the Hungarians.

Then you have:
TSI Tuscans 18.1
Romanians 21
Central Italians 22.4
Bulgarians 22.4

So the Central Italians and Bulgarians get the same score. I'm sure Serbs and Albanians, Kosovars etc. come in somewhere around there. 

Then you have the Greeks from Thessaly and the southern Italians/Sicilians with the highest percentages. Cypriots have more yet.

Greeks 24.8
S.Italian/Sicilians 25.4

Another factor to be considered is that while Italy was spared the Slavic migrations, the Balkans were not, so the original scores must have been even higher.

My point is that "high" West Asian scores are not a particularly "Italian" phenomena, and in fact "West Asian" isn't very high at all in North Italians and Tuscans in comparison to Central Europeans. Any explanation has to take these facts into consideration. 

As to any "replacement" of northwest Anatolians, I'm not aware of any such thing. I think the average "Turkic" admixture is under 10% in Turkey, which is hardly replacement anywhere, and the areas with the highest admixtures are actually not in Aegean Turkey if my memory serves. If someone has figures from different areas of Turkey I'd be very interested to see them.

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## Pax Augusta

> My point is that "high" West Asian scores are not a particularly "Italian" phenomena, and in fact "West Asian" isn't very high at all in North Italians and Tuscans in comparison to Central Europeans. Any explanation has to take these facts into consideration. 
> 
> As to any "replacement" of northwest Anatolians, I'm not aware of any such thing. I think the average "Turkic" admixture is under 10% in Turkey, which is hardly replacement anywhere, and the areas with the highest admixtures are actually not in Aegean Turkey if my memory serves. If someone has figures from different areas of Turkey I'd be very interested to see them.


To cap it all there aren't either archaeological and linguistic evidence that prove a link between ancient Etruscans and Turkey.

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## Sile

This paper is partly rubbish if it meant to cover all the Italian populace.

All Adriatic sea regions are not represented except Ferrara...............IMO , the paper is aimed at establishing an IDEA of early iron age in Italy, with Ferrara representing the most northern Etruscan area.

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## Drac II

> @Angela,
> 
> I don't know exactly how IBD works. I'm pretty sure overall closeness can make IBD scores high. So, that can help explain longer-IBD segments with Europeans than any West Asians. IBD doesn't support West Asian ancestry but ADMIXTURE and PCA does. A way to test if there is Balkan ancestry is get IBD stats from Balkans, this study only had Romanians. I think I might ask for some people online to do IBD stats this study didn't do.


IBDs are notoriously imprecise. They can't even assert for sure the direction of the gene-flow. So by looking at IBDs alone you can reach conclusions as dubious as North African admixture in Italy and France being possibly around 200 years old and in Iberia about 300 years old (this is what some of the authors of Botigue et al. concluded by placing their faith in IBDs.) Conclusions based on IBDs are often in contradiction to more standard autosomal genetic analysis like ADMIXTURE, as you yourself have noticed above.

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## Danelaw

> Let's try to focus shall we? THERE ARE NO SAMPLES IN THE STUDY FROM CAMPANIA OR APULIA OR INDEED FROM ANY PART OF CALABRIA OTHER THAN REGGIO. 
> 
> 
> It doesn't analyze those areas, so no real conclusions can be drawn based on _this study_ as to how much North African they would show. 
> 
> What we can do is look at other studies of southern Italians, studies both academic and private. Those studies SUGGEST that these other southern Italian areas would have some amount of North African, but perhaps on a south/north decreasing cline. 
> 
> As to your prior post, why wouldn't someone from the Abruzzi place next to southern Italians? They _are_ southern Italians, from everything I've ever seen of their genetic make-up.
> 
> I agree that in a place as diverse genetically as Italy they should have had more samples.


BUT HAVE YOU READ THIS QUOTE FROM THE SUPPLEMENTARY TABLE? In Basilicata there is no especially high North African admixture whatever, it's actually on par with the rest of Italy. Only Sardinia, Sicily and Calabria (Reggio only) have above noise level of North African admixture.

"_The North-African component is detectable in the Italian sample, especially in Sicily, Calabria, and Sardinia and it is distinguishable from random noise: 5.42% (2.99% - 7.85%) in South Italy and 4.66% (2.22% - 7.11%) in Sardinia. "
_
Now feel free to post those academic studies which found out these supposed North African admixture in Apulia and Campania._


_

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## Danelaw

> Sorry but if even Iberians are closer genetically to Romanians, than Northern Italians are to Southern Italians, then we can't say it is "just geography". It correlates with geography only as far as different ancestral ethnic groups settled different geographical areas...Geographical distance from Iberia to Romania is many times greater, than from Southern Italy to Northern Italy...And you also wrote, that there is (or was until ca. 1950) almost no IBD sharing between Southern and Northern Italy - why?


The authors have oversampled extreme Southerners like those from Reggio Calabria who only make 0.5% of S.Italian population. They also didn't get any samples from intermediate regions like Campania, Umbria, Abruzzo, etc... who actually fill the "void" between the North and the South like shown in the De Gaetano et al 2012. In Nelis et al 2009, Southern Italians from Apulia were genetically as close to N.Italians from Piedmont, as Northern Germans (from Schleswig-Holstein) were to Southern Germans (from Bavaria). Germany has also East-West differences (not present in Italy) that seem to be even more prominent like shown in Heath et al. (2008).

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## MOESAN

> *
> *This is Fire-Haired's comment from a duplicate thread he started*. 
> 
> 
> *


_very interesting;
the differences correlate with geography, yes, but they are genetically far more strong than geographically distances! (what I had from BritainDNA said the same). I think someone in the abstract I've seen remarked this: more "distance" between North and South Italy than between North Italy and Spain or even France, than between France and G-B and so on... for Sicily I think the differences between N-W and S or NE confirm History (pre-Roman first imput from North (akin to Ligurians?) and Norman period, even if other events I ignore could also explain that;
I need to go deeper but I rely upon other forumers, I have not the full paper; thanks all the way.
the Toscana/Lazzio proximity seems, as said here, an "etruscan" imput: not by force a specially exotic DNA, but the mean mix the Etruscan dynasties can have spred with them in their extension in Central Italy.
_

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## MOESAN

> We already discussed about it many times. We can't completely rule out that there was a small migration of a supposedly religious elite from Anatolia related to the Etruscans without a substantial genetic impact, but it is now extremely clear that the vast majority of the Tuscans are not descended from this but from Villanovians who were part of the Etruscan ethnos.


_
I'm more and more pushed to think like you about this. Something "exotic" occurred there, but was of little genetic imput, spite a cultural one of importance
_

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## Alan

> As to any "replacement" of northwest Anatolians, I'm not aware of any such thing. I think the average "Turkic" admixture is under 10% in Turkey, which is hardly replacement anywhere, and the areas with the highest admixtures are actually not in Aegean Turkey if my memory serves. If someone has figures from different areas of Turkey I'd be very interested to see them.


Note "Turkic" admixture =/= Turkish expansion. The Turkish expansion brought most likely more of the Teal element with them than East Eurasian admixture. The modern Turks probably have around 20% of real "Turkic" as from Central Asia-Siberia ancestry, but a whole lot of more Iranic one rising up to as much as 50%. It is most likely that the Seldjuks who reached Anatolia from Iran were yet already pred. West Eurasian and akine to modern Turkmens from Turkmenistan.

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## MOESAN

it concerns a trread in Y-haplos too:
the "second mesolithic" (specific trapezes tools) of Thomas PERRIN could be a clue concerning first apparition of Y-E-V13 ancestors into Europe. Spite some remote shapes links with Ukraina, it seems the source of this technical wave, fleeing the advance in Neoltihic after its first arrrival in Southern Europe, could be linked to Capsian and come from the North-East-Algerian-North-West-Tunisian region, before pass at first step into Sicily, Southern Italy and Adriatic merging lands of Montenegro/Dalmatia around 7000 BC or a before.
this technic expanded after (6200 BC) into Cantabrica, Valencia, Asturias, Eastern Lombardia, Venetia, french Provence, Southern Brittany, Portugal,before reaching North: Îe-de-France, Picardy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Denmark after 5300 BC, at the same time it disppearred progressively from Mediterranea. a first demic introduction could very well be possible, even if in it extensions, some local profiles could be the result of acculturation more than colonization. It seems too the climatic deterioration around the 6000BC has seen a change in the settlement localizations (Mediterranea dryer and colder, but population climbing in mountains (!?!) when on the Atlantic the populations got rather down near the coasts.
my hypothesis is fragile but could explain some auDNA results concernins Italy and even Yougoslavia (NorthAfrican traces mixed with more Near-Eastern ones?) + Y-E1b more variated in Western Yugoslavia than in East Balkans + apparition of E-V13 in Iberia in very Early Neolithic for West and so on... the track N-Africa to Italy through Sicily is sensible I think. surely the first groups have more immediate upstreams Y-E1b than typical E-V13: it deserves a deeper analysis of subclades I cannot do here; all that doesn't explain, maybe, the all Y-EV13 found in Italy or elsewhere in Europe because EV13 can have espanded in some cases after having been incorporated among Neolithic people, or more later during metals ages, after some demographic boom. But my if hypothesi was true, it could confirm the anteriority (and its "mesolithic" charactere) of Y-EV13 and upstreams in Southern Europe compared to Neolithic advance. Let's wait for proofs!

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## Angela

> it concerns a trread in Y-haplos too:
> the "second mesolithic" (specific trapezes tools) of Thomas PERRIN could be a clue concerning first apparition of Y-E-V13 ancestors into Europe. Spite some remote shapes links with Ukraina, it seems the source of this technical wave, fleeing the advance in Neoltihic after its first arrrival in Southern Europe, could be linked to Capsian and come from the North-East-Algerian-North-West-Tunisian region, before pass at first step into Sicily, Southern Italy and Adriatic merging lands of Montenegro/Dalmatia around 7000 BC or a before.
> this technic expanded after (6200 BC) into Cantabrica, Valencia, Asturias, Eastern Lombardia, Venetia, french Provence, Southern Brittany, Portugal,before reaching North: Îe-de-France, Picardy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Denmark after 5300 BC, at the same time it disppearred progressively from Mediterranea. a first demic introduction could very well be possible, even if in it extensions, some local profiles could be the result of acculturation more than colonization. It seems too the climatic deterioration around the 6000BC has seen a change in the settlement localizations (Mediterranea dryer and colder, but population climbing in mountains (!?!) when on the Atlantic the populations got rather down near the coasts.
> my hypothesis is fragile but could explain some auDNA results concernins Italy and even Yougoslavia (NorthAfrican traces mixed with more Near-Eastern ones?) + Y-E1b more variated in Western Yugoslavia than in East Balkans + apparition of E-V13 in Iberia in very Early Neolithic for West and so on... the track N-Africa to Italy through Sicily is sensible I think. surely the first groups have more immediate upstreams Y-E1b than typical E-V13: it deserves a deeper analysis of subclades I cannot do here; all that doesn't explain, maybe, the all Y-EV13 found in Italy or elsewhere in Europe because EV13 can have espanded in some cases after having been incorporated among Neolithic people, or more later during metals ages, after some demographic boom. But my if hypothesi was true, it could confirm the anteriority (and its "mesolithic" charactere) of Y-EV13 and upstreams in Southern Europe compared to Neolithic advance. Let's wait for proofs!


As you say, we really need ancient dna for proof but I think you have some interesting insights here. 

Everything can't be explained by very recent migrations. The flows are layered, but Alder can't distinguish them; it's just picking up the most recent admixture time. I really wish someone would do a sophisticated study of E-V13 in Greece, the Balkans, and Italy with a lot of subclade resolution, similar to what was done for Spain and Portugal in the Candela Hernandez et al paper. I think it would be a valuable adjunct even after we get ancient dna. They should do J2 as well.
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/art...l.pone.0139784

I also don't think that anyone can figure out Italian genetics without including comparisons to all of Greece and numerous Balkan countries. That's one of the problems with this study. The high "West Asian" in the Balkans, Greece, southern Italy and parts of central Italy has to be part of the same process. (See post # ) Or did the Etruscans settle the former Yugoslavia too, and Bulgaria and Romania? Perhaps there was a massive re-settlement of "Parthian" slaves there as well as in Italy in the late Empire period? :) The same goes for the North African that shows up in the Balkans and Greece and into Central Europe.
Attachment 7504

Some of that didn't come with the Moorish invasions of the early Medieval period. It may be that some of it is very old indeed. It's clear that all the early Neolithic peoples who entered Europe cluster together and are very related to each other and to Anatolian Neolithic farmers. However, there were subsequent Neolithic flows. I have speculated before that E-V13 and J2 were part of a later Neolithic flow. (Well, I did after E-V13 and J2 were found in a period best described as the transition period from the Early to Mid-Neolithic. Before that, I leaned toward believing that J2, at least, was Bronze Age and later in Europe. So, yes, I was wrong and Maciamo and LeBrok were right, as LeBrok was delighted to point out. :)) Now, we may find that E-V13 was already there in the late Mesolithic, or arrived further south in the Early Neolithic but only moved north later, but it's also possible that it _was part_ of a later, slightly more North African Neolithic flow.

After all, Oetzi already had some North African:

Attachment 7505

We may get some clarity on this when the new Lazaridis paper is published, and if we ever get an analysis of some ancient E-V13 samples in Europe. It will be interesting to see if there is a slight North African shift in some of the samples. 

I think it's only by looking at both ancient and recent processes that one can understand the differences even within southern Italy. Sicilians and some Calabrians overlap in this paper, but other Calabrians are south and east of the Sicilians. I don't think that can be because of "Moorish" rule, since Calabria was ruled by them for a very short time compared to Sicily. Now, in this paper only samples from the province of Reggio Calabria were used, not Catanzaro etc., so, one could argue that these are the most "Sicilian like" Calabrians. If that's the case, how to explain that, as I said, some of the Sicilians are a little north and west of these samples from Reggio?
Attachment 7506

It's difficult to speculate because the samples aren't labeled by the city of origin, and so we don't know if there is northwest versus extreme south substructure in Sicily. It could be that with the centuries there's been a lot of admixture and it's just down to random chance. On the other hand, we could speculate that the samples from northwest Sicily are the ones that list northward toward the samples from Lazio. Norman input in northwest Sicily could pull some of those Sicilian samples north, although the effect would probably be minimal since that wasn't a folk migration. However, there were other even more ancient migrations that disproportionately affected the northwest. The yDna certainly shows spikes in I1, and U-106 in the northwest although not specifically in that one city. The following image may not be exact, because I don't know when it was last updated, and there's no legend for the percents we're talking about here,which for some of these is very minor, but at least it gives an idea of the variation. Also be aware there's no break down of J2b versus J2a, and a lot of that "E" is E-V13.



It's also speculation what the same analysis would show for the other Sicilian regions. I'd be very surprised, however, if there's much difference between the people of Messina and the people of Reggio Calabria. However, there would have to be some impact in certain specific towns from the deliberate policy of settling areas depopulated by expelled "Saracens" or "Moors" with settlers from Lombardia, Liguria, Toscana etc. This is the establishment of the so called "Lombard" towns. I've speculated before that a portion of the U152 on the island may be a result of this re-poplation. We'd need detailed subclade resolution to say which U-152 arrived "recently", and which is "Italic". 

There was no concerted "Lombard" or northern Italian resettlement of Calabria, and the Normans had less impact there even if it was a minor factor even in Sicily. These differences may partly explain some of these results, but the ancient processes also have a part to play. When either the Oetzi or Gok 4 genome was first released I remember that there was some indication of overall similarity to or IBD flow that included not only Sardinia but also Calabria. Don't quote me, though, because I haven't found the paper yet. :)

Anyway, these are my speculations so far. When we get more ancient dna it should clarify matters.

Oh, I have no idea why some people are claiming that there was no Greek colonization of Apulia. There certainly was; in fact, there are still enclaves in the Salento where they speak Griko, a dialect of Greek, to this day.

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## Sile

> It's not a high level. You can see that from the Admixture runs. It's the fact that the segments are _long_ that shows it was relatively recent. They're showing IBD into the first millennium BC, so it should show up, you're right. Ralph and Coop went back to approximately 2500 BC.
> 
> If the "Etruscans" _did_ come from northwest Anatolia, they might have been a male elite. The paper that provided a PCA for ancient Etruscans showed them as generic Southern Europeans, maybe even pretty Balkan like, not West Asian as in Turkish or Anatolian or Armenian at all. 
> 
> There might have been a Bronze Age migration by way of the Balkans that carried ANE and high farmer levels but very little WHG. I've been proposing for a long time that the Indo-European migrations weren't a case of one specific group that somehow exponentially increased in population and then went out and invaded and admixed with native groups, but a case of "related" populations spreading in different directions, sometimes after a certain amount of back migration. So, some of the "Indo-Europeans" that came to Italy from the east may not have been exactly the same autosomally as the Indo-Europeans who arrived from the north. 
> 
> We should know soon, when we get ancient Greek and Italian genomes from the relevant periods.


Can you check your term of west-asian ................It is not turkic ..............

Also *Turkic only appears in modern Turkey about 1000 years ago*, before this there was no Turkic there

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## Angela

> Can you check your term of west-asian ................It is not turkic ..............
> 
> Also *Turkic only appears in modern Turkey about 1000 years ago*, before this there was no Turkic there


Where did I ever say or imply that West Asian equals Turkic? Everybody knows that the Turks didn't arrive until the Middle Ages.

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## Sile

In regards to U106 comments........there is a suggestion that it formed when Gallic/Celtic and Germanic people mixed to create the Belgae....these Belgae occupied all of the Netherlands in ancient times and migrated to britain.

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## Hauteville

Basilicata and Sicily basically overlap genetically and the Abruzzo samples of Behar and Eurogenes are just slightly more Northern (I think it has to do with 800 years of Kingdom from Normans to Bourbons), surely Northern Calabrians are in that range. I think Messina and Reggio are almost the same genetically, they live in front with 2.5 km of distance.

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## Sile

> Where did I ever say or imply that West Asian equals Turkic? Everybody knows that the Turks didn't arrive until the Middle Ages.



you said
*maybe even pretty Balkan like, not West Asian as in Turkish or Anatolian or Armenian

* 
West asian = iranic

south Asian - indian

central asian = turkic

South west asia = arabic


basically thats how it works

The Romans or Alexander the Great never made contact with the Turkic people................actually , they barely made contact with the arabs either

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## Danelaw

Calabrians are Woggier because they have Greek blood...

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## John Doe

> Calabrians are Woggier because they have Greek blood...


Define Greek, Greeks from the Macedon region on average probably have a lighter complexion than the on average Greeks who live in Crete or on Kos.

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## Angela

> @Angela,
> 
> I don't know exactly how IBD works. I'm pretty sure overall closeness can make IBD scores high. So, that can help explain longer-IBD segments with Europeans than any West Asians. IBD doesn't support West Asian ancestry but ADMIXTURE and PCA does. A way to test if there is Balkan ancestry is get IBD stats from Balkans, this study only had Romanians. I think I might ask for some people online to do IBD stats this study didn't do.


Ralph and Coop do the best job of explaining it, I think. It's important to read the whole paper, but this will give you an idea.
http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology...l.pbio.1001555

"We can only hope to learn from genetic data about those common ancestors from whom two individuals have both inherited the same genomic region. If a pair of individuals have both inherited some genomic region from a common ancestor, that ancestor is called a “genetic common ancestor,” and the genomic region is shared “identical by descent” (IBD) by the two.* Here we define an “IBD block” to be a contiguous segment of genome inherited (on at least one chromosome) from a shared common ancestor without intervening recombination* (see Figure 1A). A more usual definition of IBD restricts to those segments inherited from some prespecified set of “founder” individuals (e.g., [8],[27],[28]), but we allow ancestors to be arbitrarily far back in time. Under our definition, everyone is IBD everywhere, but mostly on very short, old segments [29]. *We measure lengths of IBD segments in units of Morgans (M) or centiMorgans (cM), where 1 Morgan is defined to be the distance over which an average of one recombination (i.e., a crossover) occurs per meiosis. Segments of IBD are broken up over time by recombination, which implies that older shared ancestry tends to result in shorter shared IBD blocks*."




> Alan: Note "Turkic" admixture =/= Turkish expansion. The Turkish expansion brought most likely more of the Teal element with them than East Eurasian admixture. The modern Turks probably have around 20% of real "Turkic" as from Central Asia-Siberia ancestry, but a whole lot of more Iranic one rising up to as much as 50%. It is most likely that the Seldjuks who reached Anatolia from Iran were yet already pred. West Eurasian and akine to modern Turkmens from Turkmenistan.


Could you provide a reference for an average of 20% in Turkey? I've never seen anything anywhere that high for an average in any academic paper.

Ultimately, it wouldn't matter, however. Nowhere did the authors say that there was *no* IBD sharing between Turkey and other Middle East countries and Italy. They just said that what there was of it was old.

From the Supplement to the paper:
" "The IBD segments shared between the Italians and the other European populations are longer than the IBD segments shared between Italians and Turkish/Middle Eastern individuals, indicating that the admixture events between Italians and other Europeans are the most recent."



There is also the broader issue of "West Asian" as an admixture component, and by that I mean the admixture component modal in Iran, Armenia, the Caucasus and modern Turkey. As I pointed out upthread, the Northern Italians have just about the same amount as the Hungarians, a little less actually. TSI Tuscans are a bit higher, about 4 points. Central Italians, which in that project are some Romans and some people from the Abruzzi, have about as much as the Romanians and Bulgarians and no doubt the Albanians and Serbians, and that's after whatever dilution occurred because of the Slavic migrations. Did the Etruscans settle in Bulgaria and Albania too? That just won't cut it as an explanation for all of the alleles in this cluster, although an elite migration might contribute to some of it. Nor, as I said upthread, will some mythical settlement of Parthian slaves in the late Empire in Italy explain it, as it would have to have occurred all over the Balkans and not in central or western Europe or Iberia or anywhere else.

There are other processes involved as well, older, in my opinion, having to do perhaps with late Neolithic and early Bronze Age gene flows, perhaps mediated partly through Crete and the Myceneans, and then additional gene flow during the period of Greek colonization.

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## Angela

Joey, am I going to have to go checking IP addresses again? Banned posters aren't allowed to come back under new registrations, you know. In the meantime you got an infraction for using an ethnic slur. By all means continue.

As to any substance, a Neapolitan is going to deny his illustrious Greek heritage? What of Neapolis, Cumae, Paestum? For shame.

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## Sile

> Ralph and Coop do the best job of explaining it, I think. It's important to read the whole paper, but this will give you an idea.
> http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology...l.pbio.1001555
> 
> "We can only hope to learn from genetic data about those common ancestors from whom two individuals have both inherited the same genomic region. If a pair of individuals have both inherited some genomic region from a common ancestor, that ancestor is called a “genetic common ancestor,” and the genomic region is shared “identical by descent” (IBD) by the two.* Here we define an “IBD block” to be a contiguous segment of genome inherited (on at least one chromosome) from a shared common ancestor without intervening recombination* (see Figure 1A). A more usual definition of IBD restricts to those segments inherited from some prespecified set of “founder” individuals (e.g., [8],[27],[28]), but we allow ancestors to be arbitrarily far back in time. Under our definition, everyone is IBD everywhere, but mostly on very short, old segments [29]. *We measure lengths of IBD segments in units of Morgans (M) or centiMorgans (cM), where 1 Morgan is defined to be the distance over which an average of one recombination (i.e., a crossover) occurs per meiosis. Segments of IBD are broken up over time by recombination, which implies that older shared ancestry tends to result in shorter shared IBD blocks*."
> 
> 
> 
> Could you provide a reference for an average of 20% in Turkey? I've never seen anything anywhere that high for an average in any academic paper.
> 
> ...


North-Iitalian ( i.e known as *Bergamo* ) is associated more with Bulgarians ( most likely ancient thracians ) than with Hungarians ..............as per LAZ and other geneticists
This "bulgarian" asociation is close , maybe more of a Pontic association than a levant one

The 2015 paper by rubino states that the NE-Italy closest assimilation of people within only Italian regions is with Marche

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## Sile

> Note "Turkic" admixture =/= Turkish expansion. The Turkish expansion brought most likely more of the Teal element with them than East Eurasian admixture. The modern Turks probably have around 20% of real "Turkic" as from Central Asia-Siberia ancestry, but a whole lot of more Iranic one rising up to as much as 50%. It is most likely that the Seldjuks who reached Anatolia from Iran were yet already pred. West Eurasian and akine to modern Turkmens from Turkmenistan.


I never heard of 20% Turkic in anatolia .............the only figures I have ever seen range between 6% and 10%

can you link me this information

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## Angela

> Basilicata and Sicily basically overlap genetically and the Abruzzo samples of Behar and Eurogenes are just slightly more Northern (I think it has to do with 800 years of Kingdom from Normans to Bourbons), surely Northern Calabrians are in that range. I think Messina and Reggio are almost the same genetically, they live in front with 2.5 km of distance.


I agree. Basilicata is very landlocked, however, sort of isolated from major trade routes and migration flows, not like coastal Sicily, Calabria or Campania, so it may be a bit different. Still, I don't know where this comment comes from that Basilicata has the same amount of North African as "the rest of Italy", and is not in the same group as Sicily and Calabria.

