# Humanities & Anthropology > History & Civilisations >  How did the ancient Romans turn into Italians ?

## Maciamo

One of the great mysteries of European history in my eyes is the complete reversal in character between the ancient Romans and medieval or modern Italians. 

The Romans were very organised, disciplined, serious, rather stern and stoic, military-minded, cared little about family ties (they frequently adopted people unrelated to them or murdered their blood relatives), and were unusually ready to sacrifice themselves for the common good of their nation (as legionaries). 

The Italians are just the opposite in all these respects. They are possibly the least organised Europeans, among the least disciplined. They are fun-loving hedonists. They have made terrible soldiers ever since the Middle Ages (Italians haven't won a single foreign battle in history, except in Libya and Ethiopia where their army far outnumbered the locals in number and fire power). Italians attach a lot of importance to family relations, and often place loyalty to family and friends above that of society or the whole nation. One of the main problems of modern Italy is tax fraud, because people don't feel enough solidarity with other Italians.

Many character traits are highly inheritable. Cats don't make dogs or vice versa. So how is it possible that modern Italians descend from ancient Romans ? 

The character traits of modern Italians listed above are far more exacerbated in the southern half of Italy. This is all the more surprising since the ancient Latins originated in the coastal area between Rome and Naples. Since Rome was flooded with immigrants from all over the empire, chances are that the Roman genes survived better in Neapolitans. The region was heavily settled by rich Romans, who had holiday homes in what they called the _Campania Felix_. Campania was even part of the same province as Rome, the _Regio I Latium et Campania_. Some Roman emperors were more often in Capri than in Rome itself.

This made me wonder how much DNA from the ancient Latins, the patricians of the Roman Republic, survive in modern Italians. Ironically the temperament and values of the ancient Romans were closer to that of modern Swiss or Germans than to that of Italians. Yet it is hard to think of two European cultures more diametrically opposite as the Swiss/Germans and the Italians, especially if we look only at the Neapolitans or southern Italians.

EDIT:

In his book The Moral Basis of a Backward Society, the American political scientist Edward Banfield employed the phrase '*amoral familism*' to describe the inability of modern (mostly southern) Italian villagers to 'act together for the common good, or indeed for any good transcending the immediate material interest of the family'. Interestingly this complete lack of attachment to the state and lack of identification to the wider community is found nowadays in societies that I would qualify of '*short-ranged collectivist*' (in which the collectivity is the family or village) of the Balkans and southern Italy, as opposed to the 'wide-range collectivism' (where the collectivity is the whole nation) of East Asia.

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## Taranis

First off, I do think you are exaggerating somewhat on the Italian attitudes. Be that as it is, I think it should be pointed out that between the destruction of the Ostrogothic Kingdom by the Byzantines (6th century AD) and the Italian Unification (19th century), no unified Italian state existed. I would blame a lot of the changes on this. The short-lived Byzantine reconquest also could be blamed, as it effectively destroyed any potential for a distinctly "Italian" Germanic successor state in Italy, which in turn happened in Gaul (Franks) and Spain (Visigoths). I would also disagree on the statement that Italians are horrible at war: in this intermediate period, individual Italian states were very well able to wage war on one another, and the Italians were equally able to wage war against Austria-Hungary during their unification.

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## ElHorsto

Interesting question. Also the roman architecture was cool and technocratic as well as the latin language.
What also is interesting is that the "Barbarians" like Celts and Germanics were the opposite as well back then: unorganized, chaotic, drunken and wild, although brave and vital and sometimes admired by some Romans. Not quite the same as today Italians, but similarly anarchistic.

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## Maciamo

> Be that as it is, I think it should be pointed out that between the destruction of the Ostrogothic Kingdom by the Byzantines (6th century AD) and the Italian Unification (19th century), no unified Italian state existed. I would blame a lot of the changes on this. The short-lived Byzantine reconquest also could be blamed, as it effectively destroyed any potential for a distinctly "Italian" Germanic successor state in Italy, which in turn happened in Gaul (Franks) and Spain (Visigoths).


Apart from the change in attitude towards the loyalty to the state, I don't see how it could have affected the Italian character.




> I would also disagree on the statement that Italians are horrible at war: in this intermediate period, individual Italian states were very well able to wage war on one another, and the Italians were equally able to wage war against Austria-Hungary during their unification.


How can you judge a nation's talent for military strategy or discipline if they are fighting between themselves ?

As for fighting Austro-Hungary, Italy never won a single battle, even when they were fighting at 10 against one . It is either the Prussians and especially the French (thanks to Napoleon III's dream of unifying Italy) who defeated the Austrians and gave Austrian possessions to Piedmont.

The same happened in WWII. Italy lost on every front. They lost in Greece and needed to be rescued by the Germans. They lost in Egypt against the Brits and needed to be rescued by the Germans. Etcetera.

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## Vallicanus

Near Eastern slave blood?

Y DNA studies of Italy give some support for this.

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## Wilhelm

Same can be said of germanics, but the other way around, how did they turn out from being chaotic barbarians to organized and civilized ? Nations can change with time. Anways, I think you are exaggerating and going by stereotypes. Italians are still an organized and rich country.

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## edao

What about immigration? 
If Rome was the economic super power of its day it would have been a mecca for economic migrates, just as the US is today. 
Also is there not a massive north/south divide in culture and genetics in Italy?

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## edao

> Same can be said of germanics, but the other way around, how did they turn out from being chaotic barbarians to organized and civilized ?


Concepts of the 'barbarians' being a wild simple people is exaggerated as most sources describing them that exist today are from the Roman side. Non-roman Europe was far more developed than is made out, the Roman's didn't land in a space craft and didn't exist is some kind of bubble of isolation pre empire.

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## ebAmerican

I wonder what the effect of the Papal States, and the center of Christendom did to the character of the Italians. This is the only big shift in ideology. IDK how, but it's worth a moment of contemplation.

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## Angela

@Maciamo,
I don’t personally give too much weight to stereotypes.

Truly, I don't think that Tacitus was correct when he wrote that the Germanic peoples were all slothful, drunken savages, although he did find admirable things in them. There is a decided touch of a Rousseau like “Noble Savage” approach to his thinking about them. Nor do I agree, of course, with the description of the Celts as drunken, naked madmen with absolutely no discipline, whose forces fell apart at the first hint of reverses. 


If I were that sort of person, and wanted to engage in stereotyping, I might be tempted to repeat the slurs that all the Germanic peoples are humorless, passionless, cold, predictable, slow thinking, racist, petty-fogging record keepers. Now, that wouldn’t be an accurate representation would it?


Neither would I ever subscribe to the thinking popular in the decades after World War II that held that there was something fundamentally wrong with the German culture and personality. In fact, I remember reading such an article, called “What is Wrong With The Germans?” Someone prone to that kind of thinking and susceptible to that argument might respond that the problem with them, and the Russians, is that they are the Europeans who were least subject to the civilizing power of Rome. Of course, I’m not one of them.


For anyone interested in a modern take on this line of thinking, there is, of course, the relatively recent book, “ Hitler’s Willing Executioners.” Also, for a discussion of the particular appeal of authoritarianism in Germany, see also, http://www.press.umich.edu/23269/soc...many_1870_1930


@Vallicnus,
I’ll also respond, in good humor, I trust, to the, with all due respect, rather predictable comments about Italian military capability and “slavery” in the Roman empire. 

I’m a bit perplexed as to why good military strategy suddenly isn’t good military strategy and ability when it’s leveled against one’s own country men, but I won't belabor the point, and therefore, I won’t consider the tactics employed by German commanders during the Thirty Years War, either.


Does military prowess against other Europeans count? Since the discussion touched upon the Renaissance era, then perhaps one might consider Piero Strozzi.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piero_Strozzi#References

Or against the Ottomans? I rather think we Europeans might now all be practicing Islam were it not for the Battle of Lepanto. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea_Doria
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Lepanto
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_...rder_of_battle

Leone Stozzi did his bit too as commander of the Galleys of the Knights of St. John.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leone_Strozzi

Then, I believe World War I was mentioned, that totally senseless butchery of a whole generation of European men. Do the Austrians count as Germans? Or were there too many eastern Europeans among them?

See Battle of Vittorio Veneto:

"By October 1918, Italy finally had enough soldiers to mount an offensive. The attack targeted Vittorio Veneto, across the Piave. The Italian Army broke through a gap near Sacile and poured in reinforcements that crushed the Austrian defensive line. On 3 November, 300,000 Austrian soldiers surrendered.


The Battle of Vittorio Veneto heralded the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Army as an effective fighting force, and also triggered the disintegration of Austria-Hungary. During the last week of October, declarations made in Budapest, Prague, and Zagreb proclaimed the independence of their respective parts of the old empire. On October 29, the imperial authorities asked Italy for an armistice, but the Italians continued to advance, reaching Trento, Udine, and Trieste."


Oh, wait…I forgot my compatriot, whose paternal line comes from a hamlet across the river from where I was born, and whose mother’s family were Ligurians…Napoleone Buonaparte… who spoke French with a Corsican accent until the day he died. 

Or are we going to quibble that he was born in Corsica? 


Of course, if you fight long enough, and against enough countries, and your opposing general has studied your strategy for long enough, you can ultimately lose. 


As for “slavery” and the impact on the Italian genome…where to begin? For one thing, slaves were shipped to every part of the empire. For another, I always find it interesting that people who raise this issue often seem to focus only on slaves from the Middle East or North Africa, when so many thousands of Celts and “Germani” were enslaved by the Romans. I’ve seen an estimate that one third of the population of Gaul was enslaved during the Gallic Wars. That may be an exaggeration, of course, but it’s pretty clear that Caesar’s fortune was mainly derived from the sale of Gaulish slaves. 


Regardless of where the Roman slaves came from, if the latest IBD studies are correct, the Italian genome has experienced minimum inflow from other groups since around 500 B.C. (See Ralph and Coop et al), so it doesn’t seem that these Roman slaves, or the slaves bought in the Crimea during the medieval era, for that matter, had all that much influence. I’d be more than interested in knowingthe specific y dna sub clades that can be precisely pinpointed as “slave” lineages, versus, say, Roman legionnaires recruited in far flung parts of the empire, including, of course, Gaul and Germania. 

It appears that perhaps laboring in the galleys or the mines or as virtual farm animals on vast latifundias didn’t leave much time for procreating. There were women slaves also, of course, but it seems that many ended up in brothels…the number of such establishments in a small town like Pompeii is rather astounding…and, as some recent discoveries around a brothel in Britain show, the progeny of slaves were not exactly valued. Slavery is a brutal, inhuman business, no matter who is the master. 


As for the fact that our written records of these peoples are by either Romans or Greeks, it could hardly be otherwise; the Gauls and Germani were illiterate. For an analysis of the interaction between the Gauls and the Romans, a book that will soon be available from the Cambridge Classics Series, “Southern Gaul and the Mediterranean: Multilingualism and Multiple Identities in the Iron Age and Roman Periods”, looks as if it will be both interesting and nuanced.

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## zanipolo

some very very silly remarks about the military from some.
Just to let you know Venice defeated the mighty germanic habsburgs in 1508 and never lost a war against them. The best the habsburg got was a drawn out war of Gradisca 1614-1618.
In 1508
In 1507, Julius (Pope) returned to the question of the cities in Venetian hands; once again rebuffed by the Senate, he encouraged the recently elected Emperor Maximilian I to attack the Republic. Maximilian, using his journey to Rome for the Imperial coronation as a pretext, entered Venetian territory with a large army in February 1508 and advanced on Vicenza, but was defeated by a Venetian army under Bartolomeo d'Alviano. A second assault by a Tyrolean force several weeks later was an even greater failure; Alviano not only routed the Imperial army but also proceeded to seize Trieste and Fiume, forcing Maximilian to conclude a truce with Venice.[8] 
The peace was signed for 3 years, a pact that Maximilian broke in 1509............you cannot even trust the HRE!!

Another......war of Lepanto against the Ottomans
208 Christian ships of which 110 where Venetian ships ( 55% ) , ONLY 12 Spanish ships and the rest other Italians defeated the mighty Ottomans


do I need to give more......maybe Francesco Morosini or Girolamo Cornaro adventures

The issue is Italians never fought for each other and never will fight for each other...........its far better if the country became a confederation of Italian states.........it WILL work better

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## Maciamo

> Same can be said of germanics, but the other way around, how did they turn out from being chaotic barbarians to organized and civilized ? Nations can change with time.


Ancient Rome was a civilization, with a state, a citizenship, a capital, laws, and so on. Germanic and Celtic tribes had not yet reached the development stage of civilization. You cannot compare the two anymore than you could compare the maturity of a child and an adult. Celtic and Germanic societies have since reached adulthood, so now we can compare them more fairly with Italy.




> Anways, I think you are exaggerating and going by stereotypes. Italians are still an organized and rich country.


There is little relation between wealth and organisation. The ancient Celts were utterly disorganised and tribal, yet extremely rich (far richer than the Romans until the conquest of Gaul by Caesar). In contrast the Chinese have always been a very organised nation, but that did not prevent them to face the most abject poverty and starvation of millions under Mao Zedong.

Like most Italians I do not regard Italy as a united culture or nation. Italy became a country by accident. Lombards and Venetians share precious little in common with Campanians or Sicilans. Even Tuscans contrast harply with the people of the Marches just across the Apennines. 

If North Italy (or Padania as the Lega Nord calls it) were an independent country it would be the richest country in the EU after Luxembourg. So there is no denying that at least half of Italy is very rich. That doesn't make Italians, even Northerners, organised, disciplined, self-restrained and punctual people. How can you not see that wealth has nothing to do with organisation ?

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## Maciamo

> What about immigration? 
> If Rome was the economic super power of its day it would have been a mecca for economic migrates, just as the US is today. 
> Also is there not a massive north/south divide in culture and genetics in Italy?


Immigration surely changed completely the population of Rome and most of the Latium. But it wouldn't have changed all Italy. Perhaps the problem is that the ancient Roman patricians really were different from the other ancient peoples of Italy, and that their DNA became diluted in the huge mass of immigrants already towards the end of the Roman Empire.

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## Maciamo

> I wonder what the effect of the Papal States, and the center of Christendom did to the character of the Italians. This is the only big shift in ideology. IDK how, but it's worth a moment of contemplation.


Doubtful. The Piedmontese liberals (like Cavour) who unified Italy in the 1860's were quite anti-clerical. Actually Italian unification turned into a struggle against the Pope, who wouldn't recognised Italy as a state even after the annexation of Rome. Leo XIII went as far as to proclaim that any Catholic who voted at the national elections in Italy would be excommunicated. Until the dictatorship of Mussolini the Roman Catholic Church was always the Italian state. That is why anti-clerical liberals dominated Italian politics fro the 1860's to the early 1900's, when anti-clerical socialists and communists threatened to take over the country. The political ban imposed by the Church on Catholics effectively led to the rise of fascism. Rich Italians only supported Mussolini because they were afraid that the communists would stage a revolution like in Russia. That's why they gradually suppressed political liberties and instated Mussolini as a dictator. 