From the paper:
"Table S4 shows high IBD sharing between southern Italian regions-Calabria,* Basilicata*, and Sicily-and North African populations-Moroccans and Mozabites."

It is very annoying to have to go and recheck data because some members post incorrect information. As has happened before, if it becomes a habit and begins to seem like a deliberate policy to distort the data to suit a certain agenda, infractions will be issued.

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## Hauteville

Basilicata has as well Greek settlement in the southern coast.
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_...a_Magna_Grecia

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## Angela

> Basilicata has as well Greek settlement in the southern coast.
> https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_...a_Magna_Grecia


You're right. I forgot that. Nice link by the way, because it shows all of them, unlike most maps of Magna Graecia.

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## Danelaw

> I agree. Basilicata is very landlocked, however, sort of isolated from major trade routes and migration flows, not like coastal Sicily, Calabria or Campania, so it may be a bit different. Still, I don't know where this comment comes from that Basilicata has the same amount of North African as "the rest of Italy", and is not in the same group as Sicily and Calabria.From the paper:"Table S4 shows high IBD sharing between southern Italian regions-Calabria,* Basilicata*, and Sicily-and North African populations-Moroccans and Mozabites."It is very annoying to have to go and recheck data because some members post incorrect information. As has happened before, if it becomes a habit and begins to seem like a deliberate policy to distort the data to suit a certain agenda, infractions will be issued.


You are making a lot of confusion. You are now mixing ADMIXTURE and IBD which are two totally different things.

I've already posted the quote from the Supp Info which claims that only Sardinia, Sicily and Reggio Calabria have above noise level of North African admixture. 

Do not make me post it again or I will report you to the Moderators. 

I am still waiting for these supposed accademic source which found North African admixture in Apulia and Campania.

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## MOESAN

@ Angela
Thanks, my post was just a reaction based on an old souvenir - you go very farther in details and you know better Italy History than me - the dating of ancient layers is a kind of sport I think; I'm not sure surveys about today populations can provide sure dates for ancient populations layers in Italy, a country so often "visited"; it still remains interesting speculating. Buona sera.

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## MOESAN

[QUOTE=Sile;470327]I never heard of 20% Turkic in anatolia .............the only figures I have ever seen range between 6% and 10%

can you link me this information[/QUOTE

_I have not based the sufficient knowledge to steeply affirm things.
I wonder if you SIle are not confusing here 'east-asian' admixture among Anatolian Turks with Turkic introgression in to Anatolia?
I'm not sure but I suppose Alan means that among today geographically Anatolian and supposedly genetically 'westasian' of Turkey it is difficult to tell the pre-Turks already present 'westasians' of the newly arrived Turks, in fact turkicized 'westasians' come from Steppes, of diverse previous cultures (Iranians for the most).
If Turks at first seem a mix of 'eastasians' + some 'eurasians' in their Altaic cradle, it's almost sure they took a lot of diverse tribes, among these last ones tribes dominantly Iranian or Iranianized of East caspian. But Alan could precise better than me?
_

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## Danelaw

> Define Greek, Greeks from the Macedon region on average probably have a lighter complexion than the on average Greeks who live in Crete or on Kos.


I was sarcastic...

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## DuPidh

> It's not a high level. You can see that from the Admixture runs. It's the fact that the segments are _long_ that shows it was relatively recent. They're showing IBD into the first millennium BC, so it should show up, you're right. Ralph and Coop went back to approximately 2500 BC.
> 
> If the "Etruscans" _did_ come from northwest Anatolia, they might have been a male elite. The paper that provided a PCA for ancient Etruscans showed them as generic Southern Europeans, maybe even pretty Balkan like, not West Asian as in Turkish, Anatolian or Armenian at all.* 
> 
> There might have been a Bronze Age migration by way of the Balkans that carried ANE and high farmer levels but very little WHG. I've been proposing for a long time that the Indo-European migrations weren't a case of one specific group that somehow exponentially increased in population and then went out and invaded and admixed with native groups, but a case of "related" populations spreading in different directions, sometimes after a certain amount of back migration. So, some of the "Indo-Europeans" that came to Italy from the east may not have been exactly the same autosomally as the Indo-Europeans who arrived from the north. 
> 
> We should know soon, when we get ancient Greek and Italian genomes from the relevant periods.
> 
> *Ed. For anyone who is unaware of it, the inhabitants of modern day Turkey are not genetically the same as the ancient Anatolians, because, among other reasons, they have "Turkic" admixture which arrived in the Middle Ages.


There is no evidence that Etruscans came from somewhere. They very well could have been there before anybody else. The similarities of their art with Greeks could have been acquired through their maritime trade with Greeks in Sicily.
I personally believe that Etruscans were stock from the original population before the Latins set foot in Italy.

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## Hauteville

> There is no evidence that Etruscans came from somewhere. They very well could have been there before anybody else. The similarities of their art with Greeks could have been acquired through their maritime trade with Greeks in Sicily.
> I personally believe that Etruscans were stock from the original population before the Latins set foot in Italy.


They were Villanovians. It was a migration from Anatolia into Italy (and the whole Europe) but not in historical times but very ancient.

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## Alan

@Sile and Angela

A few years ago Dienekes posted an article and oracle results which showed that Anatolian Turks are ~25% modern Central Asian derived and even more 50% Iranian Plateau. The 6-10% figures are merely the East Eurasian ancestry in Turks, however it is most unlikely that the Turkic groups who left Central Asia for Iran were entirely East Eurasian. Even the most eastern Turkic groups such as Kyrygz have ~30% West Eurasian ancestry as per Dodecad globe13 but Kazakhs(from where the expansions of Turkic groups into West Asia started) up to 60%(almost all of it Iranic ancestry).

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## Fire Haired14

Boattini 2013 has 882 Italian Y DNA samples. I piled the results in this spreadsheet.

Boattini 2013

R1b-P312, G2a, E1b-V13, and J2a are the most important aspects of the Italian Y DNA gene pool. 


R1b-U152 and R1b-DF27(?) take up almost 50% of North Italy, 1/3 of Central Italy, and less than 20% of South Italy. That's the most significant regional trend in Italy. 

G2a is probably of Neolithic origin. Although J2a and E1b-V13 are more mysterious. Both have been found in "EEF" but were unpopular. AFIAK there hasn't been much work on J/E deep-subclade distributions. This is why it's a mysterious what their origins are. Saying someone has J2a1b, J1a2b, J2b2, E1b-V13, is like saying someone has R. 

R1b1a2-M269(xP311) is popular at 5%+. Added E1b-V13 and J2b2, it's tempting to say there's Balkan input in Italy. Because R1b-Z2103, E1b-V13, and J2b2 are the most popular HGs in the Balkans. Italy is kind of in it's on world, being separated by the Alps and Mediterranean sea, and therefore could have a differnt history than mainland Europe were we have ancient genomes from. It'll be interesting to see what ancient DNA reveals. There's a study with Paleolithic-Bronze age DNA from Italy coming out in the next few years.

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## Danelaw

> Boattini 2013 has 882 Italian Y DNA samples. I piled the results in this spreadsheet.R1b-P312, G2a, E1b-V13, and J2a are the most important aspects of the Italian Y DNA gene pool. R1b-U152 and R1b-DF27(?) take up almost 50% of North Italy, 1/3 of Central Italy, and less than 20% of South Italy. That's the most significant regional trend in Italy.


Meh. You are lumping Tuscany, which had a big founder effect of R1b in NW area, with areas like Latium, Abruzzo and Marche who have loads of J2a and J1. On the other hand Campania, Sicily, parts of Apulia and Molise are very very very different in their Y-DNA from Basilicata, Calabria and Salento. 

Tofanelli et al 2015, which summed several sources, found out that Sicily as whole is about 35% of R1b, more than Latium and on par with Umbria and Abruzzo. 

There is also a difference in R1b suclades between NW and NE Italy. Liguria has a lot of P-312*, while in Lombardy and Emilia is almost all U152. NE has also much more L2, which is very common above of Alps.

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## Danelaw

> Basilicata has as well Greek settlement in the southern coast.


The difference between Northern Calabria/Basilicata and Southern Calabria/Sicily, is that the former does not speak the extreme southern Italian dialects whch have loads of Greek loanwords. Just saying.

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## Fire Haired14

> Meh. You are lumping Tuscany, which had a big founder effect of R1b in NW area, with areas like Latium, Abruzzo and Marche who have loads of J2a and J1. On the other hand Campania, Sicily, parts of Apulia and Molise are very very very different in their Y-DNA from Basilicata, Calabria and Salento. 
> 
> Tofanelli et al 2015, which summed several sources, found out that Sicily as whole is about 35% of R1b, more than Latium and on par with Umbria and Abruzzo. 
> 
> There is also a difference in R1b suclades between NW and NE Italy. Liguria has a lot of P-312*, while in Lombardy and Emilia is almost all U152. NE has also much more L2, which is very common above of Alps.


Thanks for pointing this out. I did lump to many provinces into the same regions. I'll change that later.

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## Danelaw

> Basilicata and Sicily basically overlap genetically and the Abruzzo samples of Behar and Eurogenes are just slightly more Northern (I think it has to do with 800 years of Kingdom from Normans to Bourbons), surely Northern Calabrians are in that range. I think Messina and Reggio are almost the same genetically, they live in front with 2.5 km of distance.


No only Western Sicilians are slightly more Southern than Abruzzo. Eastern and Central Sicilians are not. Abruzzo also lack the SSA.

ANE+WHG

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...XwUsAA/pubhtml

Tucany: 38
Abruzzo: 32.95
West Sicilian: 30.65
C.Sicilian: 28.92
E.Sicilian: 29.24

This study used 27 samples from Matera and only 1 from Potenza, where two thirds of Lucanians live.

I would like to see how samples from Western Basilica would score. Especially from the Albanian and Gallo Italic speaking areas.

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## Hauteville

The Central Sicilians are only two samples though. I'd like indeed to see the results from other inner Sicilians towns from Gallo Italic speaking areas how they would score.

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## Hauteville

> The difference between Northern Calabria/Basilicata and Southern Calabria/Sicily, is that the former does not speak the extreme southern Italian dialects whch have loads of Greek loanwords. Just saying.


True, see your map.

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## Danelaw

> The Central Sicilians are only two samples though. I'd like indeed to see the results from other inner Sicilians towns from Gallo Italic speaking areas how they would score.


Didn't they get some samples from Albanian speakers in Sicily in another study? They should have tested them too in the genome wide analysis.

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## Hauteville

> Didn't they get some samples from Albanian speakers in Sicily in another study? They should have tested them too in the genome wide analysis.


Afaik they have studied only Y-DNA of Arbereshe from Sicily and Calabria but not the auDNA.

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## MOESAN

> you said
> *maybe even pretty Balkan like, not West Asian as in Turkish or Anatolian or Armenian
> 
> * 
> West asian = iranic
> 
> south Asian - indian
> 
> central asian = turkic
> ...


_You are running a bit fast here I think: (or maybe I misunderstood your point, because words can be confusing sometimes)
__concerning 'west-asian' in the component meaning, it already spanneds Iranic speaking people AND diverse caucasic speaking people, not only 'iranic' (it became more complicated after) - 'central-asian': i'm not sure we have a too basic component here; rather a mix of Eurasians and East-Asians, I think.
_

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## MOESAN

> There is no evidence that Etruscans came from somewhere. They very well could have been there before anybody else. The similarities of their art with Greeks could have been acquired through their maritime trade with Greeks in Sicily.
> I personally believe that Etruscans were stock from the original population before the Latins set foot in Italy.


_Hard to prove or disprove. the first stage of Villanova culture I believe preceded the Etruscan typical ones; what I find suprising is the very original aspects of Etruscan culture which could imply far born influences and not be only a solely internal evolution of Villanovian. And I 'm not sure an overwhelmed or rather an "inivisible" autochtonous " population could have taken the strong side upon the colonizing new population seemingly coming from North into Italy. I avow all that is speculation but? culture evolution could be surprising but I 'm not aware of a precedent of this kind. all the way if newcomers explain the Etruscan culture, they were rather a small population._

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## Angela

> You are making a lot of confusion. You are now mixing ADMIXTURE and IBD which are two totally different things.
> 
> I've already posted the quote from the Supp Info which claims that only Sardinia, Sicily and Reggio Calabria have above noise level of North African admixture. 
> 
> Do not make me post it again or I will report you to the Moderators.


I have a news bulletin for you: I'm one of the moderators. That's why you got an infraction for an ethnic slur. You just got another one. If you wish to complain to the other moderators please be my guest. You and your sequential registrations have been under discussion before. Maybe it needs to be revisited.

As to your substantive points, such as they are, your conclusions are not supported by the data you provided from the paper.

This is what you quoted from the paper:
"The North-African component is detectable in the Italian sample,* especially* in Sicily, Calabria, and Sardinia and it is distinguishable from random noise: 5.42% (2.99% - 7.85%) in South Italy and 4.66% (2.22% - 7.11%) in Sardinia. "

This is what you stated:

"No the North African admixture is present *only* in Sardinia, Calabria and Sicily."

 "Basilicata has *comparable levels* of North African admixture *as the rest of Italy*."

I fail to see how the quoted passage leads to your conclusions.

If you have access to the paper and there are actual figures for the percentage of North African in the people of Basilicata, please provide them. I'd be very interested to see them.

It would be very surprising, based on the IBD analysis, to find that Basilicata has no North African, or that its levels are similar to those of the central and Northern Italians. Its level of such IBD sharing is substantially higher than that of the central and northern Italians. I would expect their percentages for North African to follow the cline and be in between those of Sicily and Reggio on the one hand, and those of the central Italians on the other.

The Italian Genome Paper IBD sharing Part 2.jpg

As to over all genetic similarity, the people of Basilicata seem to overlap with Sicilians and some Calabrians. I don't see how that can be denied.
The Italian Genome-Italian variation.jpg


The Italian Genome-Italian variation through Admixture analysis.jpg



So far as I know, Campania and Apulia have not been specifically featured in an academic autosomal study of North African percentages. However, De Gaetano et al did do an admixture analysis of a southern Italian cluster which included Calabria, Sicily, Basilicata, Campania and Apulia, and also included North African populations.

You can see the various K runs below.

I don't see any indication that the people of Basilicata, or Campania, or Apulia are substantially different from the people of more southern areas. 

Admixture in Italy-De Gaetano et al.jpgAdmixture in Italy-De Gaetano et al.jpg

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## Danelaw

IBD and ADMIXTURE are two totally different things. Stop trying to equate them to compensate your lack of arguments.The quote claims that the North African admixture is especially strong and above noise levels only in Sardinia, Sicily and Reggio Calabria. 

If you can't read them, then it's not a my problem.

If you look at the spreadsheet of De Gaetano et al you will notice that many individual North, Central and South Italians are overapping, so by this it must be concluded that they are all admixed with North Africans. Anyway those PCA plots from Fiorito et al and De Gaetano et al do not feature any North African population so it's pretty irrelevant since plots are dataset dependent..

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## Danelaw

LoL the violet North African component at K=4 is found in all Europeans. Not even your sources suport you.

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## Angela

> IBD and ADMIXTURE are two totally different things. Stop trying to equate them to compensate your lack of arguments.The quote claims that the North African admixture is especially strong and above noise levels only in Sardinia, Sicily and Reggio Calabria. 
> 
> If you can't read them, then it's not a my problem.
> 
> If you look at the spreadsheet of De Gaetano et al you will notice that many individual North, Central and South Italians are overapping, so by this it must be concluded that they are all admixed with North Africans. Anyway those PCA plots from Fiorito et al and De Gaetano et al do not feature any North African population so it's pretty irrelevant since plots are dataset dependent..


I take it then that your conclusions were indeed not based on any specific percentages in the paper for North African in Basilicata or central and northern Italy. 

I read quite well, thank-you. Insults will not help your case or convince anyone as to the truth of your statements.

I never said that Admixture and IBD sharing are the same. However, they are certainly related, and in the absence of specific data as to these percentages, and given the high levels of sharing with North Africans in Basilicata, quite in line with those of Sicily and Reggio Calabria, and much higher than those in central and northern Italy, your comments to the effect that there is *no* North African in Basilicata, or, alternatively, that if it exists it is at levels *comparable to* central and northern Italy are dubious at best.

As to the De Gaetano study, I have pointed out numerous times on this site that the authors did not "vet" their samples as to whether all four grandparents came from the same city. They themselves state that some of their samples are out of cline because they represent southerners resident in the north or people in the north who have ancestry from southern regions. However, it is clear which samples should be ignored for those reasons. The majority of the southern samples plot exactly where they should. 

Also, contrary to your assertion, they did include North African populations.

Ed. I have previously posted the Botigue graphic showing North African IBD sharing reaching into France, central Europe, the Balkans, and certainly, and highest, in Iberia. That isn't the issue. 

The level is the issue, and your conclusions are the issue.

I don't see any point in continuing this discussion. You don't have proof for your assertions and all the available data undercuts them.

----------


## Danelaw

The IBD don't specify the direction of gene flow. There were multiple expulsions of muslims and jews (virtually all local converts) plus many slaves were captured by the Moorish pirates, so the geneflow is from Italy to North Africa and not vice versa.

----------


## Sile

> _You are running a bit fast here I think: (or maybe I misunderstood your point, because words can be confusing sometimes)
> __concerning 'west-asian' in the component meaning, it already spanneds Iranic speaking people AND diverse caucasic speaking people, not only 'iranic' (it became more complicated after) - 'central-asian': i'm not sure we have a too basic component here; rather a mix of Eurasians and East-Asians, I think.
> _


I presented the standard format used by many .....................I do not see why I should present what I think

there are also further breakdowns of these standards formats.........like Balochi and Gedrosia is part of West-Asian ...........

----------


## Sile

> There is no evidence that Etruscans came from somewhere. They very well could have been there before anybody else. The similarities of their art with Greeks could have been acquired through their maritime trade with Greeks in Sicily.
> I personally believe that Etruscans were stock from the original population before the Latins set foot in Italy.


The scenario of etruscans as original to Italy is a theory of the last 2 to 3 years, based on script tablets found on Lemnos . These tablets were dated that they were planted there by etruscan colonists and merchants only in a period after the etruscan where living in italy. They also found similar on the samothrace coast.

As for the Latins, some Italian historians claim the Latins are a sub-branch of etruscans who where ruled by etruscan kings and basically revolted.

but we do know that the 12 cities of etruscans where separate states and not one union..........they only got together once a year for their religious worshipping.

What they are still investigating is if etruscans settled in Corsica as well or the etruscans arrived from Corsica

----------


## Sile

> Boattini 2013 has 882 Italian Y DNA samples. I piled the results in this spreadsheet.
> 
> Boattini 2013
> 
> R1b-P312, G2a, E1b-V13, and J2a are the most important aspects of the Italian Y DNA gene pool. 
> 
> 
> R1b-U152 and R1b-DF27(?) take up almost 50% of North Italy, 1/3 of Central Italy, and less than 20% of South Italy. That's the most significant regional trend in Italy. 
> 
> ...


was'nt the Boattini samples lacking ( had zero ) samples from friuli ( missing ydna ) due to the fact that it would askew the results .

----------


## MOESAN

> I presented the standard format used by many .....................I do not see why I should present what I think
> 
> there are also further breakdowns of these standards formats.........like Balochi and Gedrosia is part of West-Asian ...........


_
Sorry, but I was understanding you identified 'west-asian' (broad sense, as for me) with Iranian speaking people only: the question is not the format of the auDNA component but the link between it and Iranians (ancient or current) whatever the variant of 'west-asian' they could have... ?
_

----------


## Angela

I've taken another look at the supplementary figures. I don't think anyone has pointed out some of the possible reasons for the different placement of the samples, particularly those from Armenia and Turkey, compared to other PCAs with which we're all familiar.
PCA from the Italian Genome Paper-2015.jpgPCA from the Italian Genome Paper-2015.jpg

I think the major reason is that there are fewer West Asian populations included. PCAs are good tools, but in order to interpret them you have to understand how they work. Everything depends on the populations that are part of the analysis. For example, this is the PCA from Behar. It is quite different. 

Global PCA-Behar et al 2013.jpg
Notice the placement of the Turkish samples and even the Spanish

That's why FSTs have to be included in the analysis, particularly ones produced by the method used in this paper. For example, on most PCAs the Northern Italian and Tuscan groups cluster with Iberians. Yet in this study the Northern Italians are closer to the generic French sample, not even the southern French, than they are to the Iberians.

North Italians:
.0001 Aostans and Sardinians
.0002 French and Central Italians
.0003 French Basques
.0004 Iberians

Central Italians:
.0001 Aostans
.0002 Basques and Northern Italians
.0003 French and Iberians

There are other very interesting numbers in there.

The results can also change based on where the analyzed samples were taken. Di Gaetano is part of this group, and was lead on the Di Gaetano paper whose Admixture run I posted above. That prior study was flawed because no attempt was made to verify that all four ancestors came from the same place. That makes me a little skeptical about whether they vetted these samples properly. Also, with a country with as much variation as Italy these samples may not be totally representative, although I think the general parameters are probably correct. 

Since I was thinking about the sourcing of samples, I thought I'd investigate where the Iberian samples were taken, especially in the context of the recent Hernandez et al paper. Those samples are half from Catalonia and half from eastern Andalucia. From that same Hernandez study, those don't seem particularly representative, in my opinion, of all Spanish variation.

----------


## Hauteville

> I don't think anyone has pointed out some of the possible reasons for the different placement of the samples, particularly those from Armenia and Turkey, compared to other PCAs with which we're all familiar.


I agree, i don't know why but the positions of Armenians and Turks is radically different from many other PCAs like the one by Lazaridis or the many available on Eurogenes. Like this one.

----------


## Angela

> I agree, i don't know why but the positions of Armenians and Turks is radically different from many other PCAs like the one by Lazaridis or the many available on Eurogenes. Like this one.


 
Fiorito et al doesn't have enough West Asian populations: there are no Iranians, Kurds, no Caucasians like the Adyghe, Lezghins, Abkhasians, no Iraqis etc. The addition or lack of certain populations makes a big difference and significantly changes where certain groups land in relationship to the others, as does which samples are used from which areas and therefore which data set is used.

Lazaridis et al make that point in their supplement. There's a whole section starting on page 76 entitled "Why do our PCAs correlate so poorly to geographic maps of Europe?" They could have added, Why did Novembre et al and some other studies produce PCAs that match that map while we don't? It seems to be that the PCAs that do match the map were made using Popres samples. Those that don't use them are different, including Lazaridis, Skoglund, and Behar. 

After an extensive analysis, " We conclude that the pattern of two discontinuous clines that we observe is not an artifact of genotyping errors in the Human Origins data set. At the same time, these analyses highlight how sensitive PCA is to the specific geographic distributions of samples used. Thus, while PCA can be used to suggest interesting hypotheses about history, PCA results are not always unambiguously interpretable in terms of history, and need to be complemented by other types of analyses to produce convincing inferences. In this context, it is crucial that the cline of ancestry proportions that we measure in this study (S114 and S117) is inferred based on analyses that do not depend on the relatiave representation of different regions (as does PCA)."
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4170574/

If I had to go with one PCA I'd go with either the Lazaridis one or the Behar one.

That's why grand theories or pronouncements can't, in my opinion, be drawn simply from one PCA, and why I felt it important to highlight, in post # 100 the different perspective provided by the FST numbers, and also to mention that certain samples might not be very representative of a country or even a region as a whole. Then, as I also mentioned in that post, PCAs don't capture very much of the total genetic variation.

----------


## Danelaw

Those bidimensional plot are often misleading. They simply can't represent all the diversity. The Armenians score two times more of the Druze/Red Component than Sicilians/Calabrians on k=5, so the plot can't be right. What I see is that the software is pushing MENA groups with less SSA towards Europeans. My two cents.

----------


## Sile

wrong thread

----------


## Danelaw

Obviously the plot is representing all the diversity alongside the first axis of SSA vs non SSA admixed populations. The authours should have made a PCA plot without SSA admixed populations like Arabs and Berbers.

----------


## Alan

> Fiorito et al doesn't have enough West Asian populations: there are no Iranians, Kurds, no Caucasians like the Adyghe, Lezghins, Abkhasians, no Iraqis etc. The addition or lack of certain populations makes a big difference and significantly changes where certain groups land in relationship to the others, as does which samples are used from which areas and therefore which data set is used.
> 
> Lazaridis et al make that point in their supplement. There's a whole section starting on page 76 entitled "Why do our PCAs correlate so poorly to geographic maps of Europe?" They could have added, Why did Novembre et al and some other studies produce PCAs that match that map while we don't? It seems to be that the PCAs that do match the map were made using Popres samples. Those that don't use them are different, including Lazaridis, Skoglund, and Behar. 
> 
> After an extensive analysis, " We conclude that the pattern of two discontinuous clines that we observe is not an artifact of genotyping errors in the Human Origins data set. At the same time, these analyses highlight how sensitive PCA is to the specific geographic distributions of samples used. Thus, while PCA can be used to suggest interesting hypotheses about history, PCA results are not always unambiguously interpretable in terms of history, and need to be complemented by other types of analyses to produce convincing inferences. In this context, it is crucial that the cline of ancestry proportions that we measure in this study (S114 and S117) is inferred based on analyses that do not depend on the relatiave representation of different regions (as does PCA)."
> http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4170574/
> 
> If I had to go with one PCA I'd go with either the Lazaridis one or the Behar one.
> 
> That's why grand theories or pronouncements can't, in my opinion, be drawn simply from one PCA, and why I felt it important to highlight, in post # 100 the different perspective provided by the FST numbers, and also to mention that certain samples might not be very representative of a country or even a region as a whole. Then, as I also mentioned in that post, PCAs don't capture very much of the total genetic variation.


2 dimensional PCA's are never reliable, always use fst distances. PCA's depend on the point of view and you will never be able to show the real relationship of populations simply on PCA's

As example Population A is close to B and C to B too. However C is not really genetically related to A but shows significant relationship to D which itself is closer to some other distant group. How are you going to show this on 2 dimensional PCA? If you put B close to A automatically you need to hold D and C also close to A. This could work with a 3 dimensional PCA but definitely not 2 dimensional.

Therefore using Fst distance table are the best you can do so far.

----------


## Danelaw

From Supp Data

"HIgh IBD between NW Africa and Italy 
South Italy(inclu. Sardinia) gets extremly high IBD with NW Africa, suggesting NW African ancestry. 
Although other Italians also get much higher IBD with NW Africa than with West Asia, much of it is .25+
*If anything this points towards European ancestry in NW Africa*."

----------


## Pax Augusta

> IBD states, Fiorito 2015
> 
> The IBD variation in Italy seems too simple. Almost everything follows a geographic pattern, and it's most North-South. 
> 
> The highlights for IBD Italy-West Eurasia are.....
> 
> *.*High IBD between NW Africa and South Italy. 
> *.*High IBD between North Europe and North Italy.
> *.*High IBD between NE Europe and Basilicata
> ...


Emilia-Romagna is North Italy in every possible sense, it's not Central Italy.

----------


## Mars

> Emilia-Romagna is North Italy in every possible sense, it's not Central Italy.


Yes, absolutely. I noticed that some italian institutions, like ISTAT etc., increase confusion about that: they often put Emilia-Romagna in "central Italy", which is a macroscopic non sense.

----------


## Angela

Razib Khan was late to the party this time. This is his review of Fiorito et al:

http://www.unz.com/gnxp/italy-from-t...medium=twitter

http://www.nature.com/ejhg/journal/v...g2015233a.html

Of course, he had to pick a picture of Claudia Cardinale wearing very exotic Middle Eastern kohl type make up and a sari to illustrate Italians. 

Is this some sort of disorder? Practically the first words I hear when meeting Greeks is "una faccia una razza", or, we look alike, so we're one race. Lebanese and northwestern Turks, even my hairdresser (!), whip out pictures and ask me if their family doesn't look Italian. Same with a Georgian woman who worked as my nanny for a while, and now this. It's all very flattering, but, other than sometimes in the case of the Greeks, the people pointed out to me don't, in the vast majority of cases, look Italian, and that most especially applies to Indians.

----------


## Danelaw

Razib Khan is OWDer with nazi feelings. Unz is blog good for laughs.

----------


## Angela

> Razib Khan is OWDer with nazi feelings. Unz is blog good for laughs.


That was totally unnecessary. Razib Khan is a very bright and very well read guy, and his blog is very informative and sensible on a whole raft of issues. He's in no way a Nazi. Leave it to you to take some gentle teasing and turn it into something totally insulting. I neither thought nor meant to imply anything like that. As I said, even though I often don't agree, it's flattering. 

Cut it out.

----------


## Hauteville

The worst part are some stormfronter replies in Razib Khan's post imo ;)

----------


## Fire Haired14

> Of course, he had to pick a picture of Claudia Cardinale wearing very exotic Middle Eastern kohl type make up and a sari to illustrate Italians.


That's the picture on her Wikpedia page. Probably why Razib chose it. 




> Is this some sort of disorder? Practically the first words I hear when meeting Greeks is "una faccia una razza", or, we look alike, so we're one race. Lebanese and northwestern Turks, even my hairdresser (!), whip out pictures and ask me if their family doesn't look Italian. Same with a Georgian woman who worked as my nanny for a while, and now this. It's all very flattering, but, other than sometimes in the case of the Greeks, the people pointed out to me don't, in the vast majority of cases, look Italian, and that most especially applies to Indians.


 If America was colonized by Middle Easterners and there were Italians and Germans immigrants, I'm sure Germans would say to Italians "You just like us". Anyways, Mexican kids at my school have said "Italians look Mexican". A combination of generic Caucasoid features with a tan complexion=anything from Armenian to Mexican. 




> and that most especially applies to Indians.


LOL.

----------


## Angela

> That's the picture on her Wikpedia page. Probably why Razib chose it.


Well, goodness knows who chose it, because it's not very representative of her. When you google her, these are the first two pictures that come up.





I find her very beautiful, and Sophia Loren as well.


However, there's a lot of variety in Italy, even in the south; these women are just as Italian, and Sicilian as well:





If you want to go to the center of the country, you can get this...


But also this....


This is a very, very, Tuscan look. You can see it all over paintings of the Italian Renaissance, and later.

People just think in stereotypes because that's what the media portrays, no matter the nationality or ethnic group involved.

@Hauteville,

I didn't see those kinds of comments when I read it. I'll have to check it out. Cretini.

----------


## Angela

All I can say is thumbs up to Razib Khan. Now I'm sorry for teasing about the picture. As I said above, a brilliant guy, and one who goes where the data takes him. I just wish he'd ban these storm front types. Morons, one and all, although the knowledge of Italian history and pre-history even among some of the bloggers and posters pontificating about Italy could be fit into a thimble.

Some wisdom from Razib:




> "@Rick
> 
> _I think that there is now a lot of data that suggests that what initially looked like high levels of residual Early Neolithic Farmer ancestry in all of southern Europe is actually from later migrations of people that carried a lot of a similar ancestry, but were not exactly the same._
> 
> where’s the data?"





> "Razib Khan 
> 
> says:
> 
> 
> December 7, 2015 at 11:48 pm GMT • 100 Words
> _The Phoenicians aren’t mentioned by Mr. Khan. Perhaps Phoenician trade and colonization is a separate source of southern Italian genetics? Just a thought._
> 
> i write what i write for a reason. read closely: _The South Italian groups are enriched with the Mozabites and Moroccans, not groups from the eastern Mediterranean._ there is a distinctive aspect to maghrebi genetics which separates them from levantines. the south italian samples have that. (there are druze, syrians, and palestinians in the data set to check)."






> "Razib Khan says:
> 
> 
> December 8, 2015 at 8:12 am GMT • 100 Words
> _It could easily be from later Roman times as well, when it is well known by historians that there were large numbers of slaves and free immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East imported into Rome._
> 
> again, the signal does not seem middle eastern but north african, so you can discount large effect of syrians (there are syrian ref pops, weak IBD signal). please read the post and see the figures before you comment. second, i generally discount slaves. yes, some freedman became very successful (e.g. pertinax’s father; since you are a history buff you’ll know who this is), but the preponderance of slaves in antiquity have very low fertility. the slaves on the latifundia in sicily didn’t have it as bad as those in the mines of sardinia, but it wasn’t a good situation…
> despite the fact that greek was heavily spoken in much of italy, and there were attested syrians, the genetic exchange is likely for whatever reason to be mostly with north africa. i suspect during the roman period this had to do with the fact that much of n africa was latin speaking, and many 4th century aristocrats had many of their lands and family roots in that area. but if it was due to the roman period i don’t understand why it’s so weak in latium and central italy, where many of these people congregated. i think it’s because the peasantry remained italian, and the cities evaporated with rome’s collapse. 
> in contrast, the muslims came in larger numbers, and there was more demographic continuity between islamicized cities and the norman polities."





> Razib Khan says:
> 
> 
> December 9, 2015 at 4:34 am GMT • 100 Words
> @L.K
> _Genetics show there was very little demographic impact as a result of Roman Slavery,_
> this is a defensible statement. but as i said above, *the historical texts are sufficient to also infer this.* slaves were last in line during times of want, and many masters did not seem to want small children who were not economically productive. they had very low fertility, and in some parts of the classical world were banned from having children (i assume infanticide would be a solution?).
> the slave reproductive rate in the american south seems to be sui generis. even in the carribean and south america their did not keep at replacement.


As I said, extremely well read.

Razib Khan says:




> December 7, 2015 at 11:50 pm GMT • 100 Words
> 
> @Matt_
> _Could be that as there are only a few Italian populations in the mix, the drift of each population becomes more relevant and the levels of shared/different ancient ancestry less relevant, and that homogenises relatedness (and/or splits away Sardinian more in their own cluster)? Any extra drift Sardinians have compared to ancient farmers will pushes them away from all populations equally. PCA or ADMIXTURE with lots of populations will look for what systematically differentiates them from one another as a correlated dimension, which will tend to exclude recent drift particular to any population(s). PCA with a few population can’t do that the same way?_
> 
> same pattern in the pooled PCA above. also, they put otzi in one of the plots. sort of supports your view, but the pops are not really that differentitaed from otzi. it looks more that they’re being pulled diff directions by non-otzi admixture.





> Razib Khan says:
> 
> 
> December 9, 2015 at 4:47 am GMT
> @Andrew Lancaster
> _I recall from some of the first autosomal studies that Italians were often found to be inexplicably similar to both Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jewish populations_
> sephardic jews are not a coherent cluster. i know because i’ve looked at hundreds of seph genotypes.
> Agree • Disagree • Tweet
> This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread 
> ...


I could have written these things myself. Heck, I have written them myself. :) Amazing what an ability to actually interpret data, and interpret it objectively, and a well read mind can do.

----------


## Hauteville

> _in contrast, the muslims came in larger numbers, and there was more demographic continuity between islamicized cities and the norman polities."_


Lol so according to him we are a bunch of transplanted moors, maybe he has read the history in some american historians with multicultural fetish myth because the situation was radically different and the muslims were actually forced to emigrate.

PS: there was never a massive migrations of muslims into Sicily let alone in the mainland regions.

From "CITT, TERRITORIO, POPOLAZIONE NELLA SICILIA MUSULMANA. UN TENTATIVO DI LETTURA DI UN’EREDIT CONTROVERSA" by Federico Cresti. Page 31 and 32.

"sulla base delle informazioni disponibili Francesco Gabrieli ha escluso che ci sia mai stata una forte immigrazione dalle coste africane, e anzi ha spiegato la lentezza della conquista con l’esiguit delle forze impiegate per le spedizioni e per il controllo dell’isola"

Which means: "based on the information available Francesco Gabrieli has excluded that there has ever been a strong immigration from North Africa, and indeed explained the slow pace of conquest with the smallness of the forces involved in the shipments and for control of the island"

----------


## frontiersman

where are the distances in FSTs?

----------


## Danelaw

In the supplementary tables.

----------


## Angela

> Lol so according to him we are a bunch of transplanted moors, maybe he has read the history in some american historians with multicultural fetish myth because the situation was radically different and the muslims were actually forced to emigrate.
> 
> PS: there was never a massive migrations of muslims into Sicily let alone in the mainland regions.
> 
> From "CITT�, TERRITORIO, POPOLAZIONE NELLA SICILIA MUSULMANA. UN TENTATIVO DI LETTURA DI UN’EREDIT� CONTROVERSA" by Federico Cresti. Page 31 and 32.
> 
> "sulla base delle informazioni disponibili Francesco Gabrieli ha escluso che ci sia mai stata una forte immigrazione dalle coste africane, e anzi ha spiegato la lentezza della conquista con l’esiguit� delle forze impiegate per le spedizioni e per il controllo dell’isola"
> 
> Which means: "based on the information available Francesco Gabrieli has excluded that there has ever been a strong immigration from North Africa, and indeed explained the slow pace of conquest with the smallness of the forces involved in the shipments and for control of the island"


I doubt that he means that there was a large input. You can tell by yDna and mtDna studies that it's not.

The Busby et al study is bunk in a lot of ways.

----------


## Danelaw

> The worst part are some stormfronter replies in Razib Khan's post imo ;)


I do think that at least several of them are Zionist psychos. Look how they got excited as soon as genetic similarities between Sicilians and Ashkenazis are mentioned. One of then was crying because McDonald (and 99.99% of WNs) don't consider the Jews as white. They almost got an orgasm with the idea of linking jews and Europeans. Shilling getting stronger.

----------


## Angela

> I do think that at least several of them are Zionist psychos. Look how they got worked up as soon as genetic similarities between Sicilians and Ashkenazis are mentioned. One of then was crying because McDonald (and 99.99% of WNs) don't consider the Jews as white. They almost got an orgasm with the idea of linking jews and Europeans. Shelling getting stronger.


That's absolute rot. All the Jews I know, and I know a LOT of them, love Italy and Italians. Most of them quite like the idea that the Ashkenazim might have been formed by some admixture with Italians, even if it's unlikely. Spare me all the tripe about Hollywood too. It's Mario Puzo who wrote The Godfather, and Francis Ford Coppola who directed it. You can throw Martin Scorcese and all his movies in there too. You might not understand it, and I don't myself, but there's a certain perverse pride in some Italian Americans about these people. There's a fascination, and a sort of perverse admiration for them on the part of non Italian Americans as well. I suppose for the Italians it's that it's just another example of "Italians Do It Better", a popular tee shirt here. For the non-Italians, I wondered about it myself. Maybe it's because while their brutality is portrayed, they're still recognizably Italian: they still take care of their families, they still love to cook and eat, they don't involve "civilians" in the mayhem etc. In other words, there's still some humanity in them, unlike the other ethnic "mafias" that are portrayed in the media. None of this applies to me. I'm all for sending them to jail, no matter if they're good fathers and grandfathers or not. 

I don't know why I'm bothering to remind you, but you have one infraction left before you get an automatic ban, so I advise you to reverse direction.

----------


## Fire Haired14

@About Jews,

I'm pretty sure Italian Jews are basically the same as Ashkenazi Jews, but maybe not(I'll ask for analysis of Italian Jews later). And Ashkenazi Jews historically are supposed to be from Italy or Balkans. Italy is a good candidate for their European ancestry.

@Mafia,

It's not a big deal that people idolize them. It's the same reason people idolize cowboys, drug lords, and gangsters. Yeah, Mafias are evil and they shouldn't be idolized so much. However they're heros/role models especially boys which is okay. Few actually think the Mafia is okay.

----------


## MOESAN

> Well, goodness knows who chose it, because it's not very representative of her. When you google her, these are the first two pictures that come up.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> I find her very beautiful, and Sophia Loren as well.
> 
> 
> ...


_beautiful girls indeed I could attract a massive males immigration into Italy: more problems!
that said, I discard almost evrytime actors and actresses portays because they are not reprensentative of common population. Selection (not natural!) is at play the most often.
I observed too that politicians are very poor representative people of common folks in their lands. But I learned politicians are often of more foreign origin(s) than the basic citizen man; as actors by the way. "à beau mentir qui vient de loin" we say in France. Concerning cinema, exotism and artificial esthetic rules are mixed one together. 
_

----------


## MOESAN

> From Supp Data
> 
> "HIgh IBD between NW Africa and Italy 
> South Italy(inclu. Sardinia) gets extremly high IBD with NW Africa, suggesting NW African ancestry. 
> Although other Italians also get much higher IBD with NW Africa than with West Asia, much of it is .25+
> *If anything this points towards European ancestry in NW Africa*."



_What do you name "extremely high IBD": compared with what? and ancestry sharing needs to be precised: what is the geographic origin of the shared IBD?
I'm almost sure we have some light common imput with NWA but at what level?
I'm intrested if you have some details. THanks beforehand.
_

----------


## Danelaw

Claudia Cardinale with her husband Pasquale Squitieri and daughter Claudia Squitieri.



Young Claudia

----------


## MOESAN

Danelow: I had not red your precedent post about Jews. I see you are a bit "old fashion teached" to stay correct with you: a bit nordic supremacist perhaps??? based upon rubbish.
You have to study more deeper anthropology and genetics I think.

----------


## DuPidh

> Claudia Cardinale with her husband Pasquale Squitieri and daughter Claudia Squitieri.
> 
> 
> 
> Young Claudia


She looks like somebody made her by hand, custom made

----------


## Angela

> She looks like somebody made her by hand, custom made


Her figure's not all that unusual in Italy, if that's what you mean. At least, it didn't use to be. Now they all starve themselves to get that stick thin look, but not so long ago a lot of women had a full, hour glass figure, without being fat. That's why some Italian women had a hard time fitting into American cut clothes...way too tight at the bust, and huge at the waist. It required tailor altering almost everything purchased. 

Different "ethnic" groups are built "differently". It's all genetics. Some women are sort of straight up and down, whether thin or fat, which I see a lot of here, some put weight on their bottom half, like a lot of black and hispanic women and even some Middle Eastern women, and some have a higher percentage of women with an "hour glass" figure. To approximate that look, women here all seem to be getting breast implants, and some even go to the extreme of having ribs removed, like Cher. 

Like I said, it's all about the genes.

This is Sophia Loren in her seventies at the 2010 Golden Globes. She's also very disciplined about her diet, sleep patterns etc., and she says she does do some light exercise, more than she did when she was a young woman. To be fair, I think she had some work on her face.



Some Italian actresses have resisted the urge to starve themselves. Again, talk about good genes. This is Manuela Arcuri and her brother. They're from Calabria.

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## Angela

> _beautiful girls indeed I could attract a massive males immigration into Italy: more problems!
> that said, I discard almost evrytime actors and actresses portays because they are not reprensentative of common population. Selection (not natural!) is at play the most often.
> I observed too that politicians are very poor representative people of common folks in their lands. But I learned politicians are often of more foreign origin(s) than the basic citizen man; as actors by the way. "à beau mentir qui vient de loin" we say in France. Concerning cinema, exotism and artificial esthetic rules are mixed one together. 
> _



Well, I was responding to Razib's choice of an actress to represent Italians, so I showed other actresses. Plus, I don't like to post "civilians" unless I have their permission or they've posted themselves on line _and_ I'm sure of their ethnicity. For "real", average Italians of my own areas, I did post pictures.

http://www.eupedia.com/forum/threads...ria-NW-Toscana

http://www.eupedia.com/forum/threads...t=people+Parma

Seriously, I totally agree that actors and actresses are going to be better looking than the average person in any country. Still, in the days before the globalization of taste, the typical actress or model from Italy wasn't going to look like the typical actress or model from Finland or the U.S. They still reflected their ethnicity. Also, the actresses I chose to post may be exotic in other countries, but they're not exotic in Italy, not even Sophia Loren, who is always spoken of in that way.

Sophia Loren

Maria Bartiromo, a famous television financial analyst. In less "progressive" times, the Wall Street types used to call her the "money honey". :) The face shape is a little different and she highlights her hair, but otherwise...


As for politicians, it's not quite that way in Italy. You have a number of southern Italians in political office in northern Italy, but immigration from other countries is a relatively recent phenomenon. The few who are of mixed ancestry and in government are known. 

None of the women members of the current Italian cabinet are of foreign ancestry for example.
http://www.eupedia.com/forum/threads...talian+cabinet

Ed. it was the wrong link

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## Angela

> @About Jews,
> 
> I'm pretty sure Italian Jews are basically the same as Ashkenazi Jews, but maybe not(I'll ask for analysis of Italian Jews later). And Ashkenazi Jews historically are supposed to be from Italy or Balkans. Italy is a good candidate for their European ancestry.


It depends what you mean by "Italian" Jews. The "original" Italian Jews, the Italkim, are different from the Ashkenazim. They're more similar to Romaniotes or Greek Jews, and Turkish Jews. They also have their own separate rite, different from that of either the Ashkenazim or the Sephardim. I find them fascinating. I wonder how much of their ancestry actually goes back to the Jewish populations of the Roman Era. 

This PCA is from the Atzmon paper:


Over the years, however, Sephardic Jews came to Italy, and eventually Ashkenazim as well. Amazingly, there wasn't a lot of intermarriage between the groups for a long time, probably because they did follow different religious rites.

Anyway, that's why you can find Italian Jews with very old "Italian" surnames, with Sephardic surnames, and with Ashkenazi surnames.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Jews

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## MOESAN

[QUOTE=Angela;472514]Well, I was responding to Razib's choice of an actress to represent Italians, so I showed other actresses. Plus, I don't like to post "civilians" unless I have their permission or they've posted themselves on line _and_ I'm sure of their ethnicity. For "real", average Italians of my own areas, I did post pictures.

http://www.eupedia.com/forum/threads...ria-NW-Toscana

http://www.eupedia.com/forum/threads...t=people+Parma

Seriously, I totally agree that actors and actresses are going to be better looking than the average person in any country. Still, in the days before the globalization of taste, the typical actress or model from Italy wasn't going to look like the typical actress or model from Finland or the U.S. They still reflected their ethnicity. Also, the actresses I chose to post may be exotic in other countries, but they're not exotic in Italy, not even Sophia Loren, who is always spoken of in that way.

Sophia Loren

Maria Bartiromo, a famous television financial analyst. In less "progressive" times, the Wall Street types used to call her the "money honey". :) The face shape is a little different and she highlights her hair, but otherwise...


As for politicians, it's not quite that way in Italy. You have a number of southern Italians in political office in northern Italy, but immigration from other countries is a relatively recent phenomenon. The few who are of mixed ancestry and in government are known. 

None of the women members of the current Italian cabinet are of foreign ancestry for example.
http://www.eupedia.com/forum/threads...talian+cabinet

Ed. it was the wrong link[/QUOTE

_
No problem Angela
__I know you know! My post was more for some possible new forumers than for yourself or other "well trained" forumers.
It's true pictures actressesses, whatever the weight of artificial esthetism are (or ware?) on statistically a bit different from country to country, but that doesn't make them a good subject of study for metrics anthropology. No big matter.
_

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## moore2moore

Stepping away from actresses for a moment, and going back to what the OP was discussing, here are my thoughts:

I have profound respect for some of the authors involved in this paper, but some of their techniques left me scratching my head in amazement. Not the positive kind.

1. They attempt to draw broad inferences about Calabrians by a sample of 12 individuals from the most cosmopolitan southern city (Reggio)? Calabria is 150 miles long and 15,0000 square kilometers. It's full of inpenetrable valleys and peaks, which any fool can tell are genetically quite disparate. I question the value of this data. It would be like ignoring the inland (barbagia) of Sardinia and taking samples from some seaside resort. That doesn't quite work.

2. Where are the samples from rural places, for that matter? Nothing from Abruzzo? Really? Nothing from Molise? These are some of the most unspoiled, un-invaded, un-admixed parts of Italy. Why not use them as a baseline? Why not compare them to the neighboring regions to see if the hypotheses actually applies? 

3. For that matter, nothing from Campania? Really? I would think that rural Campania would be a good baseline, because of its Central Italian location, to compare the validity of the other Central Italian data. I would suspect the old Greek settlements in Campania near Naples would be a good place to check the southern Italian data. Strange that this huge and significant region was left out.

4. Perhaps it is the low sample sizes and the other obvious defects in the methodology, but I'm assuming that is why the people from Val D'Aosta resemble so closely some of the southern Italians according to this study? That just doesn't pass the smell test.

Here's the bottom line:

-Italy is a loooong country, with many isolated pockets throughout. Of course there will be clines.

-But, the clines in Italy are not that different from the clines in France, Spain, Germany, Ukraine, or Sweden. Any time you have that large of territory (large by European standards), you will have a cline.

-Furthermore, anytime you have a large nation, different regions will have claims to speaking a different language and culture. Southern French dialect is SO different from mainstream French, and those folks looked to Italy for much of their history. Ditto for the Catalans in Spain. 

But, there seems to be something close to an obsession online with people trying to divide Italians. The implications are troubling: As one author put it (summarizing), it's the ever-present search to draw distinctions between the people who star in Jersey Shore and the people who produced Da Vinci.

It's not healthy, and it's insulting to all Italians. I am unaware of any other people who have to tolerate speculation that all of their national accomplishers were really another ethnic group. Watch the History Channel any week, or read an online board:

1. The Etruscans invented city planning, had an advanced alphabet, were brilliant in engineering, etc. The MUST have been Anatolian.

2. Columbus is responsible for connecting the New and Old World (notice I didn't say "discovering"). He was a great Navigator. He must have secretly been [Spanish, Jewish, English, etc.)

3. Da Vinci / Michelangelo were geniuses. They must have secretly been [French, Jewish, etc.)

It's just insane.

Here we have yet another study with dubious methods that is in this same vein. The findings don't pass the straight face test.

Then there are the posts who per usual don't understand that "Italy" was actually unified for much of its history. More than most people know, and certainly as long as Poland, Germany, etc., nations we accept as national wholes:

-Italy first got its name c. 1000 BC, based on the name of an eponymous tribe living in what is now Calabria.

-It became a unified, cohesive political unit in the days after Julius Caesar (i.e. 44 BC) and the power consolidation of Augustus shortly thereafter. As Ronald Syme wrote, the poet Horace said only tongue in cheek that Augustus's campaign slogan was "Tota Italia" (all of Italy).

-At that time, Italians in the precise geographic area we call Italy were unified politically. 

-Only Italians were Roman citizens during that period. This period lasted for over 200 years.

-Second, as the Empire was composed of nation-states welded together, the Empire recognized each nation-state as a province with borders. Not too different from the modern EU. Italy's borders were the same as today:

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

-This situation stayed the same for roughly 500 years, and this was a long time ago. So Metternich's famous statement was invalid then, and it's invalid now.