After WWII, the Catholic Church understood its mistake and lifted the ban. As a result the christian democrats stayed in power for the five decades after 1945. The only person who was able to defeat them was Berlusconi thanks to its media empire and support from the Mafia.

All this to say that many Italians are not big fans of the Catholic Church. In the Renaissance the Papal States waged wars like any other state. Religion didn't make popes less avid of conquest and political schemes. The Borgia, della Rovere and Piccolomini, who each provided two popes in the 16th century, were no better than other bloodthirsty Italian dukes, using the methods of mafia bosses. So perhaps you are right after all. The Church did shape the modern Italian character... by setting a bad example.

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## zanipolo

> Doubtful. The Piedmontese liberals (like Cavour) who unified Italy in the 1860's were quite anti-clerical. Actually Italian unification turned into a struggle against the Pope, who wouldn't recognised Italy as a state even after the annexation of Rome. Leo XIII went as far as to proclaim that any Catholic who voted at the national elections in Italy would be excommunicated. Until the dictatorship of Mussolini the Roman Catholic Church was always the Italian state. That is why anti-clerical liberals dominated Italian politics fro the 1860's to the early 1900's, when anti-clerical socialists and communists threatened to take over the country. The political ban imposed by the Church on Catholics effectively led to the rise of fascism. Rich Italians only supported Mussolini because they were afraid that the communists would stage a revolution like in Russia. That's why they gradually suppressed political liberties and instated Mussolini as a dictator. 
> 
> After WWII, the Catholic Church understood its mistake and lifted the ban. As a result the christian democrats stayed in power for the five decades after 1945. The only person who was able to defeat them was Berlusconi thanks to its media empire and support from the Mafia.
> 
> All this to say that many Italians are not big fans of the Catholic Church. In the Renaissance the Papal States waged wars like any other state. Religion didn't make popes less avid of conquest and political schemes. The Borgia, della Rovere and Piccolomini, who each provided two popes in the 16th century, were no better than other bloodthirsty Italian dukes, using the methods of mafia bosses. So perhaps you are right after all. The Church did shape the modern Italian character... by setting a bad example.


And the _Risorgimento_ was to force the foreigners out of Italy and not to make an italy. Foreigners have been in Italy since 1494.
Cavour wanted the north for the monarch, the centre for the pope and the south for the bourbons.

Garibaldi wanted one Italy, no king, no church.

the church wanted no Italy, and a division as was at the peace of Lodi in 1453.

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## Maciamo

> I don’t personally give too much weight to stereotypes.
> 
> Truly, I don't think that Tacitus was correct when he wrote that the Germanic peoples were all slothful, drunken savages, although he did find admirable things in them. There is a decided touch of a Rousseau like “Noble Savage” approach to his thinking about them. Nor do I agree, of course, with the description of the Celts as drunken, naked madmen with absolutely no discipline, whose forces fell apart at the first hint of reverses.


Some stereotypes have truth in them. There are academics conscientiously studying and comparing cultures. Unfortunately the ancient Romans didn't know anything about that. Their description of foreigners was essentially self-congratulatory propaganda. No Roman writer was ever an anthropologist, and no Roman writer ever went to live with Germanic tribes to learn their language, culture and lifestyle. Nowadays we can make much more reliable comparisons between cultures. Just mentioning ancient stereotypes in this thread makes my blood boil. It's enough for me to know that you will never understand what I mean. Like talking to a wall.





> If I were that sort of person, and wanted to engage in stereotyping, I might be tempted to repeat the slurs that all the Germanic peoples are humorless, passionless, cold, predictable, slow thinking, racist, petty-fogging record keepers. Now, that wouldn’t be an accurate representation would it?


Those are all quite negative traits of character. I don't know why you'd want to be so biased in reaction to what I wrote when I was describing the Italians as fun-loving (in contrast with the stern and cruel Romans). Anyway you could agree with me that the adjectives you choose to describe the Germans could never reasonable apply to the Italians, whether Northerners of Southerners. Likewise the adjectives I chose to describe the ancient Romans couldn't apply to modern Italians or vice versa. That proves there is a truth in them.




> Or against the Ottomans? I rather think we Europeans might now all be practicing Islam were it not for the Battle of Lepanto.


But the Italians didn't fight the Ottomans by themselves at Lepanto ! They were allied to the Habsburg who were the principal force fighting the Ottomans. In short, the Pope asked the Habsburg to come to the rescue of the Venetians who were being besieged (and losing) in Cyprus. Of the 28,500 soldiers fighting for the Holy League at Lepanto, 8,000 were Spanish, 5,000 were German, 11,500 were Italian, and 4,000 were assorted mercenaries. The commander in chief of this army was John of Austria. 

My point was that Italians never won a single foreign battle _on their own_ (apart from Libya and Ethiopia, which have no merit as they greatly outnumbered the locals and defeated them using vastly superior weapons).




> Leone Stozzi did his bit too as commander of the Galleys of the Knights of St. John.


You really have to scrape the bottom of history books to find a few Italian military leaders that could be praiseworthy. Frankly who remembers Leone Stozzi ? What are his achievements ?





> Then, I believe World War I was mentioned, that totally senseless butchery of a whole generation of European men. Do the Austrians count as Germans? Or were there too many eastern Europeans among them?
> 
> See Battle of Vittorio Veneto:
> 
> "By October 1918, Italy finally had enough soldiers to mount an offensive. The attack targeted Vittorio Veneto, across the Piave. The Italian Army broke through a gap near Sacile and poured in reinforcements that crushed the Austrian defensive line. On 3 November, 300,000 Austrian soldiers surrendered.
> 
> 
> The Battle of Vittorio Veneto heralded the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Army as an effective fighting force, and also triggered the disintegration of Austria-Hungary. During the last week of October, declarations made in Budapest, Prague, and Zagreb proclaimed the independence of their respective parts of the old empire. On October 29, the imperial authorities asked Italy for an armistice, but the Italians continued to advance, reaching Trento, Udine, and Trieste."


It would be more intellectually honest to place the Battle of Vittorio Veneto into context. It followed the disastrous Battle of Caporetto, in which the Italian army, despite its numerical advantage, was spectacularly defeated by the Germans and Austrians. The Italians suffered 40,000 casualties. However, more tellingly, 265,000 Italians were taken prisoners (by an Austro-German army of 280,000 still alive, so nearly one prisoner per victor) and according to David Gilmour in his history of Italy, "_350,000 deserted, disappearing into the hills and attempting to find their way home_."

The Battle of Vittorio Veneto, in November 1918, is often hailed as the greatest of all time in Italian history and is claimed by Italians to have led to the destruction of the Austro-Hungarian Emire. However, as David Gilmour explains, "In fact it was achieved with the support of French and British units at a time when the Germans were already beaten, the empire was already dissolving, and the Viennese government was seeking an armistice."

This reminds me of how the Italians changed side in the middle of both World Wars. How honourable and satisfying is it to betray your former allies and defeat them when they are already on their knees and seeking armistice ? In 1940 Italy had insisted on staying neutral when Hitler declared war on France and Britain, only to change mind and declare war on France in June, two months _after_ the French had already surrendered. How brave indeed.





> Oh, wait…I forgot my compatriot, whose paternal line comes from a hamlet across the river from where I was born, and whose mother’s family were Ligurians…Napoleone Buonaparte… who spoke French with a Corsican accent until the day he died. 
> 
> Or are we going to quibble that he was born in Corsica?


He was a French speaker, born in France, educated in a military school in Champagne, and fought with an army of French soldiers, not Italian ones. The problem Italians had fighting wars, esp. since the Risorgimento, was that Italian soldiers were cowards who deserted or surrendered at the first occasion. 




> As for “slavery” and the impact on the Italian genome…where to begin? For one thing, slaves were shipped to every part of the empire. For another, I always find it interesting that people who raise this issue often seem to focus only on slaves from the Middle East or North Africa, when so many thousands of Celts and “Germani” were enslaved by the Romans. I’ve seen an estimate that one third of the population of Gaul was enslaved during the Gallic Wars. That may be an exaggeration, of course, but it’s pretty clear that Caesar’s fortune was mainly derived from the sale of Gaulish slaves. 
> 
> Regardless of where the Roman slaves came from, if the latest IBD studies are correct, the Italian genome has experienced minimum inflow from other groups since around 500 B.C. (See Ralph and Coop et al), so it doesn’t seem that these Roman slaves, or the slaves bought in the Crimea during the medieval era, for that matter, had all that much influence. I’d be more than interested in knowingthe specific y dna sub clades that can be precisely pinpointed as “slave” lineages, versus, say, Roman legionnaires recruited in far flung parts of the empire, including, of course, Gaul and Germania. 
> 
> It appears that perhaps laboring in the galleys or the mines or as virtual farm animals on vast latifundias didn’t leave much time for procreating. There were women slaves also, of course, but it seems that many ended up in brothels…the number of such establishments in a small town like Pompeii is rather astounding…and, as some recent discoveries around a brothel in Britain show, the progeny of slaves were not exactly valued. Slavery is a brutal, inhuman business, no matter who is the master. 
> 
> As for the fact that our written records of these peoples are by either Romans or Greeks, it could hardly be otherwise; the Gauls and Germani were illiterate. For an analysis of the interaction between the Gauls and the Romans, a book that will soon be available from the Cambridge Classics Series, “Southern Gaul and the Mediterranean: Multilingualism and Multiple Identities in the Iron Age and Roman Periods”, looks as if it will be both interesting and nuanced.


I would appreciate if you did not mix your replies to me and your replies to other forum members. Please quote people and reply in separate posts. I never mentioned slaves.

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## Maciamo

> And the _Risorgimento_ was to force the foreigners out of Italy and not to make an italy. Foreigners have been in Italy since 1494.


The Risorgimento was the process of Italian unification. Of course it meant kicking foreign powers out of the peninsula. That's the same thing. 




> Cavour wanted the north for the monarch, the centre for the pope and the south for the bourbons.


Cavour was the chief instigator of a single unified Italy under the House of Savoy. It is under Cavour that the Kingdom of Naples and most of the Papal States (everything but the Latium) was annexed to Piedmont. He died soon afterwards, but fervently wanted to annex Rome too. Cavour was utterly anti-clerical, so how could he have wished for the independence of the Papal States ?

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## zanipolo

> But the Italians didn't fight the Ottomans by themselves at Lepanto ! They were allied to the Habsburg who were the principal force fighting the Ottomans. In short, the Pope asked the Habsburg to come to the rescue of the Venetians who were being besieged (and losing) in Cyprus. Of the 28,500 soldiers fighting for the Holy League at Lepanto, 8,000 were Spanish, 5,000 were German, 11,500 were Italian, and 4,000 were assorted mercenaries. The commander in chief of this army was John of Austria. 
> 
> My point was that Italians never won a single foreign battle _on their own_ (apart from Libya and Ethiopia, which have no merit as they greatly outnumbered the locals and defeated them using vastly superior weapons).


you are wrong, while all navies had slaves for oarsmen, venice employed fighting soldiers as oarsmen, like the vikings, so if we take a minimum of 160 oars , small galley( there where many 200 oared ships, medium galley) and multiply by the 110 venetian ships at lepanto you get 17600 extra fighting men, plus the 6 galleassas which each had 400 men = 20000 men..........plus the other 60 on each ship which did not oar and where the musketeers and cannoneers = 7600

*grand total of 27600* venetian fighting men and *then add the other italians* ...........the habsburg ONLY sent 12 ships........search all records you like

EDIT ...I was wrong, it was not 12 spanish ships it was 14

Vessels had been contributed by the various Christian states: 109 galleys and 6 galleasses from the Republic of Venice, 56 from the Spanish Empire (32 galleys from the Kingdom of Naples, 14 galleys from Spain, and 10 galleys from the Kingdom of Sicily), 7 galleys from the Pope, 27 galleys from the Republic of Genoa (partly financed by Spain), 3 galleys of the Order of Saint Stephen from the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, 3 galleys each from the Duchy of Savoy and the Knights of Malta,

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## zanipolo

> The Risorgimento was the process of Italian unification. Of course it meant kicking foreign powers out of the peninsula. That's the same thing.


It was not for the creation of Italy for the whole peninsula.........nobody wanted that except Garibaldi and then the Italians stabbed him in the back by ceding his birthplace NICE to France while he was still alive. Nice was always "Italian" owned.




> Cavour was the chief instigator of a single unified Italy under the House of Savoy. It is under Cavour that the Kingdom of Naples and most of the Papal States (everything but the Latium) was annexed to Piedmont. He died soon afterwards, but fervently wanted to annex Rome too. Cavour was utterly anti-clerical, so how could he have wished for the independence of the Papal States ?


He was poisoned 3 days after the event. He only wanted the north for the monarchy. he did not care about the rest, he was not going to stop the Pope to take the centre.
The Pope did not want an Italy , which is why they did not recognise Italy until 1922 under Mussolini

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## Maciamo

> you are wrong, while all navies had slaves for oarsmen, venice employed fighting soldiers as oarsmen, like the vikings, so if we take a minimum of 160 oars , small galley( there where many 200 oared ships, medium galley) and multiply by the 110 venetian ships at lepanto you get 17600 extra fighting men, plus the 6 galleassas which each had 400 men = 20000 men..........plus the other 60 on each ship which did not oar and where the musketeers and cannoneers = 7600
> 
> *grand total of 27600* venetian fighting men and *then add the other italians* ...........the habsburg ONLY sent 12 ships........search all records you like
> 
> EDIT ...I was wrong, it was not 12 spanish ships it was 14
> 
> Vessels had been contributed by the various Christian states: 109 galleys and 6 galleasses from the Republic of Venice, 56 from the Spanish Empire (32 galleys from the Kingdom of Naples, 14 galleys from Spain, and 10 galleys from the Kingdom of Sicily), 7 galleys from the Pope, 27 galleys from the Republic of Genoa (partly financed by Spain), 3 galleys of the Order of Saint Stephen from the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, 3 galleys each from the Duchy of Savoy and the Knights of Malta,


I wasn't there to count, but anyway it wasn't a single-handed Italian victory, and you'd be hard-pressed to cite many others.