Onto Sicily:

When the Saracens were expelled from Sicily, the attitude was not, "well, heck, if some of you that we've been fighting as a duty to God, for 500 years, want to stay, then heck, here's the welcome mat." On the contrary, it was expulsion followed by resettlement of mainland Italians.

That is why Dante formed the modern Italian language by using Tuscan mixed with Sicilian, with a smidgeon of Provencal words.

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## Angela

I was raised to be an Italian nationalist of the old school, and remain one today. The last thing I want to contribute to is a division of Italy along regional lines. However, facts are facts, and this is absolutely incorrect.




> Moore:-But, the clines in Italy are not that different from the clines in France, Spain, Germany, Ukraine, or Sweden. Any time you have that large of territory (large by European standards), you will have a cline.


We have discussed Italian genetics here on this Board at great length. Avail yourself of the search engine to find the pertinent threads. Whether you go by uniparental markers, PCAs, Admixture Analyses, FSTs, IBD or other statistical measures, the Italian cline is different than the one in the other countries you list by an order of magnitude. 

For IBD, perhaps you might want to look at Ralph and Coop again.
http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology...l.pbio.1001555

As to the Admixture analyses, go to any recent calculator at gedmatch that lists lots of subgroups within England, Spain, Italy. Figure out the differences in percentages of the major admixture components. There is no comparison. Between Bergamo and Southern Italy there is almost a 20 point difference in the total CHG/ENF number. 

Or, look at the space that the Italian genomes take up on a PCA compared to the German genomes.
http://blog.23andme.com/wp-content/u...logpostfig.jpg

I'm afraid that just won't fly.

As for the rest, it annoys me too at times, but consider the source of most of it. This sort of thing is the refuge either of people with an ethnic inferiority complex, or of people who aren't very broadly educated or cultivated, or of people who were fed idiotic Nordicist ideology with their mother's milk, or of people with obvious personality disorders if you mean racist anthrofora, or maybe some unfortunates suffer from all of the previous. :) Let them yap.

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## moore2moore

> As to the Admixture analyses, go to any recent calculator at gedmatch that lists lots of subgroups within England, Spain, Italy. Figure out the differences in percentages of the major admixture components. There is no comparison. Between Bergamo and Southern Italy there is almost a 20 point difference in the total CHG/ENF number. 
> 
> I'm afraid that just won't fly.


Thank you for your kind and wise comments above. We are certainly of the same mind.

A couple things we disagree on (which appear in the text box I quoted):

1. Geneticists have always explained to me that France is like a square, with each point showing rather extreme variability. The NW point (Bretagne, Armorica) is very Celtic-influenced. The NE point is very German/Norman influenced. The SE point (Provence, so named because the Romans joked it was a province of Italy) is very much Italian-like, with traces of Greek influence around Marseilles. And the SW point is Basque, and we know what genetic outliers they are.

Studies on France are fewer than studies on Italy. This is for two reasons: (1) French law is incredibly harsh on DNA collection, and (2) there is less interest, perhaps for the reasons I articulate above.

Forgive me if I didn't use the proper word with "cline," but I maintain places like France, for example, exhibit as much regional differentiation as in Italy. We need a few more studies, but it's hard to get such studies when every scientist is obsessed with Italy (LOL!)

2. I have yet to find a calculator in Gedmatch that accurately detects Italian heritage. I have yet to find a calculator, for that matter, that is scientifically accurate at all. This is a topic for another thread, but keep in mind that if version 1 of a calculator (which everyone loves, gets excited about, posts their results, etc.) shows a drastically different result than version 2, which the author releases a few months later (and so on), then one can't use them to base scientific conclusions.

IMHO, calculators are fun. But when purporting to do SCIENCE, and make scientific conclusions, one can't trust a thermometer that reads 20 one day, when another brand reads 55, and the next product by the same brand reads 80.

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## Hauteville

Dear moore2moore it's not only an issued by History Channel and anglo historians but also by italian schools that are made up by far left scholars who claim that Italy in Roman Empire was multicultural and full of slaves from Africa and Syria, Anatolia and Mesopotamia (but strange, no one from Gaul or Britannia uh?), that Southern Italy (they include all the regions south of Rome being part of Caliphate but in reality fact they only weakly controlled Sicily, but mostly the western part, for short time) is heavily mixed and colonized by the Arabs without expulsion but rather being tolerated because they they bring us civilization (in Magna Graecia?funny really funny), that Sardinia has a lot of Phoenician blood from Carthage, that Etruscans were Anatolians and Romans descendent from Trojan exiles etc etc. What a joke. Nothing new about your post, just only disgust judging at how many garbage against Italy. Anyway the lack of Campanian samples shocking me since it's a very important region and with an important metropolis like Naples. Anyway regarding other samples, luckily you can find samples used by Eurogenes and derived from Behar and Hellenthal about Abruzzo (samples from Chieti) and Calabria (samples from Crotone). The precedent study about Italian structure made by De Gaetano was partially incorrent in my opinion, because it used as well samples of mixed peoples from many regions.

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## Danelaw

I agree. The lame attempt to explain positions of PCA plots with historical conquests is typical of American half breeds confused about their own identity, who think that it is cool to be as mixed and colorful as them. Now we have mesolitich and neolitich samples from Anatolia and the Caucasus which can easily explain the genetic landscape of Italy, without bringing in Moors, Jews and Levantine Slaves. I feel bad for PC lunatics from the new world.

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## Sile

> Thank you for your kind and wise comments above. We are certainly of the same mind.
> 
> A couple things we disagree on (which appear in the text box I quoted):
> 
> 1. Geneticists have always explained to me that France is like a square, with each point showing rather extreme variability. The NW point (Bretagne, Armorica) is very Celtic-influenced. The NE point is very German/Norman influenced. The SE point (Provence, so named because the Romans joked it was a province of Italy) is very much Italian-like, with traces of Greek influence around Marseilles. And the SW point is Basque, and we know what genetic outliers they are.
> 
> Studies on France are fewer than studies on Italy. This is for two reasons: (1) French law is incredibly harsh on DNA collection, and (2) there is less interest, perhaps for the reasons I articulate above.
> 
> Forgive me if I didn't use the proper word with "cline," but I maintain places like France, for example, exhibit as much regional differentiation as in Italy. We need a few more studies, but it's hard to get such studies when every scientist is obsessed with Italy (LOL!)
> ...


I do not know why we are discussing this paper. the paper in limited to italians from non-adriatic sea side areas. no samples came from the eastern side of italy. they seem to link these supplied samples with western italians of etruscans, romans, ligures, southerners ..............they did include the main etruscan town of romagna area

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## Angela

> Thank you for your kind and wise comments above. We are certainly of the same mind.
> 
> A couple things we disagree on (which appear in the text box I quoted):
> 
> 1. Geneticists have always explained to me that France is like a square, with each point showing rather extreme variability. The NW point (Bretagne, Armorica) is very Celtic-influenced. The NE point is very German/Norman influenced. The SE point (Provence, so named because the Romans joked it was a province of Italy) is very much Italian-like, with traces of Greek influence around Marseilles. And the SW point is Basque, and we know what genetic outliers they are.
> 
> Studies on France are fewer than studies on Italy. This is for two reasons: (1) French law is incredibly harsh on DNA collection, and (2) there is less interest, perhaps for the reasons I articulate above.
> 
> Forgive me if I didn't use the proper word with "cline," but I maintain places like France, for example, exhibit as much regional differentiation as in Italy. We need a few more studies, but it's hard to get such studies when every scientist is obsessed with Italy (LOL!)
> ...


It's indeed true that there are differences in France in terms of migration patterns and therefore some differences in genetic make up. The same is true in Germany. The whole POBI study (People of the British Isles) was created to find those differences in Britain. Did they find any? Yes, they did. However, as the authors of the POBI study pointed out, they had to go to a very fine level of resolution to find any differences. 

It's not that there isn't population structure in other European countries; it's just that the one in Italy is much more pronounced. Wishing it away is dishonest and it isn't going to work anyway. The data is there. Denying it just makes people look foolish. There's just absolutely no question about it.

Let's take, for example, the new analyses that are bring done using the ancient CHG genome. Eurogenes hasn't deigned to include Sicilians and Southern Italians in his new calculator, but the poster "Chad" has included them.

You can find the results here:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...#gid=232516320

Now, I'm not saying that the percentages are exact. I take all such percentages from amateur calculators with a large grain of salt. However, that's not the point. It's the relationships which are revealed which are the issue. 

I made a comparison between the "French" results and the "French South" results, the latter of which are from far southwestern France, with the "French" results coming from eastern France. I added up the "southern" components, i.e. Anatolian Farmer, Caucasus Hunter/Gatherer, and S.W. Asian for both groups. The difference between the two French groups was around 3-4 points. 

I then did the same thing for the Bergamo samples versus the south Italian and Sicilian samples. The difference was from 10-12 points. You don't think that's a more significant difference? Do the arithmetic yourself and you'll see what I mean. 

Any analysis which contains samples from the three major Italian groupings and samples from more than one region in other countries will give the same results. I've done the analyses. I'm not just guessing.

I also disagree with your comment that no calculator reflects Italian heritage, or at least, if I understand your point, I think I disagree. :) I've run every single gedmatch calculator on my genome. I've also run DIY versions where they're available. My results always show me as Northern Italian/Tuscan in first and second place, although the FST fits might differ. In the MDLP latest calculator, where he has 4 northern Italian reference samples as well as a Tuscan sample, those are my first five results. I'd say that's pretty good. 

I know that Southern Italians/Sicilians, in addition to coming out as what they are, sometimes get Ashkenazi as one of their lesser results. That happened to my husband too. Now, whether that's just coincidence because the Ashkenazim have ancient Near Eastern ancestry plus central European and eastern European ancestry, or whether there's something to the idea that the Ashkenazim partly descend from Italians I don't know, although I suspect it's more the former. 

At any rate, once you look at IBD segments, it's absolutely crystal clear that Ashkenazim and southern Italians /Sicilians haven't shared any ancestry in at least the last 500-600 years. No Ashkenazim show up as "genetic relatives" of Sicilians or Southern Italians at 23andme. 

For that matter, up until the last few decades, southern Italians and northern Italians haven't exchanged genetic material for the last 500 years either. I've been on 23andme from the very first. Most of my matches* (few of them because the number of people from my area who have tested are very few) are from northwestern Italy and Toscana, a few from Lombardia. I even have a few of Scandinavian descent, and Irish descent. I have yet to get a close match with someone of totally southern Italian descent.

While the "base" if you want to call it that, EEF with some additional WHG, in my opinion, is the same, subsequent migrations coming from different directions affected different parts of Italy. Political separations and a very mountainous terrain resulted in a certain amount of drift. One set of migrations wasn't any better than any other, one group of Italians isn't any better than any other, and it doesn't mean that we're not all Italians.

Anyway, that's how I see it.

Ed,* I'm referring to matches at the default level or above. I think matches below that may be IBS instead.

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## moore2moore

We're pretty much on the same page, although not entirely.  :Smiling: 

We are making the same point with respect to calculators and Italians, just saying it in different ways.

Many of the "calculators" use Tuscans as the baseline for Italians, or, alternatively, the Tuscan samples are the largest in their databases. (This is similar to how, many calculators use people from Utah of Northern & Western European ancestry as a proxy and the biggest baseline for what people think of as a generic north/west European.) 

Just like Utahans, who tend more often than not to be LDS, with an entirely different migration history than the rest of the country (more British, more Scandinavian, significantly less Irish) are not the perfect baseline for all Americans of western European heritage -- As you noted, Tuscans aren't always the best proxy for Southern Italians. 

This causes Southern Italians, who have a right to "Italianness" as much as anyone else, to fall under other categories, with false positives and false negatives since they don't always match Tuscans closely. GIGO. So, we're saying the same thing on that point.

As for the other countries, I don't believe or pretend that the clines are as pronounced as Italy, a long country with very isolated regions. But they do exist in other nations, even if they are not as focused on. And since the other countries haven't been picked apart by studies, it is entirely possible that additional genetic differences will be discovered over time.

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## Angela

> We're pretty much on the same page, although not entirely. 
> 
> We are making the same point with respect to calculators and Italians, just saying it in different ways.
> 
> Many of the "calculators" use Tuscans as the baseline for Italians, or, alternatively, the Tuscan samples are the largest in their databases. (This is similar to how, many calculators use people from Utah of Northern & Western European ancestry as a proxy and the biggest baseline for what people think of as a generic north/west European.) 
> 
> Just like Utahans, who tend more often than not to be LDS, with an entirely different migration history than the rest of the country (more British, more Scandinavian, significantly less Irish) are not the perfect baseline for all Americans of western European heritage -- As you noted, Tuscans aren't always the best proxy for Southern Italians. 
> 
> This causes Southern Italians, who have a right to "Italianness" as much as anyone else, to fall under other categories, with false positives and false negatives since they don't always match Tuscans closely. GIGO. So, we're saying the same thing on that point.
> ...


I'm sorry, but I don't think we're saying the same thing. That isn't how the ADMIXTURE program works, which is what these "calculators" are based upon. No one is comparing Southern Italians/Sicilians to Tuscans, or to Northern Italians for that matter. 

Let's take a simple example where researchers are looking at modern groups alone. The algorithm is instructed to divide the data into a certain number of "cluster" or "K" groups. If you tell it to divide everybody into three groups you're going to basically get a "Caucasian" group, a "SubSaharan" African group, and a "Mongoloid" group. (Excuse the archaic terminology.) Depending on what the researcher is looking for, they might go to higher K. Some people like to limit it to 8 or so. 

The clusters are usually then named for the area where they are "modal" or most frequent. In the calculators the genome of an individual is run through the same program and divided up into percentages of each cluster. That's what gives you your percent "Atlanto Med" or "Eastern European" etc. etc. Now, with the availability of ancient genomes our modern genomes are compared to them. That's how Tuscans, for example, get X percent Anatolian Neolithic or X percent WHG. 

Only then do you get to the Oracle section, an algorithm first created and used by Dienekes if I'm not mistaken. The creator of the calculator has to then input modern sample reference populations for a comparison with the genome of the user. If there were no English reference sample, English people would come back as German or Norwegian or French or whatever, with very bad FST or goodness of fit numbers. With Italians it's even more important to get lots of reference samples because we have a lot of diversity. If there's no southern Italian reference sample then obviously the results for southern Italians are going to be garbage. On one of the early iterations of one of these calculators they only had a Tuscan sample to stand in for Italians. I wound up in the Balkans! :)

Things are getting better, though. There are now 4 Northern Italian samples, plus the academic Tuscan ones. There's also a sample from the Abruzzi, and there's a Western Sicilian sample, an Eastern Sicilian sample, and a Calabrian sample. One could argue the latter weren't the most representative areas from which to draw, and there should definitely be some samples from Campania and Apulia, but we have more areas sampled than a lot of other areas of Europe. Plus, in my opinion, I actually think there's rather more diversity in northern Italy than in southern Italy, perhaps because the latter were part of one governmental unit for so long (unlike northern Italy).

Anyway, your genome then gets compared to the genomes of these "reference" samples, and the similarity is computed. That's why southern Italians come out as southern Italian first and foremost. As I said upthread they may sometimes get Ashkenazi as a second or third best match. However, people have to understand that groups can wind up with similar ancestral proportions and therefore plot near each other on a PCA not because of a long shared genetic history, but just because by chance they were formed by similar ancient ancestral populations. That's why someone who is half Chinese and half English can wind up plotting near the Uighers. Or, as I said, maybe it's true that the Ashkenazim are partly descended from a southern Italian population. 

Now, perhaps you were thinking of the 23andme analysis. Even there, however, users are compared to the reference samples. There's lots of southern Italians on there who've been chosen to represent southern Italians as a reference sample. It's the northern Italians for whom 23andme only has the 12 person Bergamo sample and the paltry few who have tested. Even with just those few, northern Italian users still plot north on the PCA, southern Italian users plot south, and Tuscans plot sort of midway but closer to northern Italians. (I can't believe they're getting rid of their PCA btw.)

I do know what you're getting at in terms of the computation of the "Italian" percentage. As I said somewhere or other, it can seem as if they threw magnetized markers representing all the "Italian" genomes, academic and from their users, onto a Board. Where the "cluster" is most dense, it's "Italian", where you have markers being "pulled" toward other strong "clusters", they find "minority" ancestry, like the 20-25% Northwestern European that some Northern Italians get. (For Italians, all "Southern European" percentages on 23andme are, in my opinion, "Italian". It's just that 23andme is very conservative in calling the segments.)

This is why you get these figures from a few percent to 15-20% which 23andme labels "Middle Eastern/North African" in Southern Italian/Sicilians. First of all, people don't understand, or choose not to mention because of bizarre agendas that on 23andme "Middle Eastern" doesn't mean Middle Eastern as everyone else in the world would understand it, i.e. Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, etc. It means Caucasus, Turkey, Iran. Now, that's ancestry that everyone in Europe carries (CHG), and certainly everyone in Italy carries. That number in Southern Italians just represents the "excess", in my opinion, over what the rest of the Italians carry. Then the question is when did it get to Italy? 

The majority could not have come with the "Moors", in my opinion. They may be responsible for some of the 1 or 2% SSA that shows up for some people in certain calculators (some of it may be even more ancient), and the 2-3% NA that also shows up. A few percent more "Caucasus" could have arrived with them, but it has to be extremely minor because North Africans from Egypt all the way west just don't have much of it themselves. In fact, the entire legacy has to be pretty minor if uniparental markers mean anything at all, and I think they do. (The yDna is about, what, 6-7%, and the mtDna even less.)

So, it's more likely, in my opinion, that it came before that, and I doubt much of it is "slave" ancestry, for all the reasons Razib Khan pointed out, but also because of the Italian cline. Slaves came from all over the world, the north,west, and east as well as the Middle East and North Africa, and slaves went all over, to other parts of Italy and all other parts of the Roman world, as I'm sure you know but others may not. There was no regulation saying ok all Middle Eastern slaves are going to go to southern Italy, and all northern slaves are going to go to northern Italy. It didn't work like that. So, it's probably earlier. My guess is late Neolithic/Bronze Age, maybe early Iron Age. It may have come with Indo-European speaking peoples for all we know, and I think most of it was mediated through the Greek mainland and Islands. Part of my rationale for believing this is because in most calculators, for example, mainland Greeks have the same amount or higher levels of Caucasus (or "West Asian" in the older ones), and the rest of the Balkans isn't far behind. 

(One can't use the "Greek" results on 23andme to analyze these migration patterns, no matter what the "usual suspects" on racist anthrofora may say when taking my words out of context, because the "Balkan" cluster at 23andme is a mess. It includes "Malta" for goodness sakes, so you're getting only the "excess" southern genes for Greeks and Balkanites.) The Spaniards are in a different situation because they have much more North African and some areas have more SSA. Based on the recent excellent analyses of their mtDna, some of it is ancient, but some of it is definitely from the period of Moorish domination as well. In one recent analysis specifically of CHG or "Caucasus", West Asian ancestry, the Spaniards seem to score from 25 in the far north to 30-31%, in comparison to 34-35 for Bergamo, from 0-3 points more of WHG. However, they have slightly more Anatolian Neolithic. I can't provide the figures for southern Italians because they weren't included in that particular run. 

A final word about ADMIXTURE and even 23andme. They are both very subject to drift, meaning that there may be more underlying genetic similarity between all Italians than either analysis shows.

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## moore2moore

> Only then do you get to the Oracle section, an algorithm first created and used by Dienekes if I'm not mistaken. The creator of the calculator has to then input modern sample reference populations for a comparison with the genome of the user. If there were no English reference sample, English people would come back as German or Norwegian or French or whatever, with very bad FST or goodness of fit numbers. With Italians it's even more important to get lots of reference samples because we have a lot of diversity. If there's no southern Italian reference sample then obviously the results for southern Italians are going to be garbage. On one of the early iterations of one of these calculators they only had a Tuscan sample to stand in for Italians. I wound up in the Balkans! :)
> 
> Things are getting better, though. There are now 4 Northern Italian samples, plus the academic Tuscan ones. There's also a sample from the Abruzzi, and there's a Western Sicilian sample, an Eastern Sicilian sample, and a Calabrian sample. One could argue the latter weren't the most representative areas from which to draw


This is exactly what I was saying actually! Just not as artfully as you.  :Smiling: 

I have friends who are from some little peak or valley in the southern Appennines, and they basically come across as sui generis on whatever calculator. I don't think the reference samples are sufficient.


SHIFTING GEARS:

1. Not to get too philosophical, but doesn't this call into question the use of calculators? In other words, if they need a reference population to be pretty close to what you know you are, then why do you need a calculator to tell you what you know you are?

Only the gullible (and I admit that's a large number) use a calculator and say, "OMG, I must be secretly Balkan" (in your example above) when they get an obviously bad reading.

2. And then on calculators in general, I must re-state my point about a thermometer. Again, I have friends who (and they've shown me) show up as one thing in Dodecad version X, something else entirely in Dodecad version Y, then something entirely different in Eurogenes version X, something different in Eurogenes version Y, then something different in MDLP.

Which one is right? Is one right at all? If one is right, doesn't that mean the others are wrong. So wrong, indeed. Am I right?  :Smiling: 

But seriously, if you have 8 thermometers, and they all read different temperatures, you know that either all 8 are wrong. Or just 7. Neither outcome gives one faith in the scientific exactitude of the measuring.

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## Drac II

> So, it's more likely, in my opinion, that it came before that, and I doubt much of it is "slave" ancestry, for all the reasons Razib Khan pointed out, but also because of the Italian cline. Slaves came from all over the world, the north,west, and east as well as the Middle East and North Africa, and slaves went all over, to other parts of Italy and all other parts of the Roman world, as I'm sure you know but others may not. There was no regulation saying ok all Middle Eastern slaves are going to go to southern Italy, and all northern slaves are going to go to northern Italy. It didn't work like that. So, it's probably earlier. My guess is late Neolithic/Bronze Age, maybe early Iron Age. It may have come with Indo-European speaking peoples for all we know, and I think most of it was mediated through the Greek mainland and Islands. Part of my rationale for believing this is because in most calculators, for example, mainland Greeks have the same amount or higher levels of Caucasus (or "West Asian" in the older ones), and the rest of the Balkans isn't far behind.


Slaves were predominantly imported into Italy, particularly Rome, the capital of the empire, not as much to peripheral areas of the empire, which were in fact the suppliers of the slaves for Rome. Plus there were free citizens from all over the empire who migrated to Rome, who were as numerous as the slaves. 




> The Spaniards are in a different situation because they have much more North African and some areas have more SSA. Based on the recent excellent analyses of their mtDna, some of it is ancient, but some of it is definitely from the period of Moorish domination as well.


That mtDNA paper did not accurately pinpoint anything regarding the allegedly "recent" mtDNA in question. They kept their options open, from anywhere around Roman times to even descendants of immigrants from the New World. Plus some of their statements are actually for Europe in general, not just Spain. Their paper does not shed any more light on the subject than autosomal studies.

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## Angela

> Slaves were predominantly imported into Italy, particularly Rome, the capital of the empire, not as much to peripheral areas of the empire, which were in fact the suppliers of the slaves for Rome. Plus there were free citizens from all over the empire who migrated to Rome, who were as numerous as the slaves. 
> 
> 
> 
> That mtDNA paper did not accurately pinpoint anything regarding the allegedly "recent" mtDNA in question. They kept their options open, from anywhere around Roman times to even descendants of immigrants from the New World. Plus some of their statements are actually for Europe in general, not just Spain. Their paper does not shed any more light on the subject than autosomal studies.



Same old, same old. This isn't theapricity or Stormfront. Nobody is impressed by cut and paste responses already posted a hundred times by you which are, as always, devoid of any data to substantiate them. 

For the record, I don't give a **** if Italians carry some slave ancestry from Gauls or the British or the Germans or the Spaniards or the Syrians or Anatolians or whatever. It's all the same genes from the same ancestral populations which formed all Europeans, which you would know if you were interested in the science of all of this and more importantly, could understand it. Most slaves, unfortunately, were fodder for the mines and latifundia and galleys and the whore houses and didn't live to reproduce or weren't allowed to reproduce, again, as you would know if you'd ever actually studied the era. The ones who were manumitted and did reproduce were the survivors, the smartest and most capable of them, and, as Maciamo once opined, perhaps the best looking as well. :) That's a form of selection if you understand what that means.

Whatever happened, after the total destruction of a magnificent civilization, the Italians, the product of everything that had gone before, whatever it turns out to be when we have the ancient dna, had the wherewithal to re-create European civilization once again in the Renaissance. So, it's all more than fine with me.

By the way, that's what real "ethnic" pride looks like....I recommend it to you in terms of your own people. Of course, that would mean acknowledging and embracing all the North African and the trace SSA and your 70-80% Near Eastern ancient ancestors. 

As for that silly comment about the recent papers on Spanish mtDna, anyone who frequents this or other Boards where they were discussed knows their value and knows you are distorting their conclusions, so it's not even worth discussing it. The tide has turned, Drac. The science has proved you wrong over and over again. You're in a hole so stop digging.

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## Angela

> This is exactly what I was saying actually! Just not as artfully as you. 
> 
> I have friends who are from some little peak or valley in the southern Appennines, and they basically come across as sui generis on whatever calculator. I don't think the reference samples are sufficient.
> 
> 
> SHIFTING GEARS:
> 
> 1. Not to get too philosophical, but doesn't this call into question the use of calculators? In other words, if they need a reference population to be pretty close to what you know you are, then why do you need a calculator to tell you what you know you are?
> 
> ...


This is a reminder of all the discussions on the topic at 23andme. :) As I said from day one, if you have all four ancestors from one place, you know what you are and you don't need 23andme or any of the calculators. If you are adopted or of mixed ancestry, it can be very challenging and sometimes impossible to get precise answers.

Let's take adoptees. If they are 100% of Italian ancestry, but just don't know it, a calculator that has Bergamo, Tuscans and Southern Italians will probably tell them that. If it only has one Italian reference sample it might not. If they're 100% British, it might come close as well, but it might not be able to tell them if they're Irish versus English or what percentage of each unless there are samples for all of those groups. If they're French it might be even more off. Now, what if they're Ashkenazi or part Ashkenazi? The only place that can tell them that with any real degree of accuracy is 23andme. The calculators are hopeless. (I hope that gedmatch has taken down that "J" calculator, for example. It's totally useless.) If they're of Sephardic ancestry, however, they're out of luck because the Sephardim aren't a sufficiently bottlenecked population to pick it up. If they're a mix, again, they're out of luck. Someone Sicilian and English might be told they're Slovenian or Bulgarian. Of course, if you know the ethnic ancestry of one biological parent it's easier to at least get a region for the other one.

The people who are the real market for all of this are Americans of mixed ancestry, even if it's just a mix of English, Irish and German, who want to clarify their ancestral "roots". People from the British Isles also seem to be pretty interested, although I'm not quite sure why. I can't get any of my "real" Italian relatives to test. Their attitude is, "I know I'm Italian. I even know where all my ancestors lived for the last at least five to six hundred years. What more do I need to know? Oh, and I have too many cousins already." :) I suspect that for some groups with an ethnic inferiority complex they may be trying to prove their "European-ness" or lack of "exotic" (to them) admixture.

The problem is that there is serious overlap between the genomes of certain British people and those of people from the Netherlands and Scandinavia, for example, so they're never going to be all that accurate, in my opinion, for these purposes.

What these "calculators" are "good" for, given that they are honestly and competently made, and the primary reason for their creation, at first by Dienekes, is to try to figure out the peopling of Europe. It's all about population genetics. However, it soon became clear that these "clusters" were still too modern, and that there were more ancient "mixtures" hiding inside them. Now that we have ancient dna, the calculators are focused on those kinds of comparisons. I still don't put much stock on the precise percentages found in these amateur calculators, but there are still things to be gleaned by comparisons between different ethnic groups. You have to understand how to use and interpret them, however.

If a group like the Reich Lab or Allentoft put out the results of an Admixture run then it's a different story.

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## Drac II

> Same old, same old. This isn't theapricity or Stormfront. Nobody is impressed by cut and paste responses already posted a hundred times by you which are, as always, devoid of any data to substantiate them. 
> 
> For the record, I don't give a **** if Italians carry some slave ancestry from Gauls or the British or the Germans or the Spaniards or the Syrians or Anatolians or whatever. It's all the same genes from the same ancestral populations which formed all Europeans, which you would know if you were interested in the science of all of this and more importantly, could understand it. Most slaves, unfortunately, were fodder for the mines and latifundia and galleys and the whore houses and didn't live to reproduce or weren't allowed to reproduce, again, as you would know if you'd ever actually studied the era. The ones who were manumitted and did reproduce were the survivors, the smartest and most capable of them, and, as Maciamo once opined, perhaps the best looking as well. :) That's a form of selection if you understand what that means.
> 
> Whatever happened, after the total destruction of a magnificent civilization, the Italians, the product of everything that had gone before, whatever it turns out to be when we have the ancient dna, had the wherewithal to re-create European civilization once again in the Renaissance. So, it's all more than fine with me.
> 
> By the way, that's what real "ethnic" pride looks like....I recommend it to you in terms of your own people. Of course, that would mean acknowledging and embracing all the North African and the trace SSA and your 70-80% Near Eastern ancient ancestors. 
> 
> As for that silly comment about the recent papers on Spanish mtDna, anyone who frequents this or other Boards where they were discussed knows their value and knows you are distorting their conclusions, so it's not even worth discussing it. The tide has turned, Drac. The science has proved you wrong over and over again. You're in a hole so stop digging.


Such hostility! Since you are in a "I will tell you what I think of you whether you like it or not" mode (and for the record you started this, again), I am forced to have to answer in similar fashion and go into "what I think of you" mode too:

You mean all the evidence that you keep trying to deny or downplay, which is a different thing. The statements of all those historians and scholars in Roman history that you already know pretty well about (specially after I gave links and quotes as examples in other threads where this subject came up) are not going to magically go away just because you want to make assumptions about most slaves conveniently dying off, or staying static in Rome for centuries and not moving around other parts of Italy, or just a few of them being manumitted, or ignoring the communities of free "peregrini", and so forth. And neither are some autosomal results, like the ones from the study which is the subject of this thread, which are not to your liking either (notice just how quickly you tried to dismiss what is in fact one of the most interesting and original parts of it, the admixture age estimates, a sort of "novelty" for a paper on Italian DNA, since they did not come out as remote as you would have hoped for), no matter how much you claim that having something to do with Roman-era slaves and immigrants doesn't really bother you. I know you pretty well from a long time ago in these forums, since long before you were made an admin. I'm not a newbie. We were already "arguing" about some of these things then. I know how very casually you try to dismiss this subject. Oh, but on the other hand you do love to consider just about any remote possibility and give credit to just about any paper whatsoever when it comes to them "Moors" from Islamic times. I wonder why? (rhetorical question, since anyone who has been around here for a long time knows why.)

The tide has "turned"? If it has, it does not seem to be exactly on your side either.

As for Maciamo, he does not seem to have any problem accepting the fact that there were many people from places like the Near East in Italy during Roman times. He has made comments about it himself (and interestingly enough also get accused of being a "racist" or using "white supremacist arguments" by some Italians because of it), and Eupedia itself touches upon the subject in its page about Italy. It seems that among the administration it is you and only you who is bothered by this. 

As for the mtDNA paper, the comments about it were already made here:

http://www.eupedia.com/forum/threads...669#post469669

As I expected, you weren't able to argue anything to the contrary of my observations and comments there, or here for that matter. We all know why you want to give this paper super-importance, an importance which it doesn't really have. It did not settle anything about the subject that interests you (i.e. the "recently" introduced mtDNA), and far from being more informative than autosomal studies in fact it even tried to seek support from them (a support which is not really there, or at least not by the papers they tried to conjure up.) It just kept giving "possibilities" for what they estimate was of "recent" introduction. Had this exact same paper been about that same mtDNA in Italy, I would bet $1 million that you would quickly have made the exact same observations about its inconclusiveness and not given it anywhere even near as much importance as you try to give it.

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## Angela

Ignoring posts doesn't mean one necessarily agrees with the points made. I often ignore posts which I don't think are worth spending any time on because they're so obviously lacking in intellectual merit. I can't spend my entire existence correcting people who have no idea what they're talking about. I think you should be able to follow the logic here.

As for the rest, I majored in history and have a master's degree in it as well. That I sold out for a more lucrative career is beside the point. :) Roman history remains an avocation, and I have in my personal library thirty or more texts on it, and have read scores of papers on the subject as well as original sources. I'm not some illiterate teenager who can be impressed with cribbed snippets found through a google search. Your points are totally unsupported by the data. There is NO, and I repeat NO evidence to suggest that all slaves from the Middle East were sent to Italy and were in addition sent only to southern Italy. Such a suggestion is ludicrous.

Most importantly, as I already pointed out to you, should the ancient dna show that there was a big change in Italian genetics specifically from that source, I have absolutely no problem with it. It wouldn't be the first time that history gets trounced by genetics. You keep imputing your strange agenda and racist opinions onto me. I've told you before; I'm not you; I'm not a denizen of racist anthrofora. I don't share your beliefs or your concerns and preoccupations. 

What possible difference can it make WHEN "Near Eastern" genes entered southern Europe? Are North African genes more objectionable to you if they came to Iberia with the Moors rather than with the Neolithic farmers or late Mesolithic hunter-gatherers? I have news for you; it's all the same alleles. 

I think it's time for you to embrace your ancient Near Eastern identity, Drac. In fact it's time for all Nordicists to come to grips with reality. In your particular case it's even more imperative. Good God man, in your case it's probably 70%+ of your total ancestry. This isn't just ethnic nihilism, it's individual nihilism. 

Now, why don't you go argue about whether Spaniards are blonder than Poles or something equally important and consequential.

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## moore2moore

I am a GSI in Roman History at a major university in CA. Hopefully some day soon I will get tenure, so those impressed with credentials can call me a full professor. In the meantime, I will have to tell you that I have eaten, breathed, drank, and probably defecated Roman history for the last 25 years.

I know which wars Rome fought against whom, and when. I've read entire books on the Roman Slave trade, and the life of average Romans, including slaves. (I still recommend Jerome Carcopino's, if anyone is looking.)

I can tell you that Angela is correct. Slaves came from all over. And went all over. *If you purport to see a "Roman Era Slave DNA Signature" for Italy or South Italy, you would have to explain why such a signature is absent for much of France (Roman for ~700 years), Catalonia (Roman for ~700 years), and indeed even England (Roman for ~400 years). Do you believe slaves worked the vast plantations in those regions?* 

Indeed, why aren't all of these regions one gigantic melting pop, and yet incredibly homogenous at the same time, due to seven centuries of the importation of Roman-era slaves?

Angela is correct in asking: do you seriously believe that there was a sorting process somehow, where slaves of a certain ancestry went to certain regions? That, Sir, has no basis in reality, history, or common sense. 

Angela is also correct in stating that large numbers of slaves went to mines, galley ships, and places like brothels, where the life expectancy was short, the treatment harsh, and the likelihood of having children small. Household slaves were often castrated. 

The average manumitted slave was often well beyond childbearing age, since manumission overwhelmingly occurred only upon the death of the household paterfamilias and his surviving wife. 

Aside from certain very wealthy freedmen hitting it big, manumitted slaves were often poor, and did not have the resources to raise large families.

Do I doubt that some genes made their way into the gene pool of modern Italians from Roman-era slaves? Sure. But you would expect such genes to be concentrated in the places where slave-supported industries were the largest. And they're not.

For example: the Romans used Egypt as a breadbasket for about 400 years. The Romans fought wars against the Germanic tribes continuously during that same period. German slaves were very common in Rome. Read the Ode to Bissula, or even Pope Gregory's famous comments. By your metric, there should be a visible signature of German slave genes in Egypt. 

Let's go even further. Sardinia provides ample examples of extremely rare uniparental markers that can be used to detect Sardinian ancestry with ease. For a long time, Sardinian slaves were the most common in Rome. "Cheaper than a Sardinian slave" was the saying in the city. Yet are these Sardinian markers present in Rome? No. The similar mainland clades show a TMRCA several millennia before the Roman period.

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## Drac II

The problem is that in reality you can't "correct" the majority of what I say and back up with actual sources, but simply deny it. Contrary to what you claim, it is not for lack of trying on your part.

The fact that Rome was the center of the empire and therefore the largest consumer of labor should already have told you where the majority of the slaves and free citizens were going. For example, I don't see many historians finding a great deal of funerary inscriptions with names of Hellenized foreigners in other parts of the empire other than Italy. Sure, you can find some, like for example evidence of North African and Near Eastern foreigners in Roman Britain, but this is because the conquest of that place happened rather late, at a time when the Roman armies were largely composed of non-Romans. Even quite a few Roman emperors at this time were foreigners themselves. So it should not be surprising to find some evidence of foreigners elsewhere in the empire as well, but as another user commented here:

http://www.eupedia.com/forum/threads...ically-diverse

That actually should give you an idea how many more of them there must have been in a place like Rome, the center of the empire itself. Furthermore, we also have the statements of ancient writers like Martial, Petronius, Juvenal, etc. from which is easy to gather how common were such foreigners in Rome, and also from what areas of the empire they predominantly came from. And it sure is not Gaul or Germania that they point to.

As for your "sent only to southern Italy", that is, again, your very own claim, not mine. Remember, you are the one wanting to confine any "recent" genetic influx to southern Italy, preferably mostly Sicily (the mainland is "too close for comfort".) Don't try to attribute your agendas to me. I have always said that the majority of the slaves and immigrants had Rome as their destination, which is what the historical evidence points to.

But there are DNA studies that do make the inference that Italians have "recent" DNA from around Etruscan/Roman/medieval times, like the paper that is the subject of this thread. Of course, you waste little time to dismiss them. Very different from whenever a study tries to make the same inference about Iberians. Then we must all remain very open minded and strongly believe that those mighty "Moors" were quite capable of leaving a lasting genetic impression, never mind the fact that historians estimate their numbers as being very low, and that, unlike all those pagan and early Christian slaves and immigrants in Roman Italy, there was an actual long-lasting war waged by those who remained Christian to expel them and their coreligionists. The double-standard is rather blatant. We have to believe that a relatively small group of elitist military/religious invaders, who for the most part were eventually expelled, had a considerable impact on the much larger native population of an entire peninsula, but a larger number of slaves and immigrants in another peninsula somehow miraculously barely left a trace. Angela, if you really buy that, I got a real nifty bridge to sell you.

You keep accusing others of what you yourself do. Not nice, Angela. You might be fooling some people with this claim that you don't really care if Italians have "recent" African or Eastern DNA, and that you are not worried about such things, and accusing others of being "racist" (I wonder why you don't accuse Maciamo of being so as well, since some have already accused him of such a thing when he has made statements on the subject), while you yourself are supposedly totally different, but your posts since back in the day suggest otherwise. They show a preoccupation with the subject. And no, the fact that you go around Googling for articles on other subject matter and making posts on other topics is not fooling me or anyone else who is well acquainted with you. No, you are not me, for sure. The difference between you and me is that I do not try to hide the fact that this topic interest me very much. But you do.

Angela, please, don't try to feign ignorance. You know very well what "difference" it makes. For a long time Nordicist charlatans have been accusing southern Europeans of being "tainted" with "recent blood" from Africa and the Middle East, while they paint rosy pictures of themselves, being "pure" and having truly prehistoric and ancient blood-lines, the "real whites", and blah, blah, blah. And in the case of Italy the number 1 argument they use is the fact that the Romans imported large numbers of slaves from outside Europe and that many free citizens from places like Turkey, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, etc. also migrated there. They did not "invent" this. They picked it up from real scholars on the subject (their writings are full of references to actual scholars like Mommsen, Tenney Frank, La Piana, Duff, etc.) but of course they give it their own "spin", claiming that the North Africans and Middle Easterners of those times were no longer "white" but "mixed race" or just plain "non-white" (this part is mostly their own invention, they did not get this idea from actual scholars and historians.) One only has to examine writings like those of Arthur Kemp to plainly see this typical Nordicist strategy. So it has become very important for Italians who care about such things to try to deny it. Unfortunately, instead of attacking the Nordicist spin on the whole thing, they have tried to deny the work of actual scholars and claim that no such things happened, or that all slaves and foreigners died off, and what have you.

I think it is time for you to embrace all those things you conveniently want others to accept, Angela, instead of claiming to be a descendant of "Celt-Ligurians", like some other Nordicists do.

Why argue about Spaniards and Poles when you can invest your time more profitably arguing about whether Italians are practically as blue eyed and blond as Orcadians because "predictions" based on some alleles seem to suggest so, or something just as important and consequential.

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## Vukodav

LoL do you even realize that the Southern half of Italy was called Magna Graecia and was hellenized long before the Roman Empire was born? Do you also realize that ancient Romans had a HUGE fetish for anything Greek? I mean, they have found thousands of Greek inscriptions in Rome, but no Anatolian, Armenian and Semitic ones. I thought that only the 1% richest Levantines was able to speak Greek. You should come up with something better than quoting butthurt Germanic historians who wish that ancient Romans were blonder than modern Scandinavians!

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## Drac II

> LoL do you even realize that the Southern half of Italy was called Magna Graecia and was hellenized long before the Roman Empire was born? Do you also realize that ancient Romans had a HUGE fetish for anything Greek? I mean, they have found thousands of Greek inscriptions in Rome, but no Anatolian, Armenian and Semitic ones. I thought that only the 1% richest Levantines was able to speak Greek. You should come up with something better than quoting butthurt Germanic historians who wish that ancient Romans were blonder than modern Scandinavians!


The inscriptions we are talking about are from later times, and have many names that are typical not of Greeks but of Hellenized Near Easterners. This matches very well with ancient authors like Juvenal who scoff and denounce the "Greeks" at Rome as fakes, Near Easterners pretending to be "Greek". Juvenal did not even like the Greeks to begin with, so he can't be accused of somehow wanting to protect "real" Greek identity. But even an anti-Greek bigot like him recognized that most of these "Greeks" were actually people from places like Syria.

The Nordictist charlatans' claims about Romans being super-blond and what have you are obviously baloney, of course. But this is not about their strange claims. We are talking about things that have been part of legitimate scholarship on Roman history for a long time, and which unfortunately these Nordicists have picked up to try to back up their own weird claims about the original Romans being more Nordic than Thor himself before Rome was influenced by all these foreign peoples.

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## Vukodav

Bla bla bla. Where are the countless Anatolian, Armenian and Semitic inscriptions in Italy? Only the 1% richest minority of near easterners was Greek speaking and you are telling me that they only left Greek inscriptions. By the way my name is Joseph, an Hellenized Levantine name. Does it make me a Palestinian? Are tens of millions of North Europeans with names like Luke, Thomas, Sam, Paul, John.... Jordanians and Beduins in denial?

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## Drac II

> Bla bla bla. Where are the countless Anatolian, Armenian and Semitic inscriptions in Italy? Only the 1% richest minority of near easterners was Greek speaking and you are telling me that they only left Greek inscriptions. By the way my name is Joseph, an Hellenized Levantine name. Does it make me a Palestinian? Are tens of millions of North Europeans with names like Luke, Thomas, Sam, Paul, John.... Jordanians and Beduins in denial?


You are comparing modern naming practices with those of 2000 years ago, quite before the spread of Christianity all over the planet.

Greek names, language and customs were very common among many Near Easterners. In Syria itself there's plenty of inscriptions in Greek.

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## Vukodav

But only the richest 1% of Easterners was Greek Speaking. So where are the inscriptions in Armenian, Lydian, Lycian, Carian, Coptic, Hebrew, Aramaic,... in Italy? Answer the question and stop with the circles.

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## Drac II

> But only the richest 1% of Easterners was Greek Speaking. So where are the inscriptions in Armenian, Lydian, Lycian, Carian, Coptic, Hebrew, Aramaic,... in Italy? Answer the question and stop with the circles.


Where do you keep getting this idea that only 1% of Easterners knew Greek, or had Greek names? Regarding Syria in particular, in entire regions of it Greek names predominated. Even in many rural areas of Syria Greek language was used:

"Inscriptions and texts show the predominance of Greek throughout the region. Greek was not confined to the cities, as inscriptions, papyrus and parchments from rural settings show." 

https://books.google.com/books?id=YJ...ion%22&f=false

Page 284. 

A pretty common language in Syria at the time, besides the other ones also present in the area.

----------


## Angela

> The problem is that in reality you can't "correct" the majority of what I say and back up with actual sources, but simply deny it. Contrary to what you claim, it is not for lack of trying on your part.
> 
> The fact that Rome was the center of the empire and therefore the largest consumer of labor should already have told you where the majority of the slaves and free citizens were going. For example, I don't see many historians finding a great deal of funerary inscriptions with names of Hellenized foreigners in other parts of the empire other than Italy. Sure, you can find some, like for example evidence of North African and Near Eastern foreigners in Roman Britain, but this is because the conquest of that place happened rather late, at a time when the Roman armies were largely composed of non-Romans. Even quite a few Roman emperors at this time were foreigners themselves. So it should not be surprising to find some evidence of foreigners elsewhere in the empire as well, but as another user commented here:
> 
> http://www.eupedia.com/forum/threads...ically-diverse
> 
> That actually should give you an idea how many more of them there must have been in a place like Rome, the center of the empire itself. Furthermore, we also have the statements of ancient writers like Martial, Petronius, Juvenal, etc. from which is easy to gather how common were such foreigners in Rome, and also from what areas of the empire they predominantly came from. And it sure is not Gaul or Germania that they point to.
> 
> As for your "sent only to southern Italy", that is, again, your very own claim, not mine. Remember, you are the one wanting to confine any "recent" genetic influx to southern Italy, preferably mostly Sicily (the mainland is "too close for comfort".) Don't try to attribute your agendas to me. I have always said that the majority of the slaves and immigrants had Rome as their destination, which is what the historical evidence points to.
> ...


Look what was at the bottom of my pile of posts. It's like finding a lump of coal in the bottom of a Christmas stocking. :) What a very disappointing effort, Drac. Thousands of letters, but no scholarship, no reasoned, logical, and data based points to refute the arguments of others, including a professor of Roman history-only an attempt to project your repugnant agenda and lack of intellectual integrity onto me. How very typical of you. For your information, I didn't even know that racist anthrofora existed until a few years ago when I followed a link in a posting on a respectable genealogy site. If you want to do battle with Italian Nordicists over whether Spaniards or Italians are less "northern", they are here, to my shame and disappointment, as should be obvious, but leave me out of it. 

You can deny all you wish, you can try to besmirch me with innuendo, but I am confident that my knowledge of the subject matter and the logic and quality of my argumentation are apparent to the readers of this Board, as is the lack of respect for your own output. 

Your day is over. No one takes you seriously any more. 

As for my heritage, given where my family has lived for at least six hundred years, I would say I am indeed probably descended from Celt-Ligures since both my parents come from areas where they lived, but probably equally, of course, from the Roman citizens of Luni. Then you have to add in the Etruscans, my "favorites" if I can be said to have any, who had settlements across the Magra, perhaps some stray Greek merchants or even residents of Luni, perhaps indeed a slave or two who might have been manumitted, although our area, especially my father's was far too poor and mountainous for slaves to be very feasible, and yes, to some Indo-Europeans who came into the Po Valley. Before all of that, of course, there would be a lot of ancestry from Neolithic farmers and the smaller input from whatever WHG might have survived. There might be a stray Lombard in there too, given the number of Lombard castles in the area and a surname that appears often in my family tree, but the total impact would be minute, which would be more than fine with me. The Lombard lords and nobles of my area (and the Franks who sometimes succeeded them) were bloodsucking oppressors one and all and I have no desire to claim ancestry from any of them. Given the nearness to the coast, I might have had a stray ancestress who didn't run quite fast enough when the Saracens came raiding, but I don't see it in my dna. The strangest thing I see is a steppe mtDna, but unlike most men, I don't define myself by a uniparental marker. It's a very small part of my total make-up. I actually don't think those mtDna clades are as "fit" as something like "H" for example, so if anything I would have preferred to get another one. 

If all these calculators are correct, what I do see is that I am overwhelmingly Southern European in ancestry, which is what I expected and hoped, and indisputably Italian, which is also what I expected and hoped. Would that you felt the same way about all your ancestors...there would perhaps be less misinformation coming from your postings, and you would perhaps be a happier and less angry person.

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## Angela

> I am a GSI in Roman History at a major university in CA. Hopefully some day soon I will get tenure, so those impressed with credentials can call me a full professor. In the meantime, I will have to tell you that I have eaten, breathed, drank, and probably defecated Roman history for the last 25 years.
> 
> I know which wars Rome fought against whom, and when. I've read entire books on the Roman Slave trade, and the life of average Romans, including slaves. (I still recommend Jerome Carcopino's, if anyone is looking.)
> 
> I can tell you that Angela is correct. Slaves came from all over. And went all over. *If you purport to see a "Roman Era Slave DNA Signature" for Italy or South Italy, you would have to explain why such a signature is absent for much of France (Roman for ~700 years), Catalonia (Roman for ~700 years), and indeed even England (Roman for ~400 years). Do you believe slaves worked the vast plantations in those regions?* 
> 
> Indeed, why aren't all of these regions one gigantic melting pop, and yet incredibly homogenous at the same time, due to seven centuries of the importation of Roman-era slaves?
> 
> Angela is correct in asking: do you seriously believe that there was a sorting process somehow, where slaves of a certain ancestry went to certain regions? That, Sir, has no basis in reality, history, or common sense. 
> ...



It's a pleasure to have someone on the Board with specialized scholarly knowledge in this field and I'm sure other expertise as well. As you can see, a great deal of disinformation or just superficial information gets posted here on certain topics.