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## Wilhelm

> Ancient Rome was a civilization, with a state, a citizenship, a capital, laws, and so on. Germanic and Celtic tribes had not yet reached the development stage of civilization. You cannot compare the two anymore than you could compare the maturity of a child and an adult. Celtic and Germanic societies have since reached adulthood, so now we can compare them more fairly with Italy.
> 
> 
> 
> There is little relation between wealth and organisation. The ancient Celts were utterly disorganised and tribal, yet extremely rich (far richer than the Romans until the conquest of Gaul by Caesar). In contrast the Chinese have always been a very organised nation, but that did not prevent them to face the most abject poverty and starvation of millions under Mao Zedong.
> 
> Like most Italians I do not regard Italy as a united culture or nation. Italy became a country by accident. Lombards and Venetians share precious little in common with Campanians or Sicilans. Even Tuscans contrast harply with the people of the Marches just across the Apennines. 
> 
> If North Italy (or Padania as the Lega Nord calls it) were an independent country it would be the richest country in the EU after Luxembourg. So there is no denying that at least half of Italy is very rich. That doesn't make Italians, even Northerners, organised, disciplined, self-restrained and punctual people. How can you not see that wealth has nothing to do with organisation ?


When did I say that ?? I said ancient germanics were chaotic and barbarian (not mentioned their wealth) and that modern Italians are rich AND still a organised country (not relating the two, it's a conjuction...). A disorganised country would be Zimbabwe (to say somthing) but not ITALY..

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## Vallicanus

> When did I say that ?? I said ancient germanics were chaotic and barbarian (not mentioned their wealth) and that modern Italians are rich AND still a organised country (not relating the two, it's a conjuction...). A disorganised country would be Zimbabwe (to say somthing) but not ITALY..


You jest.
Italy has a shrinking economy, 40pc youth unemployment and the most incompetent politicians outside Zimbabwe.

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## Maciamo

> When did I say that ?? I said ancient germanics were chaotic and barbarian (not mentioned their wealth) and that modern Italians are rich AND still a organised country (not relating the two, it's a conjuction...).


Then why do you say that Italy is "still an organized and rich country." Why mention the "rich" ? I never said they were poor.




> A disorganised country would be Zimbabwe (to say somthing) but not ITALY..


I am not just talking about the political system (which is disorganised), but society in general. Just look at the way traffic is in Italy. It's not organised by any northern European standard.

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## Fire Haired

> The Romans were very organised, disciplined, serious, rather stern and stoic, military-minded, cared little about family ties (they frequently adopted people unrelated to them or murdered their blood relatives), and were unusually ready to sacrifice themselves for the common good of their nation (as legionaries).


in the USA Most Italians i think are Sicilian. Also their most known for the mafia. One of my teachers half Italian says in school 1950's he was a trouble maker and teachers saw him as another crazy Italian. Italians in urban areas of america i think are most know for crime. I always thought the Italian mafias where like ancient Rome they where disciplined, professional, violent, and cold. Unlike street gangs their connected to high places so they don't exactly fit the idea of Italians being wild and unorganized. I dont know i always saw Italian Mafi's being like ancient Rome but of course their probably are no culturally connection just random they turned out similar.




> The Italians are just the opposite in all these respects. They are possibly the least organised Europeans, among the least disciplined. They are fun-loving hedonists. They have made terrible soldiers ever since the Middle Ages (Italians haven't won a single foreign battle in history, except in Libya and Ethiopia where their army far outnumbered the locals in number and fire power). Italians attach a lot of importance to family relations, and often place loyalty to family and friends above that of society or the whole nation. One of the main problems of modern Italy is tax fraud, because people don't feel enough solidarity with other Italians.


i think u kind of exaggerated the character of modern Italians and ancient Romans. I dont think we can explain it look how different the american character today it to what it was 100 years ago. alot of stuff can change in a people group culturally so quickly it is very hard to understand why when there are not alot of records. When Rome was constantly invaded by Germans and Huns then finally conquered on the western area where Italy is Italy i think just lost their power and roman pride. 

Italy was no longer the most powerful or advanced area in Europe. The Germans in a way took there spot they started most of the kingdoms in medieval western Europe after conquering the western roman empire. The Germans left their old culture and started very advanced civilization that dominated Europe till like the 1400's. Then the Spanish and Portuguese became powerful in the 1400-1700's England became powerful, Russia, Germany Italy was left out. I think so much has changed in Italy today culturally and politically from ancient Rome of course there going to be almost nothing like the Romans by the way they act.

well i dont know how true this is or what its history is. But i have noticed a romance type of charcter in Spain, Portugal, France, and Italy i dont know how to explain it but all those areas speak a Latin language and where apart of the roman empire. I have always noticed bug similates between them maybe it goes back to Rome but character and culture in people changes alot after 2,000 years. I dont think Rome was as serious as u say. I agree that the traditional roman going back to Italic tribes tradition like in 700bc was suppose to be serious, tough, discplined, good moral's, and live a simple life unlike Greeks. I was looking at these books written by Romans saying the Germanic tribes fit alot of their ideas of a good roman because they where not influenced by Greek civilization.

Cato the elder is probably the best example of a traditional Roman he fit almost every single one of the traits and he absolutely hated Greece. The fact that Romans said they did not like Greek influence and their idea of a real roman was a simple farmer shows they still had Italic tribe traditions going back to Villnovaen culture.




> Many character traits are highly inheritable. Cat don't make dogs or vice versa. So how is it possible that modern Italians descend from ancient Romans ?


there is no doubt modern Italians descend from Romans i guarantee u the ones in the city Rome today are mainly descended of the first people to make the city. They defintley dont descend from Germans who migrated there not enough I1a1, I1a3, I1a4, I1b or R1b S21 also they have extremely low amounts of light hair and eyes which is and was very popular in Germans. They don't descend from Gauls will i guess u can make an argument about the 40% R1b S28 in Italy which gauls had but so did the first Italic speakers. They dont come from mid eastern u can make the argument about the over 30% mid eastern and north African y DNA E1b1b, J1, and j2 but their white so u know their not 100% mid eastern. 

Italians in my opinion mainly descend from a Neolithic people who brought G2a who where a mix of Paloithic Italians who brought I2a1a more from Otzie farmer people. Otzie people brought Med aust DNA (i am talking about the globe13 test) the Paleolithic Italians had north Euro aust DNA. modern sardine people are the last full blooded Neolithic Italians that is why i think they are the closest relatives to Otzie (5,300 year old farmer from alps Italy). Then the next gene flow into Italo came from iron age Italic speakers who brought R1b S28 the most popular Y DNa haplogroup in Italy today. They would have been generically identical to southern Gauls and probably to modern southern Germans, Swiss, and eastern French or alps people. the Italics probably brought more north euro aust DNA they also would have brought red hair which explains why cato the elder was a redhead. at some point there was a huge mid eastern input into Italy mainly south Italy which means it probably came form the Mediterranean and from around Syria and isreal. I am guessing it came with Greek influnce. south Italiens in the globe13 test have about 35-45% southwest asian and west asian north Italians about 25% and central are in between so i guess the western Mediterranean is also a big part of italiens and romans ancestry.

modern north Italians probably mainly descended from early Italic speakers that i think why R1b 28 is centered in northern Italy. The Romans came out of those Italic tribes but of course they had tons of Greek influence but i still think they kept Italic tradtions which is where the stern military part of Rome comes from.

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## Fire Haired

Italy has changed alot since Rome it has been 2,000 years. Look how much different the world is than it was 200 years ago i doubt personality traits are passed down so much in people group like maciamo said. it was not in romans dna to be stern they had that ability but it became more of a part of their culture.

it is not in the dna of blacks to be loud and like hip hop that just became a part of their culture white people have the same natural ability to be like that. all humans races or ethnic groups have the same personality traits some choose to use certain ones differently. also almost no one in the world is purely from one race or ethnic group.

all of us are a mix for example of two group that mixed 20,000ybp then formed a new group that mixed with another group that was a mix of 5 groups and so on and so on. so i doubt that idea that certain ethnic groups naturally have certain natural personality's is true

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## Fire Haired

Do modern English who are a mix of Insular Celtic and Germanic tribes from northern Germany. Do they feel in their instinct to go raid a town and act all barbaric . Modern German's personality is far more different from ancient Germanic tribes. Germans and British today are like the most organized and smart Europeans they used to be the most primitive. Alot changes in 2,000 years how many people do u see living in tribal society or fighting with iron swords in Europe anymore.

Look at king louis XVI at the right king of France from 1754-1793) most of his ancestors where Gauls i guess there was some mid eastern input during the roman age. now compare him to this Gaul the type that where lead by Cheif Brennus sacked Rome in 387bc.


Looks like Alot changed in France from Gaulic times to the 1700's. By blood louis was a Gaul but that does not mean he had to act like one. I think every people group has the same human personalty traits we just choose to use them a little differently some times.

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## Boss

> some very very silly remarks about the military from some.
> Just to let you know Venice defeated the mighty germanic habsburgs in 1508 and never lost a war against them. The best the habsburg got was a drawn out war of Gradisca 1614-1618.
> In 1508
> In 1507, Julius (Pope) returned to the question of the cities in Venetian hands; once again rebuffed by the Senate, he encouraged the recently elected Emperor Maximilian I to attack the Republic. Maximilian, using his journey to Rome for the Imperial coronation as a pretext, entered Venetian territory with a large army in February 1508 and advanced on Vicenza, but was defeated by a Venetian army under Bartolomeo d'Alviano. A second assault by a Tyrolean force several weeks later was an even greater failure; Alviano not only routed the Imperial army but also proceeded to seize Trieste and Fiume, forcing Maximilian to conclude a truce with Venice.[8] 
> The peace was signed for 3 years, a pact that Maximilian broke in 1509............you cannot even trust the HRE!!
> 
> Another......war of Lepanto against the Ottomans
> 208 Christian ships of which 110 where Venetian ships ( 55% ) , ONLY 12 Spanish ships and the rest other Italians defeated the mighty Ottomans
> 
> ...


Was that the guy who lost Crete to the Ottomans and then essentially made a ruin out of the Parthenon by bombing the crap out of it? :)

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## zanipolo

> Was that the guy who lost Crete to the Ottomans and then essentially made a ruin out of the Parthenon by bombing the crap out of it? :)


yes after the longest siege in military history *22 years* for a "drawn" result where you left crete with your army intact, all artillery taken with you, all money and possessions and any Greek citizen that wanted to leave seems like a good result against the might of the ottomans.

He got his revenge 20 years later with the capture of the whole of the Peloponnese and Athens. Pity his army got the plague and he had to cease operations.
The bombing of the pantheon was not a highlight , but the ottomans filled it with gunpowder and arms. If the ottomans cared about history they would have vacated Athens.......like the Germans vacate Rome in WWII and did not contest it .

Then again, the Americans bombed a POW in southern Germany and killed my uncle ( was a POW ) with 8 days of the war remaining. The Americans bombed the camp because the Germans had tanks and artillery in the camp. ..........whose fault is this?

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## Maciamo

> there is no doubt modern Italians descend from Romans i guarantee u the ones in the city Rome today are mainly descended of the first people to make the city.


Really ? You guarantee it. Then you obviously don't know much about history. Rome had a population of approximately 1.5 million (some claim even more) in the first century. Its population gradually fell during the late Empire and the Middle Ages. In the early 15th century Rome had barely 17,000 inhabitants. In other words it lost 99% of its "golden age" population. Nowadays Rome has over 3.5 million inhabitants, many of whom came from all over Italy (and abroad) over the last few centuries. So please explain again how can modern Romans are descended from the ancient population of the city.

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## Maciamo

> Italy has changed alot since Rome it has been 2,000 years. Look how much different the world is than it was 200 years ago i doubt personality traits are passed down so much in people group like maciamo said. it was not in romans dna to be stern they had that ability but it became more of a part of their culture.


I didn't say that personality traits are inherited. I said character traits. That's very different. Character is the innate, non-acquired part of personality. To make it easier to understand, let's take dogs as an example. Each breed of dog has its own character, although each individual dog has its own personality. Regarding character, Golden Retrievers have a very sociable and kind nature. Pitbulls are mean and aggressive. Newfoundlands and St. Bernards are impassible, while poodle and many other small dogs are excitable and bark all the time. German Shepherds make excellent watchdogs, while Dachshunds are far too playful and immature to be of any use in that regard. All these character traits are set in their genes. 

Its the same for humans except that we are not so clearly divided into breeds. But some traits do apply to whole ethnic groups. Germanic and East Asian people can be considered diligent and disciplined. Celtic people are far more individualistic than any Asian or African people. Arabs are proud and confident people, while East Asians often lack self-confidence. Greeks and Italians are outgoing and talkative, while Finns and Siberians are far more reserved, shy and taciturn. I could continue for hours, but you get the idea.

Personality is by definition the traits associated with a person, and therefore vary between individuals even within the same ethnic group. Actually even identical twins have different personalities, while their genetic character/temperament is identical. If one twin is an extrovert by nature, the other will be too.

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## Vallicanus

> Really ? You guarantee it. Then you obviously don't know much about history. Rome had a population of approximately 1.5 million (some claim even more) in the first century. Its population gradually fell during the late Empire and the Middle Ages. In the early 15th century Rome had barely 17,000 inhabitants. In other words it lost 99% of its "golden age" population. Nowadays Rome has over 3.5 million inhabitants, many of whom came from all over Italy (and abroad) over the last few centuries. So please explain again how can modern Romans are descended from the ancient population of the city.


Indeed.

Also at one point during the Gothic-Byzantine Wars Rome was completely depopulated.

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## Vallicanus

> Was that the guy who lost Crete to the Ottomans and then essentially made a ruin out of the Parthenon by bombing the crap out of it? :)


Venice needed German mercenaries to re-capture the Morea.

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## Fire Haired

> I didn't say that personality traits are inherited. I said character traits. That's very different. Character is the innate, non-acquired part of personality. To make it easier to understand, let's take dogs as an example. Each breed of dog has its own character, although each individual dog has its own personality. Regarding character, Golden Retrievers have a very sociable and kind nature. Pitbulls are mean and aggressive. Newfoundlands and St. Bernards are impassible, while poodle and many other small dogs are excitable and bark all the time. German Shepherds make excellent watchdogs, while Dachshunds are far too playful and immature to be of any use in that regard. All these character traits are set in their genes. 
> 
> Its the same for humans except that we are not so clearly divided into breeds. But some traits do apply to whole ethnic groups. Germanic and East Asian people can be considered diligent and disciplined. Celtic people are far more individualistic than any Asian or African people. Arabs are proud and confident people, while East Asians often lack self-confidence. Greeks and Italians are outgoing and talkative, while Finns and Siberians are far more reserved, shy and taciturn. I could continue for hours, but you get the idea.
> 
> Personality is by definition the traits associated with a person, and therefore vary between individuals even within the same ethnic group. Actually even identical twins have different personalities, while their genetic character/temperament is identical. If one twin is an extrovert by nature, the other will be too.


that is what i thought u meant i defintley dont think it is in Germans DNA to be disciplined and diligent. Those are just traits formed from modern German culture. Just because Romans where so stern does not mean modern Italians need to be too. Humans are so related to each other unlike breeds of dogs that we dont have diff character traits. A good example is modern French and ancient Gauls two completely diff characters. It is not in blacks DNA to be more violent just because they are in modern western culture. it is because the place they have been put in ancient west African tribes where less or as violent as ancient Europeans.

i think we are born knowing what human nature is and human character. people are born with diff characters but i defintley don't think diff ethnic groups have their own characters. If u think about in the whole Human family tree. Italians and Germans are extremely related they both mainly descend from the same group of people that came to Europe over 35,000ybp they both have some R1b L11/P310 Indo European in them. They should have the same character traits according to what u are saying.

what about eskomes are they diligent like east Asians and what about the ancient Huns or Mongolian tribes they dont fit the idea of a typical east Asian. we mainly only hear about Chinese Japanese but their are tons of east Asian looking people all over Asia and Canada and almost all of them are tribal some still stone age. Their character is nothing like civilized east asians. Native Americans are in the same Mongloid family as Chinese do they have the same character traits.