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## Drac II

> Look what was at the bottom of my pile of posts. It's like finding a lump of coal in the bottom of a Christmas stocking. :) What a very disappointing effort, Drac. Thousands of letters, but no scholarship, no reasoned, logical, and data based points to refute the arguments of others, including a professor of Roman history-only an attempt to project your repugnant agenda and lack of intellectual integrity onto me. How very typical of you. For your information, I didn't even know that racist anthrofora existed until a few years ago when I followed a link in a posting on a respectable genealogy site. If you want to do battle with Italian Nordicists over whether Spaniards or Italians are less "northern", they are here, to my shame and disappointment, as should be obvious, but leave me out of it. 
> 
> You can deny all you wish, you can try to besmirch me with innuendo, but I am confident that my knowledge of the subject matter and the logic and quality of my argumentation are apparent to the readers of this Board, as is the lack of respect for your own output. 
> 
> Your day is over. No one takes you seriously any more. 
> 
> As for my heritage, given where my family has lived for at least six hundred years, I would say I am indeed probably descended from Celt-Ligures since both my parents come from areas where they lived, but probably equally, of course, from the Roman citizens of Luni. Then you have to add in the Etruscans, my "favorites" if I can be said to have any, who had settlements across the Magra, perhaps some stray Greek merchants or even residents of Luni, perhaps indeed a slave or two who might have been manumitted, although our area, especially my father's was far too poor and mountainous for slaves to be very feasible, and yes, to some Indo-Europeans who came into the Po Valley. Before all of that, of course, there would be a lot of ancestry from Neolithic farmers and the smaller input from whatever WHG might have survived. There might be a stray Lombard in there too, given the number of Lombard castles in the area and a surname that appears often in my family tree, but the total impact would be minute, which would be more than fine with me. The Lombard lords and nobles of my area (and the Franks who sometimes succeeded them) were bloodsucking oppressors one and all and I have no desire to claim ancestry from any of them. Given the nearness to the coast, I might have had a stray ancestress who didn't run quite fast enough when the Saracens came raiding, but I don't see it in my dna. The strangest thing I see is a steppe mtDna, but unlike most men, I don't define myself by a uniparental marker. It's a very small part of my total make-up. I actually don't think those mtDna clades are as "fit" as something like "H" for example, so if anything I would have preferred to get another one. 
> 
> If all these calculators are correct, what I do see is that I am overwhelmingly Southern European in ancestry, which is what I expected and hoped, and indisputably Italian, which is also what I expected and hoped. Would that you felt the same way about all your ancestors...there would perhaps be less misinformation coming from your postings, and you would perhaps be a happier and less angry person.




As I suspected, hardly much of a reply. The usual gratuitous diatribes and denials. 


You admitted it yourself, you know well what Nordicist agendas are from at least a few years ago.


No scholarship, no backing up your statements with those of actual historians, denials, suspicious agendas, etc. That sounds pretty much like your posts on this subject. I am the one who more than a few times has actually cited sources to back up what I say. Been doing it around here for quite a while. 


A "professor of Roman history"? Hmmm... yeah, sure. Like I said before, if you really believe that, I've got this real nifty bridge to sell you.


I wish I could say the same about "your day", but you never had one to begin with. I never took you seriously when it came to this topic. Your posts on this subject were always pretty easy to "read between the lines". And I see nothing nowadays to change this conclusion either.


Just pointing out what you do and then you strangely claim that it is others that do it to you. 


Lack of respect for my output? The only ones doing so are you and some of those other "anthrofora... Italian Nordicists" you referred to in your post. No one else. Who do you think, for example, gave negative points to my post above showing "Joey" that his gratuitous assertion that hardly anyone among people like Syrians knew Greek or had Greek names is quite mistaken by showing him an actual academic source stating how common it actually was? I notice, however, that you seem to rejoice at the fact that posts backed-up by actual sources are the ones getting attacked and given negative votes. Why am I not surprised? No wonder that many of the old users simply ended up quitting these forums. In fact, I know well why some of them left, since they actually sent me PMs on the subject.

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## Drac II

> It's a pleasure to have someone on the Board with specialized scholarly knowledge in this field and I'm sure other expertise as well. As you can see, a great deal of disinformation or just superficial information gets posted here on certain topics.


I am glad you like our "Roman history professor" new visitor so much, but you should actually bother to check out the very source he recommended before getting too excited by his quite uninformed posts on this topic. For example, here are some of Carcopino's thoughts on the subject that you dislike so much and try to deny or downplay at any cost:

https://archive.org/stream/dailylife...ge/n7/mode/2up

"Whether by personal favour, by emancipation, or by mass naturalisations extended at one stroke either to a class of demobilised auxiliaries or to a municipality suddenly converted into an honorary colony, a new flood of peregrini acquired citizenship. Never had the cosmopolitan character of the Urbs been so distinctly marked. The Roman proper was submerged on every social plane, not only by the influx of Italian immigrants but by the multitude of provincials bringing with them from every corner of the universe their speech, their manners, their customs, and their superstitions. Juvenal inveighs against the mud-laden torrent pouring from Orontes into the Tiber. But the Syrians, whom he so greatly despised, hastened at the first possible moment to assume the guise of Roman civilians; even those who most loudly advertised their xenophobia were themselves more or less newcomers to Rome, seeking to defend their adopted home against fresh incursions....


In the Senate House senators from Gaul, from Spain, from Africa, from Asia, sat side by side; the Roman emperors, Roman citizens but newly naturalised, came from towns or villages beyond the mountains and the seas. Trajan and Hadrian were born in Spanish Italica in Baetica. Their successor, Antoninus Pius, sprang from bourgeois Stock in Nemausus (modern Nimes) in Gallia Narbonensis; and the end of the second century was to see the empire divided between Caesar Clodius Albinus of Hadrumetum (Tunis) and Septimius Severus of Leptis Magna (Tripoli.) The biography of Septimius Severus records that even after he had ascended the throne he never succeeded in ridding his speech of the Semitic accent which he had inherited from his Punic ancestors. Thus the Rome of the Antonines was a meeting place where the Romans of Rome encountered those inferior peoples against whom their laws seemed to have erected solid ethnic barriers, or -to be more accurate- Rome was a meting pot in which, despite her laws, the peoples were continually being subjected to new processes of assimilation. It was, if you will, a Babel but a Babel where, for better or for worse, all comers learned to speak and think in Latin." 

*Pages 55 & 56.*


"Everyone learned to speak and think in Latin, even the slaves, who in the second century raised their standard of living to the level of the ingenui. Legislation had grown more and more humane and had progressively lightened their chains and favoured their emancipation. The practical good sense of the Romans, no less than the fundamental humanity instinctive in their peasant hearts, had always kept them from showing cruelty towards the servi... With few exceptions, slavery in Rome was neither eternal nor, while it lasted, intolerable." 

*Page 56.*

"Indeed, a Greek who lived at Rome in the middle of the second century was struck by the levelling which had taken place between slaves and freemen, which to his amazement extended even to their clothes. Appian of Alexandria, writing under Antoninus Pius, remarks that even in externals the slave is in no way distinguished from his master, and unless his master donned the toga praetexta of the magistrate, the two were dressed alike. Appian supplements this by recording a thing which astonished him even more: after a slave had regained his liberty he lived on terms of absolute equality with the Roman citizen. Rome, alone of all cities of antiquity, has the honour of having redeemed her outcasts by opening her doors to them. It is true that the freed slave remained bound to his former master, now his patronus, sometimes by services due or by pecuniary indebtedness, and always by the duties implied by an almost filial respect (obsequium). But once his emancipation or manumissio had been duly pronounced, whether by a fictitious statement of claim before the praetor (per vindictam) or by the inscription of his name on the censors register (censu) at the solemn sacrifice of the lustrum, or more commonly in virtue of a testamentary clause (testamento) , the slave obtained by the grace of his master, living or dead, the name and status of a Roman citizen. His descendants of the third generation were entitled to exercise the full political rights of citizenship and nothing further distinguished them from ingenui."

*Page 59.*

"Ultimately all the emperors, out of love for their own freed slaves or those of their friends, took pains to obliterate the last trace of their servile origin, either by utilising the legal fiction of the natalium restitutio or by slipping onto their finger the gold ring which might open the way to the equestrian status. Hence in the period we are studying, the slaves who benefited by the ever-increasing numbers of manumissions were placed on a footing of complete equality with other Roman citizens, enabled to secure positions and fortunes and to purchase droves of slaves in their turn, as we see Trimalchio doing."

*Pages 59 & 60.*

"The numerous colleges devoted to these heterogeneous gods at Rome not only co-existed without friction but collaborated in their recruiting campaigns. There was in fact more affinity and mutual understanding between these diverse religions than rivalry. One and all were served by priests jealously segregated from the crowd of the profane; their doctrine was based on revelation, and their prestige on the singularity of their costume and manner of life. One and all imposed preliminary initiation on their followers and periodical recourse to a more or less ascetic regimen; each, after its own fashion, indulged in the same astrological and henotheistic speculations and held out to believers the same messages of hope. Romans who had not been seduced by these exotic cults suspected and hated them. Juvenal, for instance, who could not repress his wrath to see the Orontes pour her muddy floods of superstition into the Tiber, hit out with might and main against them all, without distinction."

*Page 130.*

"Juvenal's savage and inexhaustible anger need not surprise us. He expresses with all the force of his genius the natural reaction of the "ancient Roman," hater alike of novelty and of the foreigner, to whom emotion and enthusiasm were a degradation, and who would gladly have disciplined the outpourings of faith by such ordinances as governed a civil or military parade. At this distance of time his prejudices necessarily appear to us gravely unjust, first, because he traced to the oriental religions alone superstitions whose origin goes back to prehistoric times long before Rome was invaded by the Orient, and in whose development oriental religion had no part;"

*Page 131.*


There's more of these interesting comments and observations in the book, a bit too many and too long to quote here in full, but you folks can get the point from the above (anyone can peruse them for themselves if they so wish.) Ironically, many of them blatantly contradict the totally gratuitous statements of the very person who recommended the work of this historian. 

In conclusion, good recommendation. This academical source, which I very much doubt the person who recommended it has actually read, in fact once again supports what I've been saying all along and certainly not Angela. Nothing "new" here. I will simply add Carcopino's work to the long list of academical and scholarly sources that for the last 200 years have been pointing out pretty much the same things after thorough examination of the historical evidence.

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## Hauteville

The slaves in Roman empire were used for heavy work and their life expectancy was very low. You can read this in every historian book of Italy. American and suprematist germanic historians are a bunch of envious who think that ancient Greeks and Anatolians, Romans and even Egyptians were nordic. So lol.
The hellenized persons in Roman Italy came from Magna Graecia. Do you have realized that?Just look at how many colonies from Greeks there were in Italy. For example there were colonies outside Magna Graecia like Ancona and Adria who were sub-colonies of Siracusa. Surely the Greek speaking were them not "Syrian slaves" that surely has spoken in Aramaic.
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_Grecia

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## Drac II

> The slaves in Roman empire were used for heavy work and their life expectancy was very low. You can read this in every historian book of Italy. American and suprematist germanic historians are a bunch of envious who think that ancient Greeks and Anatolians, Romans and even Egyptians were nordic. So lol.
> The hellenized persons in Roman Italy came from Magna Graecia. Do you have realized that?Just look at how many colonies from Greeks there were in Italy. For example there were colonies outside Magna Graecia like Ancona and Adria who were sub-colonies of Siracusa. Surely the Greek speaking were them not "Syrian slaves" that surely has spoken in Aramaic.
> https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_Grecia


You are talking about much older events, not what was going on in later Roman times, which is what all these historians like Carcopino (yes, very "Germanic" surname) are talking about. The Hellenized slaves and "peregrini" of Roman times were predominantly Near Easterners. Juvenal denounced them as fakes, people from places like Syria who had adopted Greek customs and language, and this guy did not even like the "real" Greeks either, among other things he is well known for his anti-Greek bigotry, so he had no motivation whatsoever to try to defend them and their identity in the first place. Still, he distinguished them from Hellenized Near Easterners.

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## Vukodav

We are still waiting for the endless list of Middle Eastern inscriptions in Italy. Untill then, you are just dreaming. 

On the other hand there is hard evidence (not just some Greek inscriptions and Juvenal's satirical works) that Romans had plenty of colonies in the rest of the Empire, including Iberia.



Just out of curiosity: do you have a life outside of internet? You seem to be online 24/7, selectively quoting few historians, among thousands, who support your wacky theories.

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## Angela

> LoL do you even realize that the Southern half of Italy was called Magna Graecia and was hellenized long before the Roman Empire was born? Do you also realize that ancient Romans had a HUGE fetish for anything Greek? I mean, they have found thousands of Greek inscriptions in Rome, but no Anatolian, Armenian and Semitic ones. I thought that only the 1% richest Levantines was able to speak Greek. You should come up with something better than quoting butthurt Germanic historians who wish that ancient Romans were blonder than modern Scandinavians!


Some actual scholarship to your point:
https://books.google.com/books?id=gl...&lpg=PA169&dqq

"On the other hand, many popular slave names can be called "wish names" and seem to express the hope of the owner for what the slave might be like: Hilaris ("Happy"), Fidus ("Trusty")..."

Then there is the preponderance of Greek names. Was this an indication that all slaves in Rome, or Roman Italy as a whole came from the Hellenistic east? Hardly, although of course there were some, particularly during the Republican era and the early Empire. 

However, what then of the million Gauls who were enslaved, or the Iberians, from those in Iberia itself to those who fought for the Carthaginians and were therefore captured during the Punic Wars, or the Britons, Germans, Dacians etc. Where are names of that ethnicity in the record? They are in tiny percentages when they appear at all. 

The answer is that, as scholars in this field maintain, " Greek names for slaves marked slaves as an aspect of luxury and the good life, like fine furniture and art...the preponderance of Greek figures [in naming] again suggests an association of domestic slavery with civilization, luxury and culture."

What this means as a practical matter is that we can tell nothing about the origin of slaves from their names.

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## Drac II

> We are still waiting for the endless list of Middle Eastern inscriptions in Italy. Untill then, you are just dreaming. 
> 
> On the other hand there is hard evidence (not just some Greek inscriptions and Juvenal's satirical works) that Romans had plenty of colonies in the rest of the Empire, including Iberia.
> 
> 
> 
> Just out of curiosity: do you have a life outside of internet? You seem to be online 24/7, selectively quoting few historians, among thousands, who support your wacky theories.


When you finally understand what all these historians are saying, and that they are not pulling things out of their hats just for the heck of it, then perhaps you will start understanding that you hardly have to find "Middle Eastern inscriptions in Italy" to know that there were many people from that area. The fact most of these people bore Hellenized names is, as has been explained to death already, because Greek was an extremely common language in the Near East at this time in history. Greek, and even Latin itself, had even been spreading into some parts of Arabia, so let alone in places like Syria:

"In regions such as Palmyrene, the Hauran and Arabia, Greek was not the only language of inscriptions, and in such places Latin names are not uncommon, perhaps the result of contact with Roman soldiers instead of Hellenizing city-dwellers. In highly Hellenized regions such as the north, the coast and the Decapolis it is hardly surprising to find Greek names predominating."

*Same book quoted in post #155, same page.* 

Lucian, for example, was of Syrian origin, and he wrote his works in Greek. You wouldn't be able to tell from such a name and the language he wrote in. 

So it is hardly surprising at all if most "Orientals" at Rome in these times in fact had Hellenized names.

The slaves and immigrants that were coming to Rome were from many of those "Roman colonies", so I am not sure what are you trying to prove here by showing something everyone knows already, and no one is questioning either.

I was quoting a historian that was recommended by another user who said several things which are in fact contradicted by his own source. 

You also seem to be here 24/7.

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## Angela

With all due respect to the poster Moore, the French historian Jerome Carcopino wrote his book in *1940.* Scholarship has moved beyond basing its conclusions on gossip or anecdote, particularly literary ones. It is a book I would most emphatically *NOT* recommend to serious students of this particular subject.

Anyone who has actually studied this material in an academic setting knows that opinions differ, and that hard evidence is difficult to find. It comes down to interpretation of scarce data, and some issues, as many in archaeology and ancient history, will only be settled by the analysis of ancient dna.

However, in the interim one could do much worse than to turn to Walter Scheidel of Stanford University and his "The Roman Slave Supply".
https://www.princeton.edu/~pswpc/pdf...del/050704.pdf



“Ideally, slave totals would be tallied up from local or sectoral counts. In the absence of such data, I have tried to construct a probabilistic model that seeks to simulate this process by aggregating individual estimates for the likely demand for slaves in different sectors of the Italian economy (Scheidel 2005a). Needless to say,* this* *method necessarily entails huge margins of error and cannot provide more than a rough notion of final outcomes* under certain starting assumptions about the scale of domestic service or agricultural inputs. For this reason, *my estimate of around** 600,000 non-farming slaves in late Republican and early imperial Italy cannot be more than a highly tenuous conjecture.* It may be somewhat less hazardous to assess levels of rural slavery, given that slave numbers can be linked to specific labor requirements. Rural slave numbers assume a pivotal role in any reconstruction of servile demography: in an ‘organic’ economy, for the share of slaves in the overall population to have been very large (e.g., along the lines of New World slave societies), the majority of slaves would need to have been employed in the countryside. However, in view of constraints on the expansion of cash crop farming and other areas of rural employment, this is very unlikely to have been the case in Roman Italy.”


"In my model,the most probable range of outcomes is consonant with a cumulative total of between one and one and a half million slaves in Italy at the peak of this labor regime, *equivalent to some 15-25% of the total population. In the most general terms, there can be little doubt that despite their potentially vital contribution to agricultural production, slaves were disproportionately concentrated in the cities* (Jongman 2003). "

 

This latter point was raised by Razib Khan, indicating, as is usually the case, that he has done extensive reading on the subjects upon which he ventures an opinion. As he also pointed out, in any invasion, including the final ones that brought about the fall of the Empire, the urban populations, and, unfortunately for them, the slaves of the urban populations, were the most likely to meet unfortunate ends. 


Now, what about the rest of the empire? According to the author, there was better record keeping in Egypt, which gives a rough estimate of 5-10% of the population being enslaved. The lower number makes perfect sense in that the fields of Egypt had existed for millennia, and had been extensively cultivated by native Egyptians or people taken in slavery by the Egyptians, and there was no necessity for massive new numbers of slaves to be introduced. This is borne out by the fact that in Egypt there were more urban slaves than rural slaves. As long as the grain shipments came in, the Romans may have decided in large measure to leave well enough alone except for some resupply where necessary and when the price was sufficiently low because of recent conquests.


What of Asia Minor, or Gaul, or Iberia, or Britain? As the author points out, “estimate of overall slave numbers would critically depend on conditions in *areas that yield hardly any pertinent information. Existing proposals – of 10% or 17-20% for the entire Empire – are necessarily mere guesses.”*

What is the author’s conclusion? “What remains is the impression that large concentrations of slaves in the hands of elites outside Italy were by no means considered implausible. “ For those unfamiliar with the process of Romanization, those elites would not necessarily have been “Roman” or better yet “Italic” elites. The co-opting of local elites was an important part of Romanization. 


In actuality, all of these figures are guesses, but some are more grounded in fact. So, we see a substantial number of slaves in the Italic peninsula, although not the inflated numbers proposed by some scholars in the past, and slavery in other parts of the Empire as well, although probably not at Italian levels. I don't think the evidence supports anything more precise than that.

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## Sile

> The slaves in Roman empire were used for heavy work and their life expectancy was very low. You can read this in every historian book of Italy. American and suprematist germanic historians are a bunch of envious who think that ancient Greeks and Anatolians, Romans and even Egyptians were nordic. So lol.
> The hellenized persons in Roman Italy came from Magna Graecia. Do you have realized that?Just look at how many colonies from Greeks there were in Italy. For example there were colonies outside Magna Graecia like Ancona and Adria who were sub-colonies of Siracusa. Surely the Greek speaking were them not "Syrian slaves" that surely has spoken in Aramaic.
> https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_Grecia


http://www.crystalinks.com/romeslavery.html

*with slaves constituting 40 percent of the population. Enslaved people with talent, skill, or beauty commanded the highest prices, and many served as singers, scribes, jewelers, bartenders, and even doctors. One slave trained in medicine was worth the price of 50 agricultural slaves. Roman law was inconsistent on slavery. Slaves were considered property; they had no rights and were subject to their owners' whims. 

*40 percent of the population ...............you do realise that the populace of ancient Rome was always larger than modern Rome.

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## Sile

> We are still waiting for the endless list of Middle Eastern inscriptions in Italy. Untill then, you are just dreaming. 
> 
> On the other hand there is hard evidence (not just some Greek inscriptions and Juvenal's satirical works) that Romans had plenty of colonies in the rest of the Empire, including Iberia.
> 
> 
> 
> Just out of curiosity: do you have a life outside of internet? You seem to be online 24/7, selectively quoting few historians, among thousands, who support your wacky theories.


Colonies = immigrants and not the major populace of the area ..............these colonies are Roman citizens with families, there are *no Roman settlements/colonies, in the alps, illyricium, also in sardinia and Portugal*

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## Vukodav

> http://www.crystalinks.com/romeslavery.html*with slaves constituting 40 percent of the population. Enslaved people with talent, skill, or beauty commanded the highest prices, and many served as singers, scribes, jewelers, bartenders, and even doctors. One slave trained in medicine was worth the price of 50 agricultural slaves. Roman law was inconsistent on slavery. Slaves were considered property; they had no rights and were subject to their owners' whims.* 40 percent of the population ...............you do realise that the populace of ancient Rome was always larger than modern Rome.


None is debating the high number of servants here. The matter is their ethnic origin. The user Drac keeps selectively quoting few historians from the 19th century/early 20th century, who assumed that half of Italy was repopulated by Syrians just because they found some tombs in the city of Rome with hellenized semitic names like Luke, Paul, Mattew, John,....He really thinks that millions of such semites were all Greek speaking and left not a single inscription in their middle eastern language anywhere in Italy. His main evidence is Juvenal's satyrical works. Hahahaha. Could you believe it?

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## Angela

> Colonies = immigrants and not the major populace of the area ..............these colonies are Roman citizens with families, there are *no Roman settlements/colonies, in the alps, illyricium, also in sardinia and Portugal*


Either you haven't looked at the map, or you don't know where the Alps are located. 

Also, who's talking about Portugal or Sardinia? The discussion, such as it is, is about Drac's quest to prove that all of the Anatolian Neolithic and CHG ancestry in Italians comes from slaves during the Roman era, and not from slaves from all over the known world at the time, but specifically from slaves from the Near East and North Africa, thereby somehow making his country's own similar levels of the same total ancestry somehow "better" or more worthy. At least, that's as much sense as I can make of his arguments. The fact that no matter when they entered Europe they are the same alleles seems to have escaped him.

I'm also unsure of the point of your post. Is it that there weren't Roman settlements in the part of the Alps closest to the Veneto? It appears that there were some, but I don't see that it matters. It won't make people of the Veneto, even the far northern Veneto, any less southern European if that is the goal, at least if the published calculator results at 23andme from the various calculators are any indication.

Ed. As to the effect of the Roman settlements and their effect on the local genetics, I would have said the same. However, if the recent Busby et al study is to be believed, there was a significant impact of Italic peoples not only in Iberia, but even all the way up in Britain. We'll see if further studies bear that out. It will also be crucial for the general discussion to get ancient dna from the Etruscans, and early Republican era Romans, Samnites etc. and compare them to the genomes of the Romans at the time of the Germanic invasions. I'm ready, as always, to accept whatever the genetics studies done by top tier labs might show.

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## Vukodav

> Colonies = immigrants and not the major populace of the area ..............these colonies are Roman citizens with families, there are *no Roman settlements/colonies, in the alps, illyricium, also in sardinia and Portugal*


Those are only the official colonies built by the Roman state. Most Romans settled in indigenous cities.

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## Drac II

Carcopino's work is perfectly fine, the fact that it was written in 1940 hardly prevents it from being so; scholarship on this subject goes to much before that. It is not based on "gossip or anecdote" but on actual historical sources (end-notes provide all the references he used), and many of the things he says are supported by other historians. 

Fair enough, the points raised in Scheidel's paper are perfectly valid, and calculations about numbers of slaves vary among historians. 

However, the argument that some dilettantes try to conjure up that most slaves died of famines, diseases and wars because they concentrated in the cities, and therefore we must dismiss them as having had any relevancy for demographic matters, is dubious at best because it rests on one assumption and two important omissions:

1- It assumes that the population of the cities remained static, even for centuries, and that all people there, including their slaves, did not eventually move around and settle in other places

2- It omits the important fact of manumission, a very common practice among the Romans 

3- It also omits to take into account the large number of free foreigners, who were never slaves 

Furthermore, this argument can be easily and conveniently also applied to other times as well, like the Middle Ages, where wars, famines and diseases would also decimate cities.

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## Sile

> None is debating the high number of servants here. The matter is their ethnic origin. The user Drac keeps selectively quoting few historians from the 19th century/early 20th century, who assumed that half of Italy was repopulated by Syrians just because they found some tombs in the city of Rome with hellenized semitic names like Luke, Paul, Mattew, John,....He really thinks that millions of such semites were all Greek speaking and left not a single inscription in their middle eastern language anywhere in Italy. His main evidence is Juvenal's satyrical works. Hahahaha. Could you believe it?


the two areas in question is slaves and colonies ..........and some here have an agenda to *assume my aim is something other than what I state*.
I state

Rome had many slaves in ancient times and the bulk was always near Rome the city...............if the numbers do not please you , bad luck............my agenda on this in regards to genetic legacy for Rome, well it is minimal.........the percent of male slaves that left offspring in Rome is very minimal, while female slaves left a greater legacy on the genetic makeup of the Romans.

In regards to colonies.......the term means a minimal of actual Romans comprised of the percentage of the populace............the genetic legacy of these Roman colonies is minimal. A colony would not represent IMO more than 10% of Romans over the local populace. How many Romans do you think there where? 
To even become a Roman was a minimum wait of 25 years..............most citizens did not even have a chance for their Roman citizenship application because they died before hand.

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## Drac II

> None is debating the high number of servants here. The matter is their ethnic origin. The user Drac keeps selectively quoting few historians from the 19th century/early 20th century, who assumed that half of Italy was repopulated by Syrians just because they found some tombs in the city of Rome with hellenized semitic names like Luke, Paul, Mattew, John,....He really thinks that millions of such semites were all Greek speaking and left not a single inscription in their middle eastern language anywhere in Italy. His main evidence is Juvenal's satyrical works. Hahahaha. Could you believe it?


False, I quote from historians from all over the 19th to 21st century span of time. It is not like opinions on this subject have changed too much among the majority of historians in all this time. On many points most of them still agree with their predecessors.

You have already seen how common Hellenized names were among Near Easterners, and not from a "19th century source" (which they also knew about already) but straight from a 21st century one. 

Keep thinking it is only Juvenal. He is just one of the ancient writers to make comments on the topics of slaves and foreigners which allow historians get a good idea of what was going on at the time.

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## Drac II

By the way, the point of all this is not to disparage Italians, in fact there is nothing "bad" about any of the things being said about this part of Italy's history, but actually to show Angela's convenient double-standards and semi-hidden agendas, as explained in a previous post in this thread. Her point all throughout being that we must remain very open minded about anything that is published about "Moors" and their supposed impact on medieval Iberia and Sicily, despite the fact that historians specializing on the subject have estimated the numbers of these foreign Muslim invaders to be rather low, but at the same time we must conveniently and paradoxically dismiss anything that even remotely suggests anything that could have to do with the quite larger numbers of slaves and free foreigners in Roman Italy, who hardly must have left anything but a trace of influence. For those of you who have a hard time "reading between the lines" or paying attention to details, just look for example at how very quickly she tried to dismiss the admixture estimates of this study that point to Roman times in the case of North and Central Italy; any study that even as much as suggests this is summarily dismissed or found full of faults, while just about any fishy paper making claims about "Moors" in Iberia or Sicily is very possible and we all must remain very open minded. She knows very well what this is all about, she's been trying to pull this for quite a while, but of course as usual she pretends she doesn't really know what it's all about.

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## Sile

> False, I quote from historians from all over the 19th to 21st century span of time. It is not like opinions on this subject have changed too much among the majority of historians in all this time. On many points most of them still agree with their predecessors.
> 
> You have already seen how common Hellenized names were among Near Easterners, and not from a "19th century source" (which they also knew about already) but straight from a 21st century one. 
> 
> Keep thinking it is only Juvenal. He is just one of the ancient writers to make comments on the topics of slaves and foreigners which allow historians get a good idea of what was going on at the time.


what is a near - easterners ?

Linguists state Hattian and Hurrian was adapted and used by the Hittites ~1700BC , it is nothing except only indo-european. It is clearly stated as *not being from the semitic language* tree.
With this knowledge, then the hatti and hurrians are also clearly a non-semitic people mostly likely from the southern Caucasus area.
There are over 50 volumes of hittite script which have been studied in respect to language.

Are south -caucasus people near -easterners?

I doubt with this hittite knowledge , the percent of Anatolia being near-easterner is very remote

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## Angela

“Owing to the limited time-depth of the Roman historiographical tradition, specific references to wartime enslavement are rare until the beginning of the third century BC: the true extent of the alleged mass enslavement ofthe inhabitants of Veii in 396 BC remains unknowable."

To continue:
Third Samnite War (297-293 BC)-58,000-77,000 individuals. (Once again, for those unfamiliar with the period, the Samnites were fellow inhabitants of the Italic peninsula.)

First Punic War (263-241 BC) 100,000 slaves. 
http://www.kirkwood.k12.mo.us/parent...unic%20War.jpg

Acragas in Sicily (261 BC)-the sack and enslavement of the entire surviving population of one of the largest Greek cities in the western Mediterranean

Second Punic War (218-202 BC)-over 100,000. According to the poster Drac, there were very few actual Carthaginians in Spain, so if we follow his logic, the soldiers from Spain who would have been enslaved would primarily have been Iberians. I’m not so sr about that, but certainly when we get to the battles which were fought in France and Italy, most of the combatants would have been allied tribes from those areas, including my own Celt-Ligurians, who seem to have made a habit of choosing the losing side. The battles in southern Italy also often involved Greek city states who made the wrong choice, with the predictable consequences. 
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c8/Second_Punic_War_full-en.svg/2000px-Second_Punic_War_full-en.svg.png 

Celt-Ligurians (230-14 BC) 40,000

Celts at Telamon (225 BC) 40,000 Dead, 10,000 Enslaved

Epirus (between Albania and Greece-167 BC-150,000 captives

Macedonians (140 BC) Unknown numbers enslaved during the Macedonian Wars

Seleucid Empire in Near East (100-63 BC) Unknown numbers of slaves
Cimbri and Teutones (102-101 BC) 60,000 and 90,000.

Athens, Corinth-Unknown Numbers.

The “Gladitorial Wars” of Spartacus, commonly known as a slave revolt, were fought mostly by Thracian and Celtic gladiators, many of the latter presumably from Gallia Cisalpina, since this was before the major engagements in Gallia Transalpina. 6,000 of the rebels were reputedly crucified along the Appian Way, with the remainder re-enslaved.

Gallic Wars (58 BC to 50 BC)-this was the mother lode, up to ONE MILLION slaves, and thus the largest single recorded group by far. 

Dacians (AD 105) 500,000

Jewish Wars 97,000

Parthians (198 AD) 100,000

I haven't given total numbers for some groups like the Germanic tribes, the Britons, the Iberians, because I'm not aware of reliable sources for them, but we know that the flow would have been there as the result of the wars of conquest fought on or near their territories.

Now, do I believe that these figures are rock solid? No, I don’t. I have about the same skepticism about them as I do about the figures for the total number of slaves. The point is that contrary to the assertions of our resident Spanish Nordicist, it should be clear that Rome was an equal opportunity enslaver. There is no indication whatsoever that the majority of slaves were sourced from the Near East or North Africa. It is quite the contrary in fact if you add up the numbers. 

Nor have I ever seen anything in any volume on the history of the period or specifically on the history of slavery in the period to indicate that slaves from the Near East made their way to Italia in disproportionate numbers at the expense of Gauls or Germans or Dacians/Thracians or Greeks. The historian I cited upthread nicely takes care of all the nonsense theories about why the slaves so often had Greek names. Obviously, as we barely see a Gallic or German or Dacian or British name among the slaves, the slaves from these areas must have been given Roman or, more often, Greek names. 

Now, conquest was not the only source of slaves, and the reason partly has to do with the lack of longevity among them. 

(To be continued)

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## Angela

Scholars are hard pressed to get accurate data for the fertility of slaves both within slavery and after manumission. 

The following is generally accepted among historians of the period:

"Owing to heavy disease loads, life was short even in the top echelons of Roman society. For that reason alone, slaves need not have lived significantly shorter lives simply because of the hazards inherent their legal status. However, the use of slaves in particularly unhealthy rural locales and especially their disproportionate concentration in large and therefore infection-rich cities may well have lowered their overall mean life expectancy even further, thereby impeding natural reproduction at or near replacement level."

Also, " Several factors militated against slave reproduction at or near replacement level: imbalanced sex ratios if and when they persisted; higher mortality in cities and mines and on malarial estates; family break-ups through sale or inheritance; and the manumission of slave women of childbearing age.”

Indeed, while the average life expectancy of the poor in the empire was, according to certain scholars from 20-30 years, that of slaves was under 20. Miners, galley slaves, and men being worked to death under insalubrious conditions in latifundia weren't procreating and keeping slave numbers stable. Only house slaves and commercial slaves would have fared better, but most of them were living in crowded urban environments and would have been subject to the periodic outbreaks of disease that entailed.

For the viewpoint of another respected historian, we have John Madden:
http://www.ucd.ie/cai/classics-irela.../Madden96.html
"However, on closer analysis, this reasoning is flawed. True, some of the more fortunate city slaves and certain rural ones as well enjoyed a secure home life. And undoubtedly these together with the many female slaves who had children by their masters (or other free men) will have contributed considerably to the number of new slaves entering the system each year. Nevertheless, the belief that the _total_ slave-body was more or less self-propagating is unsound. There are a number of reasons for this.

"1. First of all it is clear that males were in the majority where work was difficult and weighty - in building, in mining, in numerous types of industry, in a wide variety of services such as loading and unloading at docks, portage, transportation, etc. In agriculture also male slaves would have been more in demand. Small landowners would have to be content with whatever slaves were available irrespective of their sex, while large landowners would undoubtedly have needed some female slaves e.g. for weaving, cloth making, cooking. However, it is clear from passages in Varro and Columella, where the question of which of the more reliable agricultural slaves should be allowed a female companion is treated, that permission for such a partner was a special concession. Varro recommended that _praefecti_ ['overseers'], as an incentive to their faithfulness, should be granted female slaves with whom they could have children, while lesser slaves should have to do with less (_Rust_. 1.17.5,7). In Columella, on the other hand, it is the _vilicus_ ['steward'] who should be given a female partner (_Rust_. 1.8.4). In the _ergastula -_ the private prisons belonging to many Roman farms where slaves were forced to work in fetters - the inmates would have been very largely male. It is evident from this that among agricultural slaves males surely outnumbered females.

When we turn to domestic staff the evidence suggests that there too male slaves were more numerous. S. Treggiari in her analysis of the 79 members of the city household staff of Livia has noted that 77% were male (the percentage was similar among freedpersons and slaves). This is a very revealing figure since we would expect a _domina_ to have a higher number of female staff than a _dominus_. And in her study of the city _familiae_ of the Statilii and the Volusii Treggiari has shown that about 66% of the freedpersons and slaves were male, while of the thirty child slaves whose names were inscribed on the tombs of these two families 80% at a minimum were male. "

So, contrary to an assertion made upthread, the statements of Razib Khan in his comments about this paper are in total accord with the pronouncements of recognized authorities and it is those who assert the contrary who are obviously posting unsupported opinions motivated by repugnant world views.

According to a recognized specialist in this field, " I allow for a reproductive shortfall of up to 50% in late Republican Italy, at a time when the slave population was greatly expanding and dynamically unstable." 

Note that this is at a time when military conquests were increasing the number of slaves. 


So, how was the deficit at least partly made up? 

Walter Scheidel makes short shrift of the role of pirates in supplying slaves. You may wish to read his explanations on page ten of his work:
https://www.princeton.edu/~pswpc/pdf...del/050704.pdf

Other sources included those enslaved as the result of conviction of crimes, among which were avoiding the census and the draft, freedwomen cohabiting with slaves, and ungrateful freedmen. Foundlings were sometimes enslaved, and poor parents sometimes sold either themselves or their children or both into slavery, and increasingly as time went on, but it's impossible to get completely accurate numbers for this local source of slaves.

"It is unlikely that Roman fathers ever had a formal right to sell their children; in classical law, family members could not be sold into slavery or pawned. As in the case of enslaved foundlings, the state favored a pragmatic compromise position: the sale of minors did not affect their status and was technically void; therefore, redemption remained possible, with or sometimes without compensation. This focus on redemption accounts for prohibitions of the sale of such slaves overseas.
30
As a result, there were no clear boundaries between sale, pawning, and lease: given the formal inviolability of free status, ‘sale’ might merely amount to an extended lease of minors in times of hardship. "

 
Bondage for debt, which could be for life given the life expectancy of the average slave, also increased as time went on and the Empire came under more stress. 

Some of the short fall was made up because slave trading was conducted with peripheral areas once the maximum extent of the empire had been reached and no new conquests were filling the slave marts.

“The Black Sea region and the Caucasus had been well established as a major source of slaves since the archaic Greek period (see Chapter 6), and this tradition continued into late antiquity. Together with free Germany, that northeastern periphery must have accounted for most imports once the Roman empire had reached its maximum extension. Black slaves from as far away as Somalia and the occasional import from India made for comparatively rare but consequently high-prestige retainers.”

It should no longer need to be repeated that these slaves would have gone to wealthy estates in the provinces as well as Italia, whether the estates were owned by Italic Romans or Gallic Romans etc. The enslavement of foundlings, debtors etc. would have been the enslavement of locals.

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## Angela

Now, let's turn to the flow of genetic material from the slave population into the larger surrounding community anywhere in the Empire, which is the preoccupation of one of our posters. It is once again difficult to get precise numbers. In the case of the manumission of female slaves, for example, it's unclear whether slave women of child bearing age could be manumitted. The same author points out that: 


"According to the Egyptian census returns, women were not normally manumitted prior to menopause, a custom that ensured that all their offspring remained the property of their owners. The price edict of AD 301 also indicates that a premium was placed on the reproductive capabilities of female slaves. By contrast, inscriptions from Italy and the western provinces frequently commemorate young and fecund freedwomen. Once again, we lack the means to decide whether we are dealing with genuine geographical variation or merely distorting recording practices that (in 

the latter case) gave undue prominence to the experience of privileged and otherwise unrepresentative slave women. "

 
There is also the fact that a certain number of male slaves were castrated. This practice wasn't outlawed until the end of the first century, but the trade continued even after that. Many of the most wealthy and successful freedmen who surrounded the Emperors were, in fact, eunuchs. 

Over and beyond that, even favored male slaves did not normally receive their manumission until they had outlived their usefulness.

Of course, there were especially favored young and nubile male and female slaves who were manumitted in time to marry into the surrounding community. That is known from inscriptions of such freedmen who acquired enough property to leave behind funerary artifacts.

The question is how much gene flow did that entail? Some, certainly, but how much? Without some ancient dna I don't see how we can get anywhere near precise figures. Even with it, there will no doubt be difficulties.

What is without a doubt is that contrary to the assertion of one of our posters there is nothing to indicate that this gene flow would have been disproportionately from Near Eastern, or even less, North African slaves. Quite the contrary, in fact, given the figures for the slaves from Gaul alone. Nor was there an embargo on traders from Germania, and Britannia, and Gaul, and Iberia. They were all Roman citizens after a certain point and free to travel and work in Rome. Only the most biased and agenda driven reasoning would harp on such denizens of Rome coming from the Near East, not that they too didn't exist, of course. 

Also, there is the question of the "Italian cline". What was first postulated by this poster was that the "excess" CHG or "southern" ancestry in southern Italians and Sicilians, and even in Tuscans, was because of ancestry from the Near East during the time of the Roman Empire. In the Tuscans it's also purported to be from a massive invasion from Asia Minor.

I will give the Tuscans short shrift. Their admixture "components" are remarkably similar to those of the people of Albania, Kosovo, and the very northwestern parts of Greece. I'm not aware of those areas having been on the receiving end of a mass invasion from Lydia in Anatolia or being the epicenter of slavery from the Levant. 

That there might have been an elite migration from the Aegean/northwest coastal Anatolia is certainly plausible. Given the PCA that was recently published of elite "Etruscans" showing them plotting with Southern Europeans, and not that far from modern Tuscans, I doubt anything more than that took place, but should the ancient dna prove that is the case, it is perfectly fine with me. I just want to be related to them even if that is unlikely. Their precise genetic make-up is immaterial to me. I just love their culture, and in additio I've been clambering over their remains since my father took me to visit them as a child. 

Let us now try to get a handle on how much "excess" we're talking about for southern Italy compared to a place like Greece or Spain, for that matter. I see no need to go over the data for Greece. The level for even mainland Greece for CHG,* after the impact of the Slavic invasions* is roughly equal to that of southern Italy, never mind central and northern Italy, and the levels in the Balkans aren't much lower. I have posted the data before or people can access the spreadsheets for the various calculators.

Or, we can turn to Spain. The Lazaridis/Haak statistics obviously couldn't tell the difference between Anatolian Neolithic genes and CHG genes, and lumped them all in together as EEF, which is understandable as they are indeed similar. The Spanish except for Pais Vasco (as I already pointed out in another thread that information can be found in the supplement) come in at 81%. The Sicilians at 90%. Even if you take this at face value, does 8 or 9% make a difference as to whether you can be in the European club? Are the Finns going to be disqualified too? Their 8+% admixture isn't even "Caucasoid". Speaking of that, given that Near Easterners are indeed "Caucasoid", should the pertinent statistic for inclusion or exclusion, in addition to Siberian and East Asian be "SSA" percentages? I think all of Spain, not just southern Italy and Sicily might be in trouble on that one. 

Do you see how ridiculous this quickly becomes? That's what makes me angry and causes me to respond even when the comments are obviously nonsensical. That, and the fact that dishonesty and lack of integrity are second only to cruelty in my personal list of detested traits. 

See: 

Attachment 7568

The major difference between Spaniards and Sicilians is because of a difference in the WHG number. That Iberian Neolithics had some extra WHG compared even to Remedello has been apparent for some time. Are we supposed to care?

Perhaps the most persuasive data comes from IBD analyses. I have made reference to Ralph and Coop before. Read it. They find no evidence of substantial gene flow into Italian populations after about 400 BC, which would let the Celts/Gauls and the Greeks in under the wire, but would exclude both slaves from later periods of the Empire and the Germanic invaders. Now, this was based on one set of data, and they might consider anything under 10% insignificant, but those are their findings.

See: 
http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology...l.pbio.1001555

Razib Khan also has all the pertinent data, and has done an analysis in comparison to Levantines (Syria) in particular and sees no "recent" as in post Neolithic gene flow. He does see _some_ gene flow from North Africa, but that makes sense given the Moorish occupation. The male uniparental markers likely to hail from there are under 7%, however. Dienekes found much the same in his IBD runs with Near Eastern and southern European populations. 

Of course, analyses based on modern populations can only take us so far. What we need is a lot of ancient dna. I am totally open to whatever the ancient dna will show. Whatever our "mix", it's obviously the best. :)

Given these facts, I'm at a loss as to the reason why this poster is obsessed with making claims that the Italian genetic signature is due overwhelmingly to some non-existent disproportionality in the slave numbers from the Near East versus Europe during the period of the Empire. Well, I'm not actually at a loss. Anyone who has read his thousands of posts here knows that it is part of the longstanding "war" between Spanish and Italian Nordicists, skin heads, call them what you will, over who is least "southern". To say I find it disgusting is an understatement.

As to said poster's attempts at character assassination, I have no fears. His preoccupations and motivations are clear to anyone who has read his thousands of posts here on this site. I'm sure they can be found elsewhere as well, but since I'm not an habitue of those sites, I can't tell you what name he hides behind there. A word to those who would attempt to go there: if, like me, you don't have very sophisticated blocking programs, your computer will be infested with malware within a minute. My advice would be to follow my lead and not go there; it's not worth it. 

I have made all these points before, and cited the relevant sources before. To say that I resent having to redo all this work because someone chooses to ignore the evidence time after time is an understatement. In the future, I will simply post a link to this thread. Any attempt to dispute this data without relevant contrary data will be summarily dealt with as an attempt to mislead other posters. 

Now until after Christmas I'm out. Some of us do have a life outside of population genetics.

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## Drac II

> what is a near - easterners ?
> 
> Linguists state Hattian and Hurrian was adapted and used by the Hittites ~1700BC , it is nothing except only indo-european. It is clearly stated as *not being from the semitic language* tree.
> With this knowledge, then the hatti and hurrians are also clearly a non-semitic people mostly likely from the southern Caucasus area.
> There are over 50 volumes of hittite script which have been studied in respect to language.
> 
> Are south -caucasus people near -easterners?
> 
> I doubt with this hittite knowledge , the percent of Anatolia being near-easterner is very remote


Near Easterner means anyone coming from the Near East, irrespective of ethnolinguistic affiliation:

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## Drac II

We can gather some information from ancient BC sources about the numbers and place of origin of some slaves back then:


https://books.google.com/books?id=7h...rs.%22&f=false

177 BC 5,632 Istrians

167 BC 150,000 Epeirotes (Greeks)

146 BC 55,000 Carthaginians

142 BC 9,500 Iberians

101 BC 60,000 Cimbri (Celts or Germanics)

The slave revolts that started before Spartacus included slaves from all over the empire that were in Italy at the time. In fact, the first of such revolts was started by slaves in Sicily, their leader being a Syrian slave named Eunus. These wars indeed ended up in a lot of slaves getting killed due to their uprisings against the Romans. But these are older events. We are talking about the later day slavery of the times of Nero, the Antonines and the centuries AD. As is shown by a bunch of historians already referred to, the slaves and free foreigners of these later AD times came predominantly from the East. Literary sources pointing to this are not "gossip" or whatever is it that our resident Italian Nordicist wants to dismiss it with, but statements by people who were actually there and saw what was going on with their own eyes. When authors like Martial, Juvenal, Petronius, Umbricius, etc. mention slaves and foreigners in Rome they usually mention people from Africa and the Near East, not Gauls or Germanics. These last ones are more rarely mentioned. This is not "gossip" but the Rome these fellows saw with their own eyes and wrote about. Curiously and ironically enough, a good number of "Roman" writers at these times were themselves non-Romans, and some of them were acting like they were more Roman than the Romans themselves and disparaging foreigners. Once again pointing at how common the non-Roman population had become in Rome itself. But since Angela can't argue against eye-witnesses who were actually there, she tries to reduce this to "gossip", as if they were talking from hearsay. The topic of the "corruption" of Roman society was in fact commonly attributed to the large influx of slaves and foreigners coming from the Eastern parts of the empire, as Cicero's grandfather already put it:

https://books.google.com/books?id=SM...ts.%22&f=false

"There was a widespread belief that traditional values were being undermined by foreign immigrants. The decadence that was perceived to permeate the Republic was attributed largely to slippery and corrupt Greeks and Asiatics who had come to Rome from the hellenized Orient. Cicero's paternal grandfather, for one, would have nothing to do with them and deplored falling standards of Roman morality. "Our people are like Syrian slaves: the better they speak Greek, the more shiftless they are."


The historian I cited in posts #164 & #155 takes care of the nonsense that Near Easterners did not have Hellenized names or did not know Greek. Even in one of Angela's very own sources the author implies that besides "fashion" the reason why so many slaves had Greek names was because many of them came from the Hellenized East:

"Greek names dominate the record not just because many slaves came from the Hellenistic East, but also because they were fashionable."

Notice the "not just" part. Scheidel is obviously not dismissing the important contribution of the many Hellenized slaves to the total number of Greek names among Rome's slaves.

People in those times often died at earlier ages, this is true even of free people, as Angela's own sources show, so it also applies to slaves. But so? Does this mean we must disregard everyone's role in the demographics of those times just because of lower life expectancy? Don't think so. By the way, we can easily apply the same "logic" to the Middle Ages and its also lower life expectancy. So say bye-bye to any alleged "Moorish influence". Sure, them "Moors" were also dropping like flies because of war, disease and famine, so forget about them having had any significant influence either.

Furthermore, even one of her own sources mentions manumission as a key factor in reducing the slave reproduction rate:

"Manumission was probably a more important determinant of attrition and thus slave fertility. The age-specific incidence of manumission of female slaves is of pivotal importance....
Several factors militated against slave reproduction at or near replacement level:imbalanced sex ratios if and when they persisted; higher mortality in cities and mines and onmalarial estates; family break-ups through sale or inheritance; and the manumission of slave women of childbearing age."

In fact, mortality rate is only one reason and not one that Scheidel gives the highest importance. As for the important factor of manumission, demographically speaking these foreigners were still there, but now were no longer slaves.This does not mean that the foreigners in question "disappeared" or died off, they simply became freedmen. So contrary to what Angela pretends, this in fact agrees with what I and a whole bunch of historians have said, not Razib Khan's rather simplistic and naive argument about most slaves simply dying off in the big cities. Manumission played a very important part.


The Late Republic was around 147–30 BC. Slavery continued for many more centuries after that. Not to say anything of immigration from free foreigners.


From Angela's own source we can deduce that the numbers of slaves imported into Italy were larger than those imported elsewhere, as common sense dictates, Italy being the center of the empire and thus demanding more slaves from other areas, not the other way around. Something she herself had to finally "sort of" admit (after countless previous denials) as very likely in post #165 of this thread. 