Also what genetic evidence is there that Italians and Greeks are related at all ancient Greece and Rome does not been they are close relatives. Their only similarity is both have very high amounts of mid eastern which came in greco roman age. Their European side is almost completely unrelated. The west Mediterranean I2a1a split from east European I2a1b about 15,000-20,000ybp i think and that is where Italians and Greeks get their European side from. I know like 2% of Italians have I2a1a but that is just a direct paternal lineage they get their european blood from those people who lived in Paloithic Itay. Then later migrations with non European farmers came. Greeks European side is in the same family as Ukrainians it is eastern European. There is no such thing as the Mediterranean race or anything like that people in the Mediterranean have not been able to have alot of contact till just 3,000-4,000ybp. The Mediterranean is just full of unrelated people from Europe, mid east, and north Africa who have mixed like in the last 3,000 years but orignalley unrelated.

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## zanipolo

> Venice needed German mercenaries to re-capture the Morea.


yes, they employed brunswickers , you can read the full campaign 
Venice, Austria and the Turks in the seventeenth century....by Setton

Every state employed "mercenaries"

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## zanipolo

> Really ? You guarantee it. Then you obviously don't know much about history. Rome had a population of approximately 1.5 million (some claim even more) in the first century. Its population gradually fell during the late Empire and the Middle Ages. In the early 15th century Rome had barely 17,000 inhabitants. In other words it lost 99% of its "golden age" population. Nowadays Rome has over 3.5 million inhabitants, many of whom came from all over Italy (and abroad) over the last few centuries. So please explain again how can modern Romans are descended from the ancient population of the city.


I agree, then the question is 

What was ancient Roman haplotypes ..........it must have been a marker which is still diluted
I have seen that it was E , but I am unsure.

I have also seen, that the Romans branched out of Etruscan and was ruled by etruscans for a very long time.

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## Wilhelm

> Really ? You guarantee it. Then you obviously don't know much about history. Rome had a population of approximately 1.5 million (some claim even more) in the first century. Its population gradually fell during the late Empire and the Middle Ages. In the early 15th century Rome had barely 17,000 inhabitants. In other words it lost 99% of its "golden age" population. Nowadays Rome has over 3.5 million inhabitants, many of whom came from all over Italy (and abroad) over the last few centuries. So please explain again how can modern Romans are descended from the ancient population of the city.


ancient Romans was not a population restricted to Rome, but the whole of the Italic peninsula, also in times of ancient Romans the city of Rome attracted people from all over "Italy". You are too simplistic minded I think.

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## Maciamo

> ancient Romans was not a population restricted to Rome, but the whole of the Italic peninsula, also in times of ancient Romans the city of Rome attracted people from all over "Italy". You are too simplistic minded I think.


Based on what grounds ? If you include the Italian peninsula you might as well include the whole Roman Empire. 

What I mean by ancient Romans are _only_ the descendants of Latins and Etruscans who lived in Rome and the Latium during the kingdom and early republic (until about 300 BCE), before the state started its policy of conquests and expansion. Even at the time of Caesar most Roman patricians descended from these old families. With the empire the Roman state became very cosmopolitan and power progressively slid away from the old Roman families. The senate and administration became increasingly cosmopolitan in the 1st century, and by the 2nd century non-Romans were elected as emperors.

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## Fire Haired

> Based on what grounds ? If you include the Italian peninsula you might as well include the whole Roman Empire. 
> 
> What I mean by ancient Romans are _only_ the descendants of Latins and Etruscans who lived in Rome and the Latium during the kingdom and early republic (until about 300 BCE), before the state started its policy of conquests and expansion. Even at the time of Caesar most Roman patricians descended from these old families. With the empire the Roman state became very cosmopolitan and power progressively slid away from the old Roman families. The senate and administration became increasingly cosmopolitan in the 1st century, and by the 2nd century non-Romans were elected as emperors.



the high ranking people dont exactly change the genetics of the whole population. U know alot about the genetics of all of Europe including Italy because u made that article about it. Dont u know that Italiens are without a doubt descended from Italians in the Roman period and that Romans would be classified as most like Italian people based on their Y DNA and aust dna. Only major source of ancestry in iTaly that came in Greco Roman age was mid eastern that is why south Italy has way more southwest asian and west asian in globe13 test than north italy it did not come in the Neolithic it came from the meditreaen boat people like Phoenicians. 

I cant believe where even debating this. Romans where the same as modern central Italiens. Also i think Sardine people are Italian but they dont have Indo European iron age mix which brought more north euro aust dna or mid eastern mix that came in greco roman age. they do have some mid eastern that came in Neolithic. I think that is also why Sardine are closest relatives to Otzie who was a farmer in alps Italy 5,300ybp.




> What I mean by ancient Romans are _only_ the descendants of Latins and Etruscans who lived in Rome and the Latium during the kingdom and early republic (until about 300 BCE)


just like modern Italians well i gues many modern Italians descend from other italic tribes.

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## Maciamo

> I cant believe where even debating this. Romans where the same as modern central Italiens.


So you are saying that five centuries immigration to ancient Rome, foreign invaders (Goths, Vandals, Lombards, Franks, Byzantines, Germans), then the repopulation of Rome from the 15th century onwards had absolutely no effect on the genetic make-up of modern Rome ?  :Rolleyes: 




> Also i think Sardine people are Italian but they dont have Indo European iron age mix which brought more north euro aust dna or mid eastern mix that came in greco roman age. they do have some mid eastern that came in Neolithic. I think that is also why Sardine are closest relatives to Otzie who was a farmer in alps Italy 5,300ybp.


I told you before that sardines are a species of fish. Anyway what does that have to do with our discussion ?

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## Wilhelm

> So you are saying that five centuries immigration to ancient Rome, foreign invaders (Goths, Vandals, Lombards, Franks, Byzantines, Germans), then the repopulation of Rome from the 15th century onwards had absolutely no effect on the genetic make-up of modern Rome ?


These invaders were a small minority. And the repopulations were made by people genetically similar (ie. surrounding regions of Rome).

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## Nobody1

Looks like an expert discussion;

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## LeBrok

> Looks like an expert discussion;


Where are you when we need your help. :)

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## Fire Haired

> So you are saying that five centuries immigration to ancient Rome, foreign invaders (Goths, Vandals, Lombards, Franks, Byzantines, Germans), then the repopulation of Rome from the 15th century onwards had absolutely no effect on the genetic make-up of modern Rome ?


 How much Germanic Y DNA is in Italy today maybe 5% in northern Italy. The Germans made a very little genetic input into Italy. Italians have over 40% R1b S28 which came with italic languages 3,000-3,200ybp. They are defintley not mainly from post Roman people. I know there have been many post Roman conquering and migrations into Italy. Now that we have DNA we know those Germanic people or post Roman people made very little effect on Italy. Modern Italians fit the phiscal features of ancient Romans too based on their dark hair and eyes Romans said themselves. They dark haired unlike Gauls around the alps and Germans. I cant belive where even arguing this. Romans where defintley Italian that does not mean there are many full blooded Roman descendants(i bet could be some) but Romans where Italian they where also a mix of of Italian people. I wonder since Italian descends from Latin like Spanish French, Romanian. That some Italian surnames might trace back to ancient Romans or orignated in ancient Rome i know there have been alot alot of cultural changes in Italy since then but there might be some.

I doubt we will never know if people in the city Rome today are mainly descended of the very first Romans because they where typical Italians if another central Italian group migrates into Italy we wont be able to tell because they have the same Y DNA haplogroups and aust. DNA. Romans in 700bc where probably not the main ancestors of Romans in 1AD and same with Romans in 500AD. But modern Romans are central Italians just like ancient Romans so they basically are the same people.





> I told you before that sardines are a species of fish. Anyway what does that have to do with our discussion ?


I agree they are not Italian they orignally did not speak a Italic language, their aust dna is differnt, They have been a seperate people from the rest of Italy for at least 3,000-6,000 years and techbnicalley are not a Italic people because of language and culture.They had to get to Sardine from Italy probably 5,000ybp. They have 36% I2a1a which is western Mediterranean Paloithic Italy also has I2a1a. Also Sardine have the highest amount of Mediterranean in the globe13 test med in Europe almost defintley came with G2a farmers(does not matter if they have only 15% G2a that is just a direct lineage not full ancestry). 

They are the closest modern relatives to Otzie the ice man a farmer from Alps Italy who died 5,300ybp. I think they are defintley from Neolithic Italians. My next argument is modern Italians mainly descend from Neolithic Italians but have admixture from Italic tribes who came from the alps and mid easterns from around syria who came in the Greco Roman age through the Mediterranean. I think the base of Italians ancestry is Neolithic Sardine/Otzie like people. Sardine defintley in some way are connected to Italians because that is probably where the orignally came from.

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## Drac II

> These invaders were a small minority. And the repopulations were made by people genetically similar (ie. surrounding regions of Rome).


The Germanic and Hunnish invaders in Italy were indeed just a minority, like it usually happens with military invasions, but not so in the case of the immigrants, slaves and freedmen of Roman times, specially from the Eastern parts of the empire (Egypt, the Levant, Anatolia/Turkey, Greece, the Balkans.) Even Roman writers (Seneca, Tacitus, Juvenal, etc.) commented about the large numbers of these foreigners in Italy.

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## Vallicanus

> The Germanic and Hunnish invaders in Italy were indeed just a minority, like it usually happens with military invasions, but not so in the case of the immigrants, slaves and freedmen of Roman times, specially from the Eastern parts of the empire (Egypt, the Levant, Anatolia/Turkey, Greece, the Balkans.) Even Roman writers (Seneca, Tacitus, Juvenal, etc.) commented about the large numbers of these foreigners in Italy.


Exactly so.

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## Nobody1



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## Camillvs

Well gee Maciamo, we love you too!!!

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## Camillvs

Pienso igual. Es de mente muy simplista. / I agree with Wilhem.

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## RosenBlues

> Many character traits are highly inheritable. Cats don't make dogs or vice versa. So how is it possible that modern Italians descend from ancient Romans ?


First, I think this is a false attribution fallacy. Most psychologists and scientists are still debating whether character traits are results of nature or nurture. Second, the use of the cats and dogs analogy is another fallacy (cant remember which kind though) because they are two different species. Perhaps a better analogy would be a soldier does not usually end up producing works of art (at least not in this day and age). 

Though in broad and vague manner, the Italians haven't changed that much. With the Popes, they lead the Crusades and led the age of the Renaissance - so they maintained the militaristic and artistic traits from their Roman times. Perhaps we can't perceive those characteristics in contemporary times due to 'being too close to the origin' if you get what I mean. ^^ Though you can say corruption among Italians haven't ended since Roman times.

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## Templar

> Though in broad and vague manner, the Italians haven't changed that much. With the Popes, they lead the Crusades and led the age of the Renaissance - so they maintained the militaristic and artistic traits from their Roman times. Perhaps we can't perceive those characteristics in contemporary times due to 'being too close to the origin' if you get what I mean. ^^ Though you can say corruption among Italians haven't ended since Roman times.


Germanic people (and especially the Normans)were far more over-represented in the Crusades than Italians lol. 

First Crusade leadership:

*Godfrey of Bouillon*(Frankish knight born in the very edge of North-Eastern France) 

*Raymond IV of Toulouse(*Frankish knight)

*Baldwin of* *Boulogne*(Frankish knight born in modern-day Belgium)

*Bohemond I* (Norman Knight from Sicily)

*Robert Curthose (*Norman knight from Normandy)

Third Crusade:

*Philip II of France* (Frankish King born in North-Eastern France)

*Richard I of England* (Norman King)

*Frederick I Barbarossa* (Holy Roman Emperor)

I won't mention the leadership of all the other crusades because they weren't as important or successful as the first and third ones.

----------


## Nobody1

> Germanic people (and especially the Normans)were far more over-represented in the Crusades than Italians lol. 
> 
> First Crusade leadership:
> 
> *Godfrey of Bouillon*(Frankish knight born in the very edge of North-Eastern France) 
> 
> *Raymond IV of Toulouse(*Frankish knight)
> 
> *Baldwin of* *Boulogne*(Frankish knight born in modern-day Belgium)
> ...


And who do you think was in the armies of *Bohemund* and* Tancred* (First Crusade) - 

*Fulcher of Chartres*_ -_ Historia Hierosolymitana
[First Crusade]
_Franci, Flandri, Frisi, Galli, Allobroges, Lotharingi, Alemanni, Baioarii, Normanni, Angli, Scoti, Aquitani, Itali, Daci, Apuli, Iberi, Britones, Graeci, Armeni?_

Lombards and Apulians were heavily recruited by the Normans in the South; 
at every expedition against the Byzantines [_Dyrrachium 1091/Thessalonica 1085_]; Crusades; Islamic Sicily etc.

*Ioannes Skylitzes* - 
(_Normannic conquest of South Italy vs. Byzantines_)
_Michael was defeated and lost the better part of his army, he shamefully taking refuge in Cannae. Crippled like this he was none the wiser for his wound.....took back into battle his defeated forces together with the Pisidians and Lycaonians who make up the unit of the foederati and fell on the enemy at a place called Horai. Again he was severely defeated by the Franks (Normans) who had now allied with themselves a considerable host of Italians living around the river Po and in the foothills of the Alps._

Thats just the Normannic campaigns look up _
Guelph and Ghibellines_ for the Lombards on their own;

----------


## Templar

> And who do you think was in the armies of *Bohemund* and* Tancred* (First Crusade) -


I am well aware that many Italians participated in the Crusades, but what I was responding to was the claim that they were LEAD by Italians, which is false. Even the Pope who started the Crusades, *Pope Urban II*​, was born in North-Eastern France.

----------


## Nobody1

> I am well aware that many Italians participated in the Crusades, but what I was responding to was the claim that they were LEAD by Italians, which is false. Even the Pope who started the Crusades, *Pope Urban II*​, was born in North-Eastern France.


Thats true; 
none of the leaders were Italians (_Lombard/Apulian_);
i think there was one Bishop from Lombardy with a peasant army 
- but killed in Anatolia against Seljuq Turks;

----------


## Templar

> Thats true; 
> none of the leaders were Italians (_Lombard/Apulian_);
> i think there was one Bishop from Lombardy with a peasant army 
> - but killed in Anatolia against Seljuq Turks;


I am glad that we are finally getting along pretty well lol.

----------


## Vallicanus

> Thats true; 
> none of the leaders were Italians (_Lombard/Apulian_);
> i think there was one Bishop from Lombardy with a peasant army 
> - but killed in Anatolia against Seljuq Turks;


The only important Italian Crusading leaders were the Montferrat (Monferrato) dynasty from Piedmont who may have mixed with the French.

----------


## Nobody1

> I am glad that we are finally getting along pretty well lol.

----------


## Noman

First off the great works were done by Greek slaves who were much smarter than most of their masters. Second, the upper class was all etruscan and nothing to do with the rest, where all the genius of leadership came from. Thirdly they were forced to rise up to the occasion several times, which is what led to their discipline and cohesiveness for a long time. That combined with a few brilliant leaders of the caesar line is what propelled them to the top.

Then they had the problem of too much success, a huge proletariat on the dole, an ever decaying and more dissolute and outof touch upper class.

And of course it's been almost completely depopulated and replaced in the north. Then once again. Then a couple times in the south and struggles with the guelfs and ghibbolines that tore apart any last shred of cohesiveness. Then the venetians and genoans running everything in such a way as to turn everyone against each other and undermine christianity to boot, and taking on so many mercenaries again they practically speaking changed the character of the country again.

And of course the delightful rule of the duke of anjou, fallowed by the italian vespers and rule by aragon.

So no there's cohesion of any kind, and probably zero genetic continuity, and the great works of romans weren't due to the local italian population anyway.

----------


## Angela

> First off the great works were done by Greek slaves who were much smarter than most of their masters. Second, the upper class was all etruscan and nothing to do with the rest, where all the genius of leadership came from. Thirdly they were forced to rise up to the occasion several times, which is what led to their discipline and cohesiveness for a long time. That combined with a few brilliant leaders of the caesar line is what propelled them to the top.
> 
> Then they had the problem of too much success, a huge proletariat on the dole, an ever decaying and more dissolute and outof touch upper class.
> 
> And of course it's been almost completely depopulated and replaced in the north. Then once again. Then a couple times in the south and struggles with the guelfs and ghibbolines that tore apart any last shred of cohesiveness. Then the venetians and genoans running everything in such a way as to turn everyone against each other and undermine christianity to boot, and taking on so many mercenaries again they practically speaking changed the character of the country again.
> 
> And of course the delightful rule of the duke of anjou, fallowed by the italian vespers and rule by aragon.
> 
> So no there's cohesion of any kind, and probably zero genetic continuity, and the great works of romans weren't due to the local italian population anyway.



The Etruscan kings once ruled Rome, but were kicked out. The Romans absorbed the Etruscans; notably, for example, we know that Claudius married an Etruscan noblewoman, but that hardly means the Romans were really just Etruscans. It's very clear that the Latin clans were still alive and well at that period, and that these peoples (the Etruscans and the Romans) spoke different languages, from totally different language families, and that the Indo-European Latin language prevailed. 

As to the precise genetic differences, what I would say is that we don't have any "Roman" dna of that period, or any period for that matter, and as I've posted before, the only Etruscan dna we have is some HVRI values which could just as well have been in place since the Neolithic. So, everything is basically conjecture. The Italici, of which the Romans were one group, may have been significantly different from the Etruscans when they first arrived in the peninsula; we just don't know. What seems obvious, however, even if both groups came from elsewhere during the Bronze Age, or early Iron Age, (for the Etruscans there is absolutely no archaeological evidence of a mass migration at this time, so it would have to have been a small group that formed an elite) is that they would have mingled with the pre-existing population, and then with each other. 

As to "replacement" in Italy, the actual science doesn't support any such hypothesis; quite the contrary. Rather, it paints a picture of continuity since about the middle of the first millennium B.C., a continuity that is rare in Europe. I don't know why so many people seem to be unaware of the latest research using IBD analysis. 
Ralph and Coop et al: http://www.plosbiology.org/article/i...l.pbio.1001555
The discussion at Discovery: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gn...1#.Uhef6T_pxdE

This doesn't mean, of course, as Razib takes pains to point out, that there wasn't significant population substructure dating from that time, because there was, owing perhaps the most to the Celtic migrations in the north and the Greek colonization in the south. 

It also doesn't mean that Italians don't all cluster together, however, as indeed they do, and which can be seem on any academic PCA plot. You don't have all these Italians clustering in Greece or Spain or France or Switzerland, the way that the lines are blurred between, say, the Low Countries and England, or the Scandinavian countries and England. You can go all the way back to Lao et al, and his finding that one of the major breaks in the European cline (another one being near Finland) can be located at the Alps. Within Italy itself, there is a lesser break in the cline just south of Rome, which may indeed be due to the Greek colonizations which I mentioned, but which could also be a result of some small influences from the Moorish kingdoms of Sicily and the southern part of the peninsula, and then to the fact that these provinces formed part of the general area of The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies for so long, and therefore what gene flow was experienced was largely confined to that area until perhaps fifty years ago. Despite the delusions of the followers of Lega Nord, there is no genetic evidence of any distinct population of "Padanians" who live north of the Po. Rather, except for the slight break south of Rome, Italian genetics is basically clinal except for some small genetic isolates.

What has to be remembered is that Italy has maintained high population densities since the Neolithic. (more Cardial in some areas, and more Danubian in others, but any rate, it does not seem that it experienced the type of population crash that took place in the LBK, or even in the Balkans) The Italici then appear all over the peninsula and into Sicily, with their new Indo-European languages. On top of those layers, you have the migrations of the first millennium B.C. of the Greeks into the south, and the "Celtici" or "Galli" into the north. (Whether they were substantially different genetically from the earlier Italici or the mysterious Liguri is a whole other discussion that I don't think can be answered at this time. What should be remembered, however, is that if the historical sources are correct, many of these late "Gallic" migrations ended in slavery for the invaders, while some of them, like the Boi who settled Bologna, left for Dacia or France. I don't mean to imply that some of them did not remain, but I think their influence can be overblown.) Following this, you have a concerted policy by Rome to settle all parts of Gallia Cisalpina, which means basically Italy from the Alps to the Rubicon with colony after colony of Roman settlers. The Romans knew what they were about in terms of pacifying and unifying the peninsula.

That is basically the ethnogenesis, so far as I currently understand it. What the Ralph and Coop study shows, if they are correct, and nobody seems to have challenged them yet, is that there were no further *major* gene flows into Italy, with the possible exception of some from the Moors in Sicily in particular, and perhaps in lesser degree in some other areas of the south. The Germanic invasions, seem to have had little influence autosomally, and the Slavic ones virtually none. (They maintain that the same is true for the Iberian peninsula) If people are looking for total population replacement, they need to look to the population history of northern Europe. 

As to cultural matters, there are numerous full length books and scholarly papers on the intertwined cultures of Rome, Etruria and Greece that would clarify matters for anyone interested in the subject.

----------


## Noman

> The Etruscan kings once ruled Rome, but were kicked out. The Romans absorbed the Etruscans; notably, for example, we know that Claudius married an Etruscan noblewoman, but that hardly means the Romans were really just Etruscans. It's very clear that the Latin clans were still alive and well at that period, and that these peoples (the Etruscans and the Romans) spoke different languages, from totally different language families, and that the Indo-European Latin language prevailed.


But Julius Caesar was actually etruscan and therefore so was Octavian, and they were the ones who made rome what it was. And they weren't the only ones. They had red hair, how much like a modern roman is that?




> As to the precise genetic differences, what I would say is that we don't have any "Roman" dna of that period, or any period for that matter, and as I've posted before, the only Etruscan dna we have is some HVRI values which could just as well have been in place since the Neolithic. So, everything is basically conjecture. The Italici, of which the Romans were one group, may have been significantly different from the Etruscans when they first arrived in the peninsula; we just don't know. What seems obvious, however, even if both groups came from elsewhere during the Bronze Age, or early Iron Age, (for the Etruscans there is absolutely no archaeological evidence of a mass migration at this time, so it would have to have been a small group that formed an elite) is that they would have mingled with the pre-existing population, and then with each other.


We pretty much know that etruscans were neolithic farmers and we pretty much know that G haplogroup was neolithic farmers, and we have a fully G tribe that claims they were etruscans who got separated from their fellows. So that's about as wrapped up as it can be given the time.




> As to "replacement" in Italy, the actual science doesn't support any such hypothesis; quite the contrary. Rather, it paints a picture of continuity since about the middle of the first millennium B.C., a continuity that is rare in Europe. I don't know why so many people seem to be unaware of the latest research using IBD analysis. 
> Ralph and Coop et al: http://www.plosbiology.org/article/i...l.pbio.1001555
> The discussion at Discovery: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gn...1#.Uhef6T_pxdE


Ah population genetics. Long story short they are basically saying that the people there today are like themselves and not like other people who are elsewhere, but if there's something which was lost it won't measure that, and that's the only thing that matters. And problem is, simply looking at haplogroups in italy says a completely different story. Or knowing enough history for that matter.

http://italydna.blogspot.com/2007/01/r1b-in-italy.html

Spot the normans, spot the goths, spot the jews, spot the arabs. None of those groups were part of original rome.




> This doesn't mean, of course, as Razib takes pains to point out, that there wasn't significant population substructure dating from that time, because there was, owing perhaps the most to the Celtic migrations in the north and the Greek colonization in the south. 
> 
> It also doesn't mean that Italians don't all cluster together, however, as indeed they do, and which can be seem on any academic PCA plot. You don't have all these Italians clustering in Greece or Spain or France or Switzerland, the way that the lines are blurred between, say, the Low Countries and England, or the Scandinavian countries and England. You can go all the way back to Lao et al, and his finding that one of the major breaks in the European cline (another one being near Finland) can be located at the Alps. Within Italy itself, there is a lesser break in the cline just south of Rome, which may indeed be due to the Greek colonizations which I mentioned, but which could also be a result of some small influences from the Moorish kingdoms of Sicily and the southern part of the peninsula, and then to the fact that these provinces formed part of the general area of The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies for so long, and therefore what gene flow was experienced was largely confined to that area until perhaps fifty years ago. Despite the delusions of the followers of Lega Nord, there is no genetic evidence of any distinct population of "Padanians" who live north of the Po. Rather, except for the slight break south of Rome, Italian genetics is basically clinal except for some small genetic isolates.
> 
> What has to be remembered is that Italy has maintained high population densities since the Neolithic. (more Cardial in some areas, and more Danubian in others, but any rate, it does not seem that it experienced the type of population crash that took place in the LBK, or even in the Balkans) The Italici then appear all over the peninsula and into Sicily, with their new Indo-European languages. On top of those layers, you have the migrations of the first millennium B.C. of the Greeks into the south, and the "Celtici" or "Galli" into the north. (Whether they were substantially different genetically from the earlier Italici or the mysterious Liguri is a whole other discussion that I don't think can be answered at this time. What should be remembered, however, is that if the historical sources are correct, many of these late "Gallic" migrations ended in slavery for the invaders, while some of them, like the Boi who settled Bologna, left for Dacia or France. I don't mean to imply that some of them did not remain, but I think their influence can be overblown.) Following this, you have a concerted policy by Rome to settle all parts of Gallia Cisalpina, which means basically Italy from the Alps to the Rubicon with colony after colony of Roman settlers. The Romans knew what they were about in terms of pacifying and unifying the peninsula.
> 
> That is basically the ethnogenesis, so far as I currently understand it. What the Ralph and Coop study shows, if they are correct, and nobody seems to have challenged them yet, is that there were no further *major* gene flows into Italy, with the possible exception of some from the Moors in Sicily in particular, and perhaps in lesser degree in some other areas of the south. The Germanic invasions, seem to have had little influence autosomally, and the Slavic ones virtually none. (They maintain that the same is true for the Iberian peninsula) If people are looking for total population replacement, they need to look to the population history of northern Europe. 
> 
> As to cultural matters, there are numerous full length books and scholarly papers on the intertwined cultures of Rome, Etruria and Greece that would clarify matters for anyone interested in the subject.


So the invaders who had similar haplogroup to most of the invadees didn't completely change their makeup? And the invaders who'd been invaded by the invadees and vice versa for 3k years or so had similar autosomal dna? That's not a big shock.

However like I said, and is the case in monarchies and empires we know about, it was a small minority running things and that minority has never been a big percentage of the whole.

Furthermore the whole of mediterranean has undoubtedly crept in its sutosomal genetics. Especially towards darker hair and skin to protect from the sun.

----------


## Noman

In short you can make a case there's similarity to what rome was when it fell, which is largely because it imprinted itself all over the mediterranean anyway. Not much of a case it's similar to when it started, though.

----------


## Noman

Also you are basically taking distances in directions towards other sources. When you add all these outside forces up you always get basically neutrality unless the migration was unbalanced. 

So the population genetics doesn't mean anything, in general. That is you can't make any statement with it based on the data alone. You could make a statement like "this group migrated here" because of similarities but even then it's just impossible to say whether it moved there or the other guys moved without more contexted than that. you can only say there is some relation, not what it is, and even that is sketchy. It could well be a different group is inside the groups you are comparing and neither one ever had contact with each other.

And if your "markers" for example are something to do with cold resistance then you could mistakenly find poles are 100% neanderthal as happened in some other study.

----------


## Sile

> But Julius Caesar was actually etruscan and therefore so was Octavian, and they were the ones who made rome what it was. And they weren't the only ones. They had red hair, how much like a modern roman is that?
> 
> 
> We pretty much know that etruscans were neolithic farmers and we pretty much know that G haplogroup was neolithic farmers, and we have a fully G tribe that claims they were etruscans who got separated from their fellows. So that's about as wrapped up as it can be given the time.
> 
> 
> Ah population genetics. Long story short they are basically saying that the people there today are like themselves and not like other people who are elsewhere, but if there's something which was lost it won't measure that, and that's the only thing that matters. And problem is, simply looking at haplogroups in italy says a completely different story. Or knowing enough history for that matter.
> 
> http://italydna.blogspot.com/2007/01/r1b-in-italy.html
> ...


your confusion on modern nationalistic boundaries is confusing you between the ralph and coop paper and your 2007 paper. basically IF italy never formed that data is 100% accurate.....so the basis is that the different people in Italy have always been who they are......

makes you think if Italy ever needed to be formed.