The IBD conclusions of Ralph & Coop's paper are well known to the authors of the paper that is the subject of this thread, yet it did not stop them one bit from estimating the age of North African, Middle Eastern and North European DNA in North Italy to around Roman times, and in Central Italy to around a bit before Etruscan times to Roman times. For Southern Italy their estimate gave medieval results. Notice how Angela tries to dismiss these results very quickly, particularly when it concerns Central Italy (Tuscany is located there.) The results are not to her satisfaction, she wants more ancient and prehistoric links. Why? Because she knows very well the arguments that Nordicists use against Southern Europeans having more "recent" and therefore "less white" ancestry (again, this "less whiteness" thing is just a bogus claim that they invented and did not get from legitimate historians and anthropologists.) She wants to avoid Italy from being put in the same bag. So the party line is basically "if you want recent ancestry look at the Iberians and Sicilians, they have some from the medieval Moors, but in continental Italy we are truly prehistoric in origin and haven't changed in thousands of years, just like you". Once again, nevermind the paradox that the numbers of slaves and immigrants in Roman times were quite larger than those of the Muslim foreigners anywhere in Europe in the Middle Ages. I have already posted the estimates from several historians for Arabs/Berbers in Iberia in other threads, they range from under 10% to less than 5% of the total population of Alandalus or the peninsula. The estimates one can see for slaves and foreigners from historians specializing in Roman Italy are almost always larger. In Angela's very own source, the estimate for the slaves alone was around 15-25% of the population, and other higher figures can be provided from other historians. Example:

https://books.google.com/books?id=7h...rs.%22&f=false

"Nevertheless, it has been estimated that at the end of the first century BC the body of slaves in Italy amounted to between two and three million people out of a total of six to seven-and-a-half million (including Gallia Cisalpina), or roughly one-third of the population"

1/3 = 33%

Angela very arbitrarily subordinates history to genetics when it is convenient for her agenda. But when genetics seemingly agrees with the historical record and points to Roman times as the source of genetic influx, then she turns the tables and subordinates genetics to her version of "history". Since the estimates that point to Roman times are not to her liking, then she conjures up excuses about slaves (never mind manumission and all the free foreign citizens) easily going the way of dodo-bird and therefore the genetic results are "bad" and must be dismissed. Her games are very easy to perceive for any observant person who has been reading her posts on this subject for a long time. That is the same reason why she also dismissed other papers trying to asses "recent" DNA in Europe. The results for Italy did not satisfy her expectations. They also point to Roman or medieval times. Not good. What will those Nordicists think of Italians? They will also find support for their claims in genetics. Not good. This is a "privilege" that Angela only wants to reserve for Iberians and Sicilians. Notice that when a vague speculative paper about Iberians comes around that offers a wide range of "possibilities" that could go from ancient times to immigrants from the Americas, like that "African" mtDNA paper, she sings its praises, inflates its supposed importance, and arbitrarily declares that the "Moors" must have had something to do with it. The way she treats papers on Italy and Iberia are diametrically opposed. When it comes to Italy, if the results are not to her liking, like those of the present paper, and there is any suggestion whatsoever that it might have to do with Roman times, she finds a myriad of obstacles and faults. When it comes to Iberia, on the other hand, even the faintest suggestion that it has something to do with "Moors" is quickly approved and given all credibility in the world. Same old, same old. Angela hasn't changed her tune in years. I am very familiar with this song and dance. 


Predictably, Angela conjures up Lazaridis/Haak et al. and then tries to drop the "SSA" thingy on Spain, one of her favorite topics. Never mind the fact that the authors of that paper themselves question their own results in this matter, offering possible explanations, like using larger sample size. I can also conjure up the results of Busby et al., a paper that Angela most certainly does not like and dismisses any way she can, and point out how in their admixture run results the largest West African component was found among Tuscans. Was it sample size too? Maybe. They did use more Tuscan samples than of any other European group. 


Character assassination? This coming from the very person who goes around gratuitously accusing those she does not like of being "Nazis", "racists", "Nordicists", etc.


Razib Khan is a blogger and columnist, not a geneticist who has actually published anything in any journals. And some of his arguments are not as good as he thinks they are. Plus he is well known to have very questionable and controversial agendas and affiliations, that's why he was fired from the New York Times:

http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/...ib-khan-204287

So it does not surprise me that our resident Italian Nordicist seems to like him so much.

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## Hauteville

The last phoenician survivors of Carthage after the third punic war were sold as slaves throughout the Mediterranean not deported in Latium. It's a fact in the roman chronicles.

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## Vukodav

> The last phoenician survivors of Carthage after the third punic war were sold as slaves throughout the Mediterranean not deported in Latium. It's a fact in the roman chronicles.


He is a lost case: he claims that slaves in Rome were all Levantines, because there are brief mentions of "Hellenized" slaves in 3 or 4 satyrial or other gossip works, but totally forget that Caesar alone captured nearly a million of Celto Germanic slaves and moved them to Italy. Selective quoting as usualy. Not to mention the countless of Germanic, Briton and other Northern Euros who were captured in centuries of constant warfare.Anyway we are still waiting the long list of middle eastern inscriptions in Italy.

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## Drac II

> He is a lost case: he claims that slaves in Rome were all Levantines, because there are brief mentions of "Hellenized" slaves in 3 or 4 satyrial or other gossip works, but totally forget that Caesar alone captured nearly a million of Celto Germanic slaves and moved them to Italy. Selective quoting as usualy. Not to mention the countless of Germanic, Briton and other Northern Euros who were captured in centuries of constant warfare.Anyway we are still waiting the long list of middle eastern inscriptions in Italy.


Talking about real lost causes: We are all still waiting for proof of your gratuitous assertion that practically no Near Easterners knew Greek or have Greek names. Getting debunked in public must be very frustrating, but you should get better informed before making claims. 

The work of satirists are not "gossip" and actually a good source, they criticized the society in which they lived. The fact that they hardly ever mention slaves from north of the Alps is very telling. Had they been very common during those times, we see no reason why they shouldn't have been mentioned more often. These guys loved to make comments, often sarcastic or disparaging, about slaves and foreigners.

The claim that Caesar took 1 million slaves from Gaul was made by Plutarch, who was not Roman but Greek and also lived more than a century after the facts. Needless to say, the figure is obviously exaggerated even for Roman standards. One might give credit to several thousands of captured and enslaved people in those times at any given campaign, like the figures cited in one of the above posts, but a million is absurd. Velleius Paterculus, a Roman who lived closer to Caesar's times, gives a figure closer to 400,000 Gauls being captured. A bit more believable, but still probably somewhat exaggerated. On the other hand, Cato the Younger, a contemporary of Caesar, only seems to mention that 300,000 Germans were killed. Canfora gives such figures and specifically says that the ones given by Plutarch are devoid of criticism:

https://books.google.com/books?id=Ze...ism%22&f=false

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## Pax Augusta

> Talking about real lost causes:


Talking about real lost causes you personally have contributed much to derail this thread about a population genetic study and turn it into the usual and unnecessary anthro-wars. 

I firmly believe that Eupedia should remain different.

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## Sile

> Talking about real lost causes you personally have contributed much to derail this thread about a population genetic study and turn it into the usual and unnecessary anthro-wars. 
> 
> I firmly believe that Eupedia should remain different.


You must admit this was a study purely for western Italy and the western med area..............its goal, I am unsure...........but ancient etruscan and ligurian association with the south of Italy and Sardinia seems to be its core

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## Drac II

> Talking about real lost causes you, Drac II, have contributed much to derail this thread and turn it into the usual and unnecessary anthro-wars. 
> 
> I firmly believe that Eupedia should remain different.


Nobody "derailed" anything since the subject matter being discussed appertains to the paper that is the subject of this thread, and the person who started the arguments (and the rude responses; see post #144) was actually Angela, first when she attempted to make it look as if the genetics of the study was "bad" just because it suggested admixture dates she does not like (see first pages), and then when she started to bring up Iberians and Africans while she was exchanging posts with the supposed Roman history professor (see post #141.) Typical Angela tactics. If the topic of Italian genetics is getting dangerously close to making inferences she does not like, bring up those pesky Iberians and Africans.

Indeed, it should be different, but as long as some people want to push blatant double standards and agendas, unfortunately not exactly friendly exchanges like this will continue to happen.

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## Pax Augusta

> You must admit this was a study purely for western Italy and the western med area..............its goal, I am unsure...........but ancient etruscan and ligurian association with the south of Italy and Sardinia seems to be its core


Sile, I agree with you. The lack of samples from eastern Italy (Veneto, Friuli-Venezia-Giulia, Trentino-Alto Adige, Marche, Abruzzi, Apulia) in this study makes it unfinished, absolutely Ferrara isn't enough to cover all east Italy.

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## Vukodav

> Talking about real lost causes: We are all still waiting for proof of your gratuitous assertion that practically no Near Easterners knew Greek or have Greek names. Getting debunked in public must be very frustrating, but you should get better informed before making claims. The work of satirists are not "gossip" and actually a good source, they criticized the society in which they lived. The fact that they hardly ever mention slaves from north of the Alps is very telling. Had they been very common during those times, we see no reason why they shouldn't have been mentioned more often. These guys loved to make comments, often sarcastic or disparaging, about slaves and foreigners.The claim that Caesar took 1 million slaves from Gaul was made by Plutarch, who was not Roman but Greek and also lived more than a century after the facts. Needless to say, the figure is obviously exaggerated even for Roman standards. One might give credit to several thousands of captured and enslaved people in those times at any given campaign, like the figures cited in one of the above posts, but a million is absurd. Velleius Paterculus, a Roman who lived closer to Caesar's times, gives a figure closer to 400,000 Gauls being captured. A bit more believable, but still probably somewhat exaggerated. On the other hand, Cato the Younger, a contemporary of Caesar, only seems to mention that 300,000 Germans were killed. Canfora gives such figures and specifically says that the ones given by Plutarch are devoid of criticism:https://books.google.com/books?id=Ze...ism%22&f=false


Still way less ridicolous than people like you who claim that these millions of Near Easterners haven't left a single inscription in their own languages, but left plenty of them written in Greek, and that everyone with such name like Luke or Thomas was an Hellenized Arab, because Juvenal in his satires says so in few brief passages, and not some native who had adopted Christiany or some other Eastern Cult. After all millions of North Europeans with Hellenized Levantine names are officially Christians.

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## Vukodav

LoL between 400.000 to one Million of captured Gauls by Caesar alone and settled in Italy, plus only God knows how many Germans, Aquitanians, Belgians, Britons,... etc plus 150.000 Cimbri and Teutoni seized by Marius, 25.000 Salassi, 32.000 Gauls between 225 and 222, 500.000 Dacians seized by Thraian,... should I continue?

https://books.google.it/books?id=A9m...s+slaves&hl=it

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## moore2moore

We're going back and forth quite a bit. It's not that productive.

First, it is a mistake to take the statistics, or, for that matter, many statements of ancient historians as gospel. A well-known example is the Persian force at the Battle of Thermopylae. It wasn't a million. It was large, but nowhere near one million. There is a lot of legend in ancient sources.

The entire population of Gaul at the time of Caesar was ~1 million. The notion that he took 400,000 slaves must be greeted with some skepticism.

I want people to understand that ancient mass movements of people were not possible like they are in the Jet Age, or even as frequent as they were during the Germanic upheavals at the dawn of the "Dark Ages." A rather standard ancient warship, the quadrireme, carried about 75 people, 100 if packed.

(This is why I laugh at notions of the Anatolian--->Etruscan mass migration proffered by Herodotus, as more legend than fact. A "starving" inland nation of, say, 200,000 travels to coastal Anatolia, in the hostile territory of their neighbors, and cuts down enough trees, and builds 2000 ships?)

Always keep in mind the logistics. If they sound hard to believe, they are.

Caesar took 400,000 Gaulish slaves? How were they transported to Rome? Where are the mass graves from the tens of thousands who must have died en route? 

Surely some went to places other than Italy. Why is there no Gallic genetic signature in North Africa? It had been solidly Roman by the time of Caesar, for about ~200 years (the age of our country).

Think it through. Healthy skepticism with logic are both your friends.

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## Vukodav

No, the Roman Republic controlled only Coastal Northern Tunisia, not the whole North Africa, by the time of Caesar, and that only after the third punic war (146 BC), so for less than one century. In fact North Africa was repopulated by Arabs and Black slaves in the last 1000 years, so the original Romanized Berber population is now completely mixed.

Those estimates are not totally correct and but are the only solid evidences we have.

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## Drac II

> We're going back and forth quite a bit. It's not that productive.
> 
> First, it is a mistake to take the statistics, or, for that matter, many statements of ancient historians as gospel. A well-known example is the Persian force at the Battle of Thermopylae. It wasn't a million. It was large, but nowhere near one million. There is a lot of legend in ancient sources.
> 
> The entire population of Gaul at the time of Caesar was ~1 million. The notion that he took 400,000 slaves must be greeted with some skepticism.
> 
> I want people to understand that ancient mass movements of people were not possible like they are in the Jet Age, or even as frequent as they were during the Germanic upheavals at the dawn of the "Dark Ages." A rather standard ancient warship, the quadrireme, carried about 75 people, 100 if packed.
> 
> (This is why I laugh at notions of the Anatolian--->Etruscan mass migration proffered by Herodotus, as more legend than fact. A "starving" inland nation of, say, 200,000 travels to coastal Anatolia, in the hostile territory of their neighbors, and cuts down enough trees, and builds 2000 ships?)
> ...


Though Velleius Paterculus' 400,000 figure still seems exaggerated, it still is way more believable than Plutarch's absurd 1 million captives claim. 

The Anatolian origin of Etruscans, or at least of some of them, is not any impossibility at all, but not in the migration proportions used in your example.

The reason why we should not expect North Africa to show much "Gallic" or any other such signatures is simply because there weren't that many people from those areas brought there. The Romans themselves were a minority in the conquered territories, and North Africa was one more of their labor supplies, not the other way around. Whenever possible, empires have relied on local labor. Simple logistics and economics. It is cheaper and more expedient to rely on the conquered local population for a labor force than have to import it from other places far away.

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## Drac II

> LoL between 400.000 to one Million of captured Gauls by Caesar alone and settled in Italy, plus only God knows how many Germans, Aquitanians, Belgians, Britons,... etc plus 150.000 Cimbri and Teutoni seized by Marius, 25.000 Salassi, 32.000 Gauls between 225 and 222, 500.000 Dacians seized by Thraian,... should I continue?
> 
> https://books.google.it/books?id=A9m...s+slaves&hl=it


That source also gives similar reported figures for slaves from Africa and the Near East. And Plutarch's 1 million claim is hardly believable. It has no equivalent anywhere in the other reported figures.

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## Drac II

> Still way less ridicolous than people like you who claim that these millions of Near Easterners haven't left a single inscription in their own languages, but left plenty of them written in Greek, and that everyone with such name like Luke or Thomas was an Hellenized Arab, because Juvenal in his satires says so in few brief passages, and not some native who had adopted Christiany or some other Eastern Cult. After all millions of North Europeans with Hellenized Levantine names are officially Christians.


You already know why the majority of the Near Easterners that the Romans were in contact with at the time would have been Hellenized. Hellenization of the areas in question had been going on for centuries. Greek had even spread to some parts of Arabia, let alone the Near East. You also have seen how common the Greek language was associated by the Romans with people like Syrians.

It still does not answer the question of why Roman writers from around the last century BC and the coming centuries AD usually mention more slaves and foreigners from Greece, the Near East and Africa than they do from north of the Alps. Also doesn't answer the question of why the Roman paranoia with foreigners and their supposed "corrupting" influence on Roman society was concerned mostly with Greeks and Near Easterners. You would think that if people like Gauls and Germans were so common in Rome that they too would have been the target of Roman xenophobia. Yet they are not nearly as targeted. And it is not because the Romans somehow liked Gauls and Germans. Their writings usually speak of these peoples with contempt as barbarians.

Again, you are comparing modern naming practices of today, after Christianity has spread all over the world for centuries, with those of around 2000 years ago, when Christianity was not even around yet. Apples & oranges.

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## Vukodav

> That source also gives similar reported figures for slaves from Africa and the Near East. And Plutarch's 1 million claim is hardly believable. It has no equivalent anywhere in the other reported figures.


Ok 100.000 Jews, who were endogamic and did not mix with anyone, and 250.000 from the Punic wars, who included Celts, Iberians, Italics, Greeks etc... indeed the native Phoenician element among Carthaginians was a very tiny minority.

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## Vukodav

> You already know why the majority of the Near Easterners that the Romans were in contact with at the time would have been Hellenized. Hellenization of the areas in question had been going on for centuries. Greek had even spread to some parts of Arabia, let alone the Near East. You also have seen how common the Greek language was associated by the Romans with people like Syrians.It still does not answer the question of why Roman writers from around the last century BC and the coming centuries AD usually mention more slaves and foreigners from Greece, the Near East and Africa than they do from north of the Alps. Also doesn't answer the question of why the Roman paranoia with foreigners and their supposed "corrupting" influence on Roman society was concerned mostly with Greeks and Near Easterners. You would think that if people like Gauls and Germans were so common in Rome that they too would have been the target of Roman xenophobia. Yet they are not nearly as targeted. And it is not because the Romans somehow liked Gauls and Germans. Their writings usually speak of these peoples with contempt as barbarians.Again, you are comparing modern naming practices of today, after Christianity has spread all over the world for centuries, with those of around 2000 years ago, when Christianity was not even around yet. Apples & oranges.


I've posted hard evidence from historians that hundreds of thousands if not millions of native European slaves were settled in Italy, while you are just selective quoting satires and anecdotes. Plus your own source states that Levantines were bilingual in Greek and in their own native languages, yet you want me to believe that they managed to leave no inscripions in any middle eastern language anywhere in Italy, but only Greek ones?

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## Hauteville

Carthage is known to use mercenaries. The phoenician element among their army was low.

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## Drac II

> Ok 100.000 Jews, who were endogamic and did not mix with anyone, and 250.000 from the Punic wars, who included Celts, Iberians, Italics, Greeks etc... indeed the native Phoenician element among Carthaginians was a very tiny minority.


Also "a massive intake of slaves" from the Mithridatic wars. Also 100,000 Parthians. Then there's also the contributions of other means of obtaining slaves other than war captives, like commerce with the Eastern Mediterranean slave traders and "pirates". The Eastern parts of the empire were rife with them and had some of the most important slave markets, like those of Ephesus, Tyre, Chios, Thasos and Delos. 

Jewish slaves would not have the freedom to decide with whom not to mix until they regained their freedom. 

Almost all the figures given in the book are for the centuries BC, when the empire was expanding. Slavery continued all the way until the end of the empire. Once the empire stopped expanding (around Hadrian's times) Roman conquests no longer played an important role in the slave supply.

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## Drac II

> I've posted hard evidence from historians that hundreds of thousands if not millions of native European slaves were settled in Italy, while you are just selective quoting satires and anecdotes. Plus your own source states that Levantines were bilingual in Greek and in their own native languages, yet you want me to believe that they managed to leave no inscripions in any middle eastern language anywhere in Italy, but only Greek ones?


The same sources say that hundreds of thousands if not millions of native Near Easterners and North Africans were also brought to Italy. But those figures are mostly for the BC centuries, during Rome's expansion. 

Roman writers from the times of Nero, the Antonines, the Severans, etc., more often make references to slaves and foreigners from Africa, Greece and the Near East than from north of the Alps.

The source I cited clearly says that in entire areas of places like Syria Greek actually predominated. Notice that a totally Hellenized Syrian like Lucian did not write anything in any language other than Greek.

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## Vukodav

You are a liar. 100.000 captured endogamic Jews and 100.000 Persians from Ctesiphon don't add up to millions as you claim. Nothing compared to the nearly 2 millions of seized Dacians, Epirotes, Iberians. North Italians, Germans and Gauls in just five military campaigns. Your lame attempt to prove that millions of supposed Levantines only speak and wrote in Greek in Italy is making me laugh. Even your own source states that they were bilingual. Do you realize that you are going against your own source?

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## moore2moore

A little knowledge is dangerous. You are a sapient creature who can read, and you've read an ancient source or two. 

You don't know, for example, what every serious historian does: that the numbers in ancient sources are exaggerated. 

I hope you don't think Methuselah lived for 1000 years, as ancient Hebrew historians tell us. 

I hope you don't seriously think that an ancient people, the Persians, fielded an army of 2.5 million, because an ancient Greek historian told you that. (ALL credible modern estimates are that the Persian force was about 1/10 that size.)

If you knew a little more, you would know that Valleius Paterculus was a bit of a sycophant, exaggerating the victories of his patrons, for his patrons.

So, after a little further education, I hope you don't think that the "100,000 captives" is a precise count. News flash: it's NOT.

Let's assume it was 10,000, which is consistent with the exaggeration level often found in ancient sources.

Using comparable figures from historic slave trading, 25% would have died en route to their destination. That leaves 7500.

You have heard of the wealthy Roman-era cities like Antioch, Athens, Sirmium, etc. outside of Italy right? 

You do recognize that most agricultural demand was in places like Sardinia and Egypt, right? 

You do understand that the salt and metal mines were not in Italy, right?

OK, but you stubbornly cling to this notion that all the slaves went to Italy.

We'll give you 20%. That's 1,875.

Now, let's assume that half of them weren't allowed to have kids, or were castrated, or were too poor to ever think of having a family, or weren't allowed to marry.

That leaves about 900 people from this "massive slave trade" in Italy who got to procreate. I think Italy could have absorbed that. 

If one of these freedmen made it big, it was big news. Very splashy. Very newsworthy. And the Romans would complain loudly, so it made its way into Juvenal.

But these were not the huge demographic events you argue for. Not even close. This is why the clines in Italy: north, south, east, west still cling to their prehistoric configurations.

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## Drac II

> A little knowledge is dangerous. You are a sapient creature who can read, and you've read an ancient source or two. 
> 
> You don't know, for example, what every serious historian does: that the numbers in ancient sources are exaggerated. 
> 
> I hope you don't think Methuselah lived for 1000 years, as ancient Hebrew historians tell us. 
> 
> I hope you don't seriously think that an ancient people, the Persians, fielded an army of 2.5 million, because an ancient Greek historian told you that. (ALL credible modern estimates are that the Persian force was about 1/10 that size.)
> 
> If you knew a little more, you would know that Valleius Paterculus was a bit of a sycophant, exaggerating the victories of his patrons, for his patrons.
> ...


You do understand that you are not telling me anything "new" here since I said it long before you that these quoted figures have to be taken with a grain of salt. They are likely exaggerated, but some are more believable than others. Compared to Plutarch's one million outlandish figure, Patercullus' figure sounds tame. So you should be directing your comments at people like "Joey", who want to take all such figures at face value. To me they are just usually exaggerated approximations.

Since you are such a "sapient creature", who apparently hasn't even bothered to read his own recommendations, it should have occurred to you that the Romans had no problem using local labor wherever possible, including where those farms and mines were located. Also, the concentration of wealth was in Italy, therefore it would more naturally attract foreign influx, both in the form of slaves and free foreigners.

Juvenal was not complaining just about one or two foreigners "making it big" in Rome, he was ranting about the large numbers of Greeks and Hellenized Near Easterners at Rome. Then we have others like Livy, Petronius, Martial, etc. who also comment -some of them quite contemptuously- on the subject of such foreigners. Cicero already proclaimed that people like Jews and Syrians were "born to be slaves". The notion of Near Easterners as slaves and laborers was deeply ingrained in the Roman intellectual class.

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## Drac II

> You are a liar. 100.000 captured endogamic Jews and 100.000 Persians from Ctesiphon don't add up to millions as you claim. Nothing compared to the nearly 2 millions of seized Dacians, Epirotes, Iberians. North Italians, Germans and Gauls in just five military campaigns. Your lame attempt to prove that millions of supposed Levantines only speak and wrote in Greek in Italy is making me laugh. Even your own source states that they were bilingual. Do you realize that you are going against your own source?


You conveniently forget the number of prisoners from the Mithridatic wars, and the Carthaginians. Also, the author gives all the figures simply as examples that give an idea of the large scale of Roman slavery, with a good degree of caution not to take the actual figures in the examples given as being entirely accurate. 

Read the quote again, it says that in entire regions of Syria Greek predominated. Of course other autochthonous languages were also common in Syria, but that does not mean that Greek was not very common as well. Contact with the Roman world would obviously have been more pronounced in the strongly Hellenized areas than more remote areas. You have already seen how Romans like Cicero's grandfather and Juvenal associated Greek with people like Syrians.

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## Angela

The discussion of this side issue has gone on long enough. The argument is also going around in circles; all relevant points have been made. In addition this kind of provocation and selective use of data can't be tolerated beyond a certain point. As a poster stated, this is not a racist anthrofora.

All further points not directed at the paper specifically will be deleted. My apologies for my own participation in this discussion. Sometimes the rational response to the agenda of certain posters is a statement of disagreement and then to ignore the person's posts as unworthy of debate. I intend to follow my own advice.

Again, all further posts not strictly on topic will be deleted.

I may not be able to check in very often. To report a violation just PM me. It might reach me quicker that way.

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## Sile

> I agree, Ferrara isn't really Emilia and neither Romagna. Neither Arezzo and Siena are the best choice for the whole Tuscany but just good enough for Southern Tuscany. I agree they should really have included one more from the North West Tuscany, Pistoia and Lucca would be good choices.


What is Ferrara if it is not Romagna then?

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## Sile

> Near Easterner means anyone coming from the Near East, irrespective of ethnolinguistic affiliation:


IMO
since hittite, hurrian and hatti languages have nothing to do with the semetic languages as based on all linguistics, then in ancient times , Asia Minor ( Anatolia ) was/must of been regarded as European ( I used the modern term )
Sometime later in history , it stopped being "european"

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## Pax Augusta

> What is Ferrara if it is not Romagna then?


Of course Ferrara is Emilia (although even to many Italians is not clear and they think is Romagna) but Ferrara is the only Emilian province capital where the Via Aemilia doesn't pass. The Via Aemilia is the Roman road running from Ariminum (Rimini in Romagna) to Placentia (Piacenza in Emilia) from which Emilia region took its name and where ancient Romans founded on previous Etruscan and Gallic settlements the colonies of Bononia (Bologna), Mutina (Modena), Regium (Reggio Emilia) and Parma.

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