----------


## Noman

If you could say it ever did form. Like european union all it seemed to do was piss people off and ruin many of the local economies which did just fine til then.

----------


## Angela

> But Julius Caesar was actually etruscan and therefore so was Octavian, and they were the ones who made rome what it was. And they weren't the only ones. They had red hair, how much like a modern roman is that?
> 
> 
> We pretty much know that etruscans were neolithic farmers and we pretty much know that G haplogroup was neolithic farmers, and we have a fully G tribe that claims they were etruscans who got separated from their fellows. So that's about as wrapped up as it can be given the time.
> 
> 
> Ah population genetics. Long story short they are basically saying that the people there today are like themselves and not like other people who are elsewhere, but if there's something which was lost it won't measure that, and that's the only thing that matters. And problem is, simply looking at haplogroups in italy says a completely different story. Or knowing enough history for that matter.
> 
> http://italydna.blogspot.com/2007/01/r1b-in-italy.html
> ...



The gens Julii were not Etruscan...repeating it over and over again won't make it so. Perhaps you are confusing Caesar with Cicero, who did indeed claim some partial Etruscan ancestry. Of course, by Caesar's time, there had been a lot of mingling between Romans and Etruscans, and a strictly Etruscan culture had disappeared...only a few priests still spoke or could read Etruscan. Btw, if anything, thanks to the machinations of Livia Augusta in terms of their marriages, the ruling family were mostly of the ancient gens of the Claudii. 

As to the paper you cited, it has to do with y dna, not autosomal dna, and, in addition, it is wildly out of date. In general, in terms of y dna, I'm afraid that you vastly overestimate the importance of y dna haplotypes for "identity" purposes in a modern context. Your y dna line is only one of many lines that form part of your ancestry. Yes, certain y lines have certain distinctive distributions, but you cannot go from that to identifying someone "ethnically" by their y dna, or mt dna signature, for that matter. That's vastly too simplistic, in my opinion, in terms of modern populations, and I think it's even simplistic in terms of pre-historical populations.

Just as an example, while a lot of British men carry y dna "R1b" signatures, you also have British men who are E-V13, or J2a, or J1 or R1a, or any number of others, including the Yorkshire man with the ancient African haplotype that made the news. That man is no less British than someone carrying U-106. The specific autosomal make-up of a small group of men moving into a region could disappear very quickly from the autosomal make-up of their male descendants, even while the y signature is passed on. 

In terms of Italian genetics, you could do a dna test on a U-152 man from Brescia, and one from Sicily, and even if the subclades are the same, their autosomal make-up will be slightly different, and each man will almost certainly better match other people from his area. Likewise, if you take an L-21 man from Bologna, and an E-M81 man from the same area, who perhaps descends from some stray North African legionnaire who retired to Bologna 2,000 years ago, they will be very similar in terms of general genetic make-up.

That's not to say that uniparental markers don't have their uses, in cases, for example, where someone is trying to track down a birth father by using y STR's, or for help in understanding the peopling of Europe. In the latter case, however, we have a long way to go in terms of applying specific haplotypes to specific "tribes", if you will. It may be fun to speculate wildly about these things, but it shouldn't be taken too seriously, in my opinion. 

@Sile,
I'm afraid that might be overstating it a bit. They're not saying that the people from the various regions of Italy have all been in place since time immemorial. For one thing, the current state of the science means they can't go back reliably much further than the Bronze Age. For another, it's clear from their graphics that they found evidence of gene flow into Italy in the period 2300 to about 1500 B.C. It's just that there wasn't as much into certain parts of Europe as others. If you go to Figure 5 in the main body of the study, you'll see what I mean. They also aren't saying that there hasn't been gene flow between neighboring regions in Italy. It just hasn't been enough to change the pattern that was already in place by around 300 or so B.C. before the actual period of the Empire. This is in stark contrast to what happened in central and northern Europe, where there was a lot of migration and gene flow because of the Germanic and later the Slavic migrations. Even the Balkans haven't maintianed their specific genetic character the way that Italy has done. 

Also, nothing in their study contradicts the fact that the break in the cline at the Alps exists...someone from Brescia or Verona is going to cluster with Italians autosomally, not with the Swiss or Slovenes. You can even see that the people of the Ticino plot in Italy. The results on a dodecad analysis like K=12b of a person from Friuli are recognizably Italian; it's just that it is also clear that the person isn't a Tuscan or a Calabrian/Sicilian. One of the main points of the paper from an Italian genetics point of view is that there is more sub-structure in Italy than in other European countries, and that there is a definite north/south, or perhaps northwest/southeast cline. Not, of course, that substructure doesn't exist in other countries. For example, Ralph and Coop specifically state that they found noteworthy substructure in France. They didn't see the same level of substructure in Spain. It's all a question of degree.

----------


## Nobody1

*Charles Loring Brace* - The Races of the Old World (1863)
_The common Roman type, still seen among the peasantry, according to Dr. Wiseman, is a large, flat head, a low wide forehead, a face broad and square, short thick neck, and a short broad figure, such as is found in many of the antique representations of the Roman soldier._ 


person of* Latium* (_Central Italy_) - *Alpinoid* - [_Rassengeschichte der Menschheit_]


person of* Marche* (_Central Italy_) -* Dinaric* - [_Rassengeschichte der Menschheit_]



*Augustus* and *Julius Caesar* -typical _Brachycephalic_ Alpinoid/Dinarid (*Medit.* element) of the Italic Romans 



Til this day -
Modern day Italians are Anthropologically of the Caucasoid sub-races - *Mediterranid / Alpinoid / Dianrid*

*J. Deniker* - _Ibero-Insular_ _= Mediterranean race_ / _sub-Adriatic_ _= Dinaric (+Noric type)_ / _Cevenole = Alpine race_



North Italians are more _Brachycephalic_ [Alpinoid/Dinarid] 
South Italians are more _Dolichocephalic_ [Mediterranid]

----------


## Nobody1

Modern day Italians are genetically (_haplogroups and admixture_) *diverse* from each other;
Not surprising since Italy only exists since 1861 
+ Historically based _Diverse pre-Roman Italy / Diverse Roman Italy / Diverse post-Roman Italy_


_DiGaetano et al 2012
_http://www.plosone.org/article/info:...l.pone.0043759
_
_*Figure 2.* SNP-Based PC of 1,014 individuals from the Italian dataset. 
_A._ A Scatter Plot of the Italian population of the first two principal components obtained via R software (_prcomp_). 
Individuals included belong to:*
Northern Italy*: black dots / *Central Italy*: red dots* / Southern Italy*: green dots / *Sardinian*: blue dots. 
_B._ Italian population without the Sardinian-projected scatter plot of the first two principal components obtained via the R software (_prcomp_) 


_Nelis et al 2009_
http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0005472



Italians didnt greatly inter-mix with each other 
- over the last 1,500 years (_since end of Roman Empire_)
manifesting the clear diversity

_Coop & Ralph et al 2013_ 
http://www.plosbiology.org/article/i...l.pbio.1001555
_Spain and Portugal showing very few common ancestors with other populations over the last 2,500 years. However, the rate of IBD sharing within the peninsula is much higher than within Italy—during the last 1,500 years the Iberian peninsula shares fewer than two genetic common ancestors with other populations, compared to roughly 30 per pair within the peninsula; Italians share on average only about eight with each other during this period._

----------


## Sile

> . 
> 
> @Sile,
> I'm afraid that might be overstating it a bit. They're not saying that the people from the various regions of Italy have all been in place since time immemorial. For one thing, the current state of the science means they can't go back reliably much further than the Bronze Age. For another, it's clear from their graphics that they found evidence of gene flow into Italy in the period 2300 to about 1500 B.C. It's just that there wasn't as much into certain parts of Europe as others. If you go to Figure 5 in the main body of the study, you'll see what I mean. They also aren't saying that there hasn't been gene flow between neighboring regions in Italy. It just hasn't been enough to change the pattern that was already in place by around 300 or so B.C. before the actual period of the Empire. This is in stark contrast to what happened in central and northern Europe, where there was a lot of migration and gene flow because of the Germanic and later the Slavic migrations. Even the Balkans haven't maintianed their specific genetic character the way that Italy has done. 
> 
> Also, nothing in their study contradicts the fact that the break in the cline at the Alps exists...someone from Brescia or Verona is going to cluster with Italians autosomally, not with the Swiss or Slovenes. You can even see that the people of the Ticino plot in Italy. The results on a dodecad analysis like K=12b of a person from Friuli are recognizably Italian; it's just that it is also clear that the person isn't a Tuscan or a Calabrian/Sicilian. One of the main points of the paper from an Italian genetics point of view is that there is more sub-structure in Italy than in other European countries, and that there is a definite north/south, or perhaps northwest/southeast cline. Not, of course, that substructure doesn't exist in other countries. For example, Ralph and Coop specifically state that they found noteworthy substructure in France. They didn't see the same level of substructure in Spain. It's all a question of degree.


Below is my dodecad K=12b, they change every 6 months .............it means little at this point in time. maybe after another 50000 additions , it might mean something
*Admix Results (sorted):*

*#*
*Population*
*Percent*

1
Atlantic_Med
35.87

2
North_European
28.04

3
Caucasus
20.98

4
Gedrosia
7.02

5
Southwest_Asian
6.23

6
Northwest_African
1.42

7
South_Asian
0.33

8
Sub_Saharan
0.1



*Single Population Sharing:*

*#*
*Population (source)*
*Distance*

1
N_Italian (Dodecad)
6.71

2
O_Italian (Dodecad)
9.26

3
North_Italian (HGDP)
9.88

4
TSI30 (Metspalu)
11.05

5
Tuscan (HGDP)
12.44

6
C_Italian (Dodecad)
14.46

7
Romanians (Behar)
14.96

8
Baleares (1000Genomes)
15.18

9
Galicia (1000Genomes)
15.63

10
Bulgarians (Yunusbayev)
15.66

11
Bulgarian (Dodecad)
15.66

12
French (HGDP)
16.22

13
French (Dodecad)
16.35



NOTE: O_Italian means ( info from dodecad), swiss, tyrol, slovenian, croatian, istrian and austrian Italians.

The BGA test via Doug is different in the sense it means more and he stated since I was 100% european and he went back 2200 years ( his max)that my line was already in the alps. In that case, was I from Italic lines, ......the greeks did not even name Italy by then. The issue of nationalizing these terms makes far greater issue than what is justified ( ie trouble)

Note: Even Ftdna -FF and 23andme has me at 100% european

The substructure in Italy clearly indicates the difference........imagine a scenario in Europe where no nations existed. Would that change your perspective of the areas of Europe?

----------


## Sile

> *Charles Loring Brace* - The Races of the Old World (1863)
> _The common Roman type, still seen among the peasantry, according to Dr. Wiseman, is a large, flat head, a low wide forehead, a face broad and square, short thick neck, and a short broad figure, such as is found in many of the antique representations of the Roman soldier._ 
> 
> 
> person of* Latium* (_Central Italy_) - *Alpinoid* - [_Rassengeschichte der Menschheit_]
> 
> 
> person of* Marche* (_Central Italy_) -* Dinaric* - [_Rassengeschichte der Menschheit_]
> 
> ...


the only one I am nearly identical to is the Augustus type.

Do these tests mean anything?
Would a mixed marriage of Northern italian with South italian or french or spanish etc make any difference in these features?

----------


## Nobody1

> the only one I am nearly identical to is the Augustus type.
> 
> Do these tests mean anything?
> Would a mixed marriage of Northern italian with South italian or french or spanish etc make any difference in these features?


All depends what Caucasoid _sub-race_ mixes with what Caucasoid _sub-race_;
Thats what matters Anthropologically;

----------


## Noman

> The gens Julii were not Etruscan...repeating it over and over again won't make it so. Perhaps you are confusing Caesar with Cicero, who did indeed claim some partial Etruscan ancestry. Of course, by Caesar's time, there had been a lot of mingling between Romans and Etruscans, and a strictly Etruscan culture had disappeared...only a few priests still spoke or could read Etruscan. Btw, if anything, thanks to the machinations of Livia Augusta in terms of their marriages, the ruling family were mostly of the ancient gens of the Claudii.


Well you can say they aren't as well, but considering he said himself he was descended from aenias and that we "know" after the fall of troy that the trojans founded the etruscan kingdom. So is it myth or not? I will take it since he said it himself it's partly true, that's his paternal country if nothing else. Cicero was etruscan in more recent times.

He's got red hair, he's got greek toe. His face shape is exact same as classic greeks. These are neanderthal traits that don't come from anywhere else. Meaning he is related to the classic greeks and trojans not to the commoners of italy. They had all those features, too, and modern etruscans have the seemingly highest level of neanderthal DNA as well.





> As to the paper you cited, it has to do with y dna, not autosomal dna, and, in addition, it is wildly out of date.


That's because y-dna actually means something. Autosomal DNA can say whatever you want it to say.




> In general, in terms of y dna, I'm afraid that you vastly overestimate the importance of y dna haplotypes for "identity" purposes in a modern context. Your y dna line is only one of many lines that form part of your ancestry.


And yet, that's the same logic that autosomal dna comparison has but there's a huge difference. The Y-DNA shows actual paternity. Very importantly it also shows time of origin, assortively speaking. So you can compare degrees of separation between lines, if not exact dates.

So it is indeed a good marker whereas autosomal means absolutely nothing, and can easily be used to tell some whoppers if you like (or even if you don't). You don't know what source it comes from or when! If you don't even know where or what time it originates how can you say anything about it? It's just like looking at someone, except worse because looks contain all the information in at least some detail while autosomal dna is just picking out a few things that you feel are different in various made up races and then making comparisons. Meaningless.

Like I said, at best it just says there's some relationship, not what it is. That's why when you compare skulls you can get completely unrelated groups with similar skulls. Many skulls look caucasian being a blend of two y-DNA groups that have different types. So putative races have been debunked by looking at the y-dna and realizing they are just blends of of other races.

This is the same exact thing. Y-DNA is a clearly stronger test, the only one that's very strong, really.




> Yes, certain y lines have certain distinctive distributions, but you cannot go from that to identifying someone "ethnically" by their y dna, or mt dna signature, for that matter. That's vastly too simplistic, in my opinion, in terms of modern populations, and I think it's even simplistic in terms of pre-historical populations.
> 
> Just as an example, while a lot of British men carry y dna "R1b" signatures, you also have British men who are E-V13, or J2a, or J1 or R1a, or any number of others, including the Yorkshire man with the ancient African haplotype that made the news. That man is no less British than someone carrying U-106. The specific autosomal make-up of a small group of men moving into a region could disappear very quickly from the autosomal make-up of their male descendants, even while the y signature is passed on.


And guess what? England has a past as checkered as italy, probably more so. At one point everyone just moved out of most of england and went to brittany and left it to the germans. Yep, france is more english than england, and england is have german, and ireland is about 2/3 english now. Not to mention the normans. First there were people like in the NW or ireland all through whole isles, then people like in wales came. Then the germanics came, then the normans came. And of course minor players like the vikings popped in too.

We know that both from history and from y-DNA. So sorry you actually picked the perfect example of why this kind of thing is utter crap.




> In terms of Italian genetics, you could do a dna test on a U-152 man from Brescia, and one from Sicily, and even if the subclades are the same, their autosomal make-up will be slightly different, and each man will almost certainly better match other people from his area. Likewise, if you take an L-21 man from Bologna, and an E-M81 man from the same area, who perhaps descends from some stray North African legionnaire who retired to Bologna 2,000 years ago, they will be very similar in terms of general genetic make-up.


But the average makeup is still in proprtion to the Y-dna present and for looking at populations averages are what we want  :Laugh out loud: 

It's probably harder to pick out a saxon in england these days (ok not really I can pick it out instantly) or a J (ok again I still can) but the idea is the proprtions of the group are going to be the same as the proportions of the y-dna and mtDNA. As an average.

And not for CURRENT days, but for ancient days when the mix happened. Which is another advantage. We are looking at what's really there, not made up BS from reference populations that are not representative of the past.

Whereas for autosomal if you mix in 8 groups that have black hair then you conclude they are all the same. But you left out the other 250000 individual variations on DNA for each individual. So basically you didn't prove anything, a guy with black hair and light skin could be pierce brosnan or could be yassir arafat.

It's completely pointless to look at autosomal genes that have origins in monkey times to determine anything about modern populations, especially common traits. Only exception is looking for introgressions from ancient sources like neanderthal.

Basically this study may as well have said "everyone from mediterranean looks kinda the same today! And people in different cities in italy look kinda different!". Well, no kidding. We can look out the window to figure that out. What we care about is what they were like back then, and how they changed. We can see from the haplomaps it changed wildly, and any updated version is going to show it changed even more wildly (and the past is what we care about, again, not the future which we can also figure out pretty easily).




> That's not to say that uniparental markers don't have their uses, in cases, for example, where someone is trying to track down a birth father by using y STR's, or for help in understanding the peopling of Europe. In the latter case, however, we have a long way to go in terms of applying specific haplotypes to specific "tribes", if you will. It may be fun to speculate wildly about these things, but it shouldn't be taken too seriously, in my opinion.


Sounds like some sort of propaganda being repeated to me. Attack on natural selection is bad enough, now they are trying to make an attack on your ancestral lineage saying anything about your genetics  :Laugh out loud:

----------


## Sile

> the only one I am nearly identical to is the Augustus type.
> 
> Do these tests mean anything?
> Would a mixed marriage of Northern italian with South italian or french or spanish etc make any difference in these features?


data from a year ago.....cannot find link, but what are these types?

Phenotype
Central and Eastern Veneto ( inc. Friuli ) 
* - Type 1 :* Intermediate complexion (chestnut or blonde hair, light eyes, ...), leptomorphic, rather narrow face, long and straight high-rooted nose that can get arched, close set eyes, large jaw, pointy chin
~ Dinaromorphic Nordo-Mediterranean

Western Veneto ( with Trento )
*- Type 2 :* Intermediate complexion, brachymorphic, round face, little and low-rooted nose that can get snub-tipped, wide set eyes
~ Alpinoid_

Venetian lagoon area_
_- Type 3 : Intermediate complexion (from medium dark to blonde hair, blue, green or hazel eyes ...), brachymorphic, little and narrow straight nose, square-box face, broad forehead, rather wide-set eyes
~ Alpinoid/Subnordid 

Venetian-Istrano
__- Type 4 : Light complexion (blonde hair, green eyes, ...), leptomorphic, arched nose, large jaw, pointy chin, close-set eyes
~ Nordo-Dinarid

Women , either
_ type that one could label, "Alpino-Med" which is very specific to Veneto : puffy and fleshy features
or
classical North Italian phenotype ( some individuals actually match neighbouring Slovenian variability), it is traditionally accompanied by a darker variant (Dinaro-Mediterranoid) which is the quintessential pan-Italian phenotype.

----------


## Nobody1

> data from a year ago.....cannot find link, but what are these types


Those *Types* are all *Caucasoid* sub-races and sub-types

the classifications of these people are already given;
Type1 ~ Dinaromorphic Nordo-Mediterranean
Type2 ~ Alpinoid
Type3 ~ Alpinoid/Subnordid 
Type4 ~ Nordo-Dinarid [also called *Noric*]
+ _Alpino-Medit. / Dinaro-Medit._

The common Caucasoid sub-races in North Italy:
(acc. to Coon, Banse, Pittard, Eickstedt etc. + Deniker map post#65)
Alpinoid / Dinarid(+Noric) / Mediterranid / _minority Nordoid_

App. these People (_Types_) all come from *North East* Italy; 
Sp they perfectly fall within the Caucasoid sub-races of the region (_NE Italy_ - Venetia/Friul)

*Venetia* - Noric (Dinaric) - [R. Livi - plates]

----------


## MOESAN

That's because y-dna actually means something. Autosomal DNA can say whatever you want it to say.

And yet, that's the same logic that autosomal dna comparison has but there's a huge difference. The Y-DNA shows actual paternity. Very importantly it also shows time of origin, assortively speaking. So you can compare degrees of separation between lines, if not exact dates.

Like I said, at best it just says there's some relationship, not what it is. That's why when you compare skulls you can get completely unrelated groups with similar skulls. Many skulls look caucasian being a blend of two y-DNA groups that have different types. So putative races have been debunked by looking at the y-dna and realizing they are just blends of of other races.

This is the same exact thing. Y-DNA is a clearly stronger test, the only one that's very strong, really.

And guess what? England has a past as checkered as italy, probably more so. At one point everyone just moved out of most of england and went to brittany and left it to the germans. Yep, france is more english than england, and england is have german, and ireland is about 2/3 english now. Not to mention the normans. First there were people like in the NW or ireland all through whole isles, then people like in wales came. Then the germanics came, then the normans came. And of course minor players like the vikings popped in too.

We know that both from history and from y-DNA. So sorry you actually picked the perfect example of why this kind of thing is utter crap.


It's probably harder to pick out a saxon in england these days (ok not really I can pick it out instantly) or a J (ok again I still can) but the idea is the proprtions of the group are going to be the same as the proportions of the y-dna and mtDNA. As an average.


Whereas for autosomal if you mix in 8 groups that have black hair then you conclude they are all the same. But you left out the other 250000 individual variations on DNA for each individual. So basically you didn't prove anything, a guy with black hair and light skin could be pierce brosnan or could be yassir arafat.

It's completely pointless to look at autosomal genes that have origins in monkey times to determine anything about modern populations, especially common traits. Only exception is looking for introgressions from ancient sources like neanderthal.

Basically this study may as well have said "everyone from mediterranean looks kinda the same today! And people in different cities in italy look kinda different!". Well, no kidding. We can look out the window to figure that out. What we care about is what they were like back then, and how they changed. We can see from the haplomaps it changed wildly, and any updated version is going to show it changed even more wildly (and the past is what we care about, again, not the future which we can also figure out pretty easily).

_for me you mix truth and mistake (no offense, it is only a personal thought)
autosomals DNA is of great importance: the current problem is we are not gone deep enough into the analysis: this tool needs more precision - Y-DNA is interesting, I agree (but i'm not so sure our branchings datations are correct because our evaluations depend on more than a parameter) but surely enough can undergo a far swifter drift than the complete autosomals sketche - concerning external look, the problem was not the method but the lack of parameters taken in account: it is unsufficient but can help nevertheless, again more for distinction than for superficial assimilation
already an analysis of HLA (even if limited) of Madrid inhabitants, Basques an Algerians from Alger agreed apparently with what History says us..._

----------


## MOESAN

sorry: I made a mistake: I'm responsible only for the 'italic' written part of the preceding post - sorry again!

----------


## Angela

> Below is my dodecad K=12b, they change every 6 months .............it means little at this point in time. maybe after another 50000 additions , it might mean something
> *Admix Results (sorted):*
> 
> *#*
> *Population*
> *Percent*
> 
> 1
> Atlantic_Med
> ...


I'm not sure that I understand. I'm 100% European at 23andme as well, and I'm half Emilian and half eastern Ligurian/northwest Tuscan. All the Tuscans I know on there show up as 100% European, and the full Ligurians, and a Roman, and someone who is half Sicilian and half southern Italian, and someone who is half Calabrian and half Neapolitan, and one full Sicilian from Palermo. These are just from the results of people with whom I share. Yes, there are some southern Italians who show 93 or 94% "European", with some minor "Middle Eastern" ancestry, which as 23andme defines it is Turkey (Anatolia) and Persia. From the results I've seen, if they show any SSA at all, they show it at levels of about .4-.8, which is about what the "Other Italians" show.

As for your k=12b results, they seem well within the range for a northern Italian; definitely Mediterranean, but not French or Iberian. All you need to do is look at the two results for northern Italians in the spreadsheet below. When you look at enough of those calculator results, you really don't even need the algorithm to tell you what the predicted first population will be. (Your North Euro is a little elevated, but not by much. The North Italian Dodecad group has an average of 24 for that component, after all. The rest of the scores are clearly in the Italian range. )
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/...hl=en_US#gid=0

For a comparison, these are the results for the French: (Were more samples available, I think there would be substructure)
Atlantic/Med: 44.4
N.Europe: 36.5
Caucasus: 8.4
Gedrosia: 7.9
S.W.Asian: 2.5
N.W.African: .2
S.Asian: 0
SSA: 0

Their results always seem to be somewhat higher in Atlantic Med and North Europe. The big difference, however, is in the Caucasus numbers and the S.W.Asian numbers.

Then look at the numbers for the Spanish D population. If you see results with really high Atlantic Med, relatively low North Euro, low Caucasus, relatively high North African and trace SSA, it's someone from Iberia.

Atlantic Med: 52.5
North Euro: 22.7
Caucasus: 8
Gedrosia: 6.5
S.W.Asian: 4
N.W.African: 5.1
S.Asian: .2
SSA: .4

I'm surprised by the composition of the "Other Italian" group from Dodecad that you mentioned. I always just assumed there were southerners in that group, or perhaps people of mixed northern Italian/southern Italian ancestry. Those numbers are closer to Tuscan levels than to Northern Italian levels, and sometimes even veer into southern Italian territory.

Here are the results for all three groups from that same calculator: N.Italian/Tuscan/Other Italian
Atlantic Med: 44/37.9/33.5
North Euro: 22/18.7/21.8 
Caucasus: 22.9/30.5/ 28.5
Gedrosia: 4.5/4.8/ 6.2
S.W.Asian: 5.8/7.2/ 7.8
N.W.African: .7/.5/1.1
S.Asian: 0/0/0
SSA: 0/0/.8

The academic North Italian sample has 41.2 for Atlantic Med, and 23.7 as an average for North Euro. This Other Italian group has SSA, which the Northern Italians and the Tuscans do not on this analysis; they have more NW African than the other two groups, and more S.W.Asian, and almost as much Caucasus as the Tuscans. They also have .2 East African, which the others do not. So, either there are people in the group with recent ancestry from the south, or the Tyrol and these regions are really harboring ancient more southern and south eastern signals than regular North Italians. Perhaps those ancient stories of the Etruscans fleeing to the mountains to get out of the path of the Celts have some truth to them, or perhaps those areas are harboring even more ancient Neolithic signals (Oetzi had some East African and S.W. Asian, and a lot of Caucasus ), which have been preserved due to isolation.

As to your comment about the unification of Italy, we northwesterners rather feel as if we made Italy, and we're rather fond of it.  :Smile:  The pictures my father had on his wall were of Mazzini and Garibaldi, not the Pope, and no foreign emperor either. 

As to the greater geopolitical aspect, it's like how I feel about unilateral disarmament. It doesn't make any sense to me. If everyone else doesn't do it, you're...well, at a disadvantage let's say. And even if everyone claims they're going to do it, be suspicious, and really verify! I suppose I'm of the realpolitik school. 

The inability or the unwillingness during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance of the Italian city-states to unify ultimately led to all of them suffering at the hands of northern European, French and Spanish marauders. It was utter stupidity...and cupidity as well. Even Venice was forced into a long decline. 

I don't believe that people have changed, or that the world has changed. People... and nation states or ethnic groups... act in their own self-interest. I think it's as well to remember it. 

Just my two cents, to steal a phrase,  :Smile:

----------


## Ike

> the only one I am nearly identical to is the Augustus type.


Augustus is 100% Dinaric type.

----------


## Noman

> _for me you mix truth and mistake (no offense, it is only a personal thought)
> autosomals DNA is of great importance: the current problem is we are not gone deep enough into the analysis: this tool needs more precision - Y-DNA is interesting, I agree (but i'm not so sure our branchings datations are correct because our evaluations depend on more than a parameter) but surely enough can undergo a far swifter drift than the complete autosomals sketche - concerning external look, the problem was not the method but the lack of parameters taken in account: it is unsufficient but can help nevertheless, again more for distinction than for superficial assimilation
> already an analysis of HLA (even if limited) of Madrid inhabitants, Basques an Algerians from Alger agreed apparently with what History says us..._


I don't mean to say it's of no use, it's just not useful for what it's being applied to (and really it's just not something comparitive population genetics can answer anyway), and the ridiculous conclusion is proof enough for that. As maciamo says rome basically scattered to the winds, about 999/1000 inhabitants slowly melted away, all over med. Before that lots of colonies spreading out. So it's not that rome has any continuity at all, it's that it imprinted itself on the whole med. 

You really can't make any claims at all from that data in regards to ancient populations. When you look at only current day populations it's more politics than science.

You don't need to worry about drift with y-dna in large populations, if anything the drift would favor the eradication of the minority lines not the amplification of them (meaning we have at least as much contribution of other dna from these y-dna lines as the lines themselves, on average). You might have to worry about selection but that is also an issue for autosomal dna.

----------


## Sile

> Augustus is 100% Dinaric type.


Fine I have no issue with this, but I thought I was Noric, which is a sub of Dinaric

----------


## Sile

> As for your k=12b results, they seem well within the range for a northern Italian; definitely Mediterranean, but not French or Iberian. All you need to do is look at the two results for northern Italians in the spreadsheet below. When you look at enough of those calculator results, you really don't even need the algorithm to tell you what the predicted first population will be. (Your North Euro is a little elevated, but not by much. The North Italian Dodecad group has an average of 24 for that component, after all. The rest of the scores are clearly in the Italian range. )
> https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/...hl=en_US#gid=0
> 
> For a comparison, these are the results for the French: (Were more samples available, I think there would be substructure)
> Atlantic/Med: 44.4
> N.Europe: 36.5
> Caucasus: 8.4
> Gedrosia: 7.9
> S.W.Asian: 2.5
> ...


Thanks, I will look at it later.
Which are the 2 north italian individuals

The numbers for Gedrosian do not match maciano map for O_italian ( if you think its from south Italy and not from neighbours of Italy up North

----------


## Noman

They are not dinaric, they are melonheads, boskopoid man. The veneti and alpinid and dinaric are all a lot different. The head has a lot of width towards the top and the face is extra small in comparison to the brain, with a jutting chin. See also otto von hapburg, hitler, nelson mandela, einstein, abraham lincoln, ellen degeneres.

----------


## Sile

> They are not dinaric, they are melonheads, boskopoid man. The veneti and alpinid and dinaric are all a lot different. The head has a lot of width towards the top and the face is extra small in comparison to the brain, with a jutting chin. See also otto von hapburg, hitler, nelson mandela, einstein, abraham lincoln, ellen degeneres.


The Noric race was supposed to be a lighter sub-type of the Dinaric race.[5] The term derived from Noricum, a province of the Roman empire roughly equivalent to southern Austria. The term is not to be confused with Nordic. Norics were characterized by tall stature, brachycephaly, nasal convexity, long face and broad forehead. Their complexion was said to be light, and blondness combined with light eyes to be their anthropologic characteristic.

Parts of the Dinaric race
Northern and Eastern Italy was considered mostly a Dinaric area as well as western Greece, Romania, western Ukraine, southeastern German-speaking areas, and parts of southern Poland and southeastern France.

----------


## Ike

> Fine I have no issue with this, but I thought I was Noric, which is a sub of Dinaric


I'm not familiar with Deniker's racial types, what I meant is that that facial type fits very good in Dinaric area.

----------


## Angela

> I'm not familiar with Deniker's racial types, what I meant is that that facial type fits very good in Dinaric area.


That may be...I'm not a great believer in this pre-genetics method of categorizing people into ethnic groups, but if you look at sculptures of him you will see a decidedly "alpine" skull, I believe.

----------


## Angela

> Thanks, I will look at it later.
> Which are the 2 north italian individuals
> 
> The numbers for Gedrosian do not match maciano map for O_italian ( if you think its from south Italy and not from neighbours of Italy up North



If Dienekes has informed you where those O_italian samples originate, or they revealed their place of origin on the identification thread, or you know them, and they're indeed from the Italian part of Switzerland, the Tyrol, Austria, Slovenia and Croatia, all I am saying is that this group may have conserved very ancient Neolithic alleles, which shouldn't be all that surprising as we know that the Tyrol has preserved a lot of more "southern" and "southeastern" y dna. That would also explain the Gedrosia number, since that is higher towards the north. 

I questioned whether there was southern Italian admixture in those people because, as I say, their numbers look more Tuscan to me than anything else, although they have more SWAsian than the Tuscans, and they have that trace SSA. I also know that there has been movement into the Trentino over the last 100 years or so, and into the Ticino, and I don't know how much of it was from southerners. So, I wondered if some of these people might have a grandparent, say, from the south, and neglected to mention it.

Anyway, as to the spreadsheet...these are not the numbers of individuals. The numbers represent the averages of various reference populations. The majority of the data is from academic studies. However, Dienekes asked for volunteers. When he had a least five who asserted that all four grandparents came from that location, he included the averages for that group in the run. When you take a look at it for yourself, you'll see that the first column after the name of the group will tell you the source of the data, and the number of individuals in that group. There are quite a few Italian reference populations. There is a North_Italian academic sample from Bergamo consisting of 11 people, along with a group of 5 people assembled by Dienekes who are more generally from northern Italy. There are a lot of Tuscan samples available from the academic world, given the fascination with them, but in this calculator, he uses the HGDP sample of 11 people and the Metspalu sample of 22 people, all from a small village near Firenze, called the TSI sample. (The results for the two are very similar, as the results for Bergamo and the general northern Italian group are very similar.) Then he has Dodecad groups for the areas of Italy not covered by academic samples, i.e. Central Italians, O_Italians, Southern Italians/Sicilians, and Sicilians.

These are the numbers for the two Northern Italian groups, Bergamo first, and then the more generally northern Italian group.

Bergamo(North_Italian) and North Italy in general (N._Italian)
Atlantic/Med:44/41.2
North European: 22/23.7
Caucasus: 22.9/22.8
S.W.Asian : 5.8/ 5.6
N.W.African: .7/.9
East African:0/0
SSA:0/0
Siberian: 0/0
S.Asia: 0/0
S.E.Asia: 0/0

Interestingly, the TSI sample shows trace North African, but the "Tuscan" sample does not, and the Tuscan sample also shows .5 for East Asian, and .5 for South Asian. I haven't quite figured those out yet, but have wondered whether that has something to do with John Hawks' assertion that the Tuscans have a high(for Europe) Neanderthal similarity. When I want to be fanciful, I also think of those decidedly "eastern" eyes that sometimes appear in Etruscan art. 

Of course, different calculators, using slightly different clusters, will have different results. If you want to compare your numbers to the averages for a particular calculator, just go to dodecad.blogspot.com, and use the search tool to look up things like K=7b spreadsheet, or Globe 10 spreadsheet, or v3 spreadsheet, or any of the others he's done.

There generally seems to be some confusion about the admixture calculators versus IBD runs. Admixture calculators show you overall ancestry similarities. In Dienekes' case, he labels the clusters that form for the geographic areas where they are modal. IBD analyses try to match specific alleles between groups of individuals in order to find evidence of geneflow. It's sort of what 23andme does in its old Ancestry Finder, now Countries of Ancestry, which has been shown to be extremely accurate in tracking whether individuals have recent ancestry from Ashkenazi Jews. 

Ralph and Coop are doing IBD analysis. They're tracking gene flow, as does Ancestry Finder, but they seem to be able to reach much further back in time, and they claim to be able to date it. It doesn't translate to overall genetic similarity. For example, it shows, in this graphic, that there was little gene flow into Italy since about the middle of the first millennium, before Rome became an empire. The significant gene flow that appears is in the period from 4500 to 2300 years ago, and came from the north, the west, and the Balkans. What Ralph and Coop don't show is the resulting overall ancestry composition.
http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=v4cf29&s=5

I realize the math in the Ralph and Coop paper requires people to brush up on their math skills, but the logic is certainly easy enough. If, when studying modern populations, one finds that a certain population last experienced major gene flow from other countries 2300 years ago, or about 300 B.C., then it seems clear that the population is pretty much like it was at that time. In other words, what they see in Italy is population continuity since that period. It doesn't take a doctorate in mathematics to understand it. 

Just a few excerpts:
A notable exception is that nearly all populations showed no significant heterogeneity of numbers of common ancestors with Italian samples, suggesting that most common ancestors shared with Italy lived longer ago than the time that structure within modern-day countries formed.

Furthermore, we suspect that the Italian and Iberian peninsulas likely do not group together because of higher shared ancestry with each other, but rather because of similarly low rates of IBD with other European populations.

There is relatively little common ancestry shared between the Italian peninsula and other locations, and what there is seems to derive mostly from longer ago than 2,500 ya. An exception is that Italy and the neighboring Balkan populations share small but significant numbers of common ancestors in the last 1,500 years, as seen in Figures S16 and S17S17. The rate of genetic common ancestry between pairs of Italian individuals seems to have been fairly constant for the past 2,500 years, which combined with significant structure within Italy suggests a constant exchange of migrants between coherent subpopulations. Patterns for the Iberian peninsula are similar, with both Spain and Portugal showing very few common ancestors with other populations over the last 2,500 years. However, the rate of IBD sharing within the peninsula is much higher than within Italy—during the last 1,500 years the Iberian peninsula shares fewer than two genetic common ancestors with other populations, compared to roughly 30 per pair within the peninsula; Italians share on average only about eight with each other during this period.

----------


## Nobody1

*'K12b' -* _spreadsheet_
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/...hl=en_US#gid=0

Italian populations:

*DODECAD* figures -

*N Italians* - [5 samples] 
41.2% Atl.-Med. / 23.7% N Europe / 22.8% Caucasus 
5.7% Gedrosia
5.6% SW Asia / 0.2% S Asia / 0.0% E Asia
0.9% NW Africa / 0.0% E African / 0.0% Sub-Saharan 

*C Italians* - [13 samples] 
34.8% Atl.-Med. / 17.1% N Europe / 32.1% Caucasus 
4.8% Gedrosia
8.7% SW Asia / 0.1% S Asia / 0.0% E Asia
2.3% NW Africa / 0.0% E African / 0.0% Sub-Saharan 

*S Italian & Sicilian* - [10 samples] 
29.9% Atl.-Med. / 11.8% N Europe / 36.5% Caucasus 
5.5% Gedrosia
12.5% SW Asia / 0.5% S Asia / 0.0% E Asia
2.5% NW Africa / 0.7% E African / 0.0% Sub-Saharan 

*Sicilian* - [15 samples] 
30.0% Atl.-Med. / 11.9% N Europe / 36.5% Caucasus
4.5% Gedrosia
11.9% SW Asia / 0.1% S Asia / 0.0% E Asia
4.1% NW Africa / 0.7% E African / 0.2% Sub-Saharan 


*HGDP* (Stanford Uni.) figures -

*N Italians* - [11 samples] 
44.0% Atl.-Med. / 22.0% N Europe / 22.9% Caucasus 
4.5% Gedrosia
5.8% SW Asia / 0.0% S Asia / 0.0% E Asia
0.7% NW Africa / 0.0% E African / 0.0% Sub-Saharan 

*Tuscans* - [7 samples] 
37.9% Atl.-Med. / 18.7% N Europe / 30.5% Caucasus
4.8% Gedrosia
7.2% SW Asia / 0.5% S Asia / 0.5% E Asia
0.0% NW Africa / 0.0% E African / 0.0% Sub-Saharan

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## Angela

> *'K12b' -* _spreadsheet_
> https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/...hl=en_US#gid=0
> 
> Italian populations:
> 
> *DODECAD* figures -
> 
> *N Italians* - [5 samples] 
> 41.2% Atl.-Med. / 23.7% N Europe / 22.8% Caucasus 
> ...


You forgot the TSI HapMap3 academic sample-Florentines.

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## Nobody1

> You forgot the TSI HapMap3 academic sample-Florentines.


Correct;


*Andres Metspalu* figures -

*TSI30* (_Tuscans_) - [21 samples] 
38.7% Atl.-Med. / 19.3% N Europe / 28.6% Caucasus 
5.0% Gedrosia
7.3% SW Asia / 0.1% S Asia / 0.0 E Asia
0.8% NW Africa / 0.0% E African / 0.0% Sub-Saharan


Def. very similar (_almost identical_) to the *HGDP*[Stanford Uni.] Tuscans of 7 samples;

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## Sile

> If Dienekes has informed you where those O_italian samples originate, or they revealed their place of origin on the identification thread, or you know them, and they're indeed from the Italian part of Switzerland, the Tyrol, Austria, Slovenia and Croatia, all I am saying is that this group may have conserved very ancient Neolithic alleles, which shouldn't be all that surprising as we know that the Tyrol has preserved a lot of more "southern" and "southeastern" y dna. That would also explain the Gedrosia number, since that is higher towards the north. 
> 
> I questioned whether there was southern Italian admixture in those people because, as I say, their numbers look more Tuscan to me than anything else, although they have more SWAsian than the Tuscans, and they have that trace SSA. I also know that there has been movement into the Trentino over the last 100 years or so, and into the Ticino, and I don't know how much of it was from southerners. So, I wondered if some of these people might have a grandparent, say, from the south, and neglected to mention it.


The issue is not with Trentino which has always been Italian for many centuries, but with south Tyrol. The Italians gained south Tyrol after WW1 and when Mussolini got in power he decided to place many Italians in south Tyrol, usually from Moise and Apulia regions. This was to ensure the italinization of south Tyrol from the Bavarian tongue. So you can be correct in the gedrosian impact.

in regards to O-italian, well below is what dodecad stated the very first time:


* 1. Dodecad ProjectJune 22, 2011 at 1:34 AM
*
*O_Italian is Other Italian, and that is all due to a single individual that I am waiting to hear from to see whether he/she has any explanation for these results. I will also carry another data cleanup once I'm done with this, to detect submitted relatives or outliers that likely misreported their ancestry. This is part of the reason why I am not reporting raw averages at this time, as I have not cleaned up all the latest submissions.

Part of the (to be continued) involves visually inspecting the population portraits to catch outliers such as the one contributing the "Northeast Asian" in the O_Italian sample.*


and 6 months later:
*
**As for the O_Italian_D population, it stands for Other Italian. Thus it consists of all ethnic Italian Dodecad participants who don't belong to a regional Italian Dodecad population (e.g., C_Italian_D).
*
And then what I stated after, I forgot to include the French riviera area which was always Italian until 150 years ago and Corfu, these are to be added to the list





> Anyway, as to the spreadsheet...these are not the numbers of individuals. The numbers represent the averages of various reference populations. The majority of the data is from academic studies. However, Dienekes asked for volunteers. When he had a least five who asserted that all four grandparents came from that location, he included the averages for that group in the run. When you take a look at it for yourself, you'll see that the first column after the name of the group will tell you the source of the data, and the number of individuals in that group. There are quite a few Italian reference populations. There is a North_Italian academic sample from Bergamo consisting of 11 people, along with a group of 5 people assembled by Dienekes who are more generally from northern Italy. There are a lot of Tuscan samples available from the academic world, given the fascination with them, but in this calculator, he uses the HGDP sample of 11 people and the Metspalu sample of 22 people, all from a small village near Firenze, called the TSI sample. (The results for the two are very similar, as the results for Bergamo and the general northern Italian group are very similar.) Then he has Dodecad groups for the areas of Italy not covered by academic samples, i.e. Central Italians, O_Italians, Southern Italians/Sicilians, and Sicilians.
> 
> These are the numbers for the two Northern Italian groups, Bergamo first, and then the more generally northern Italian group.
> 
> Bergamo(North_Italian) and North Italy in general (N._Italian)
> Atlantic/Med:44/41.2
> North European: 22/23.7
> Caucasus: 22.9/22.8
> S.W.Asian : 5.8/ 5.6
> ...


The whole concept of mixing different companies on admixture results is not accurate.
Many have different terminologies for similar names.
ie, Bergamo is north Italian and Italian is central Italy for one company....another company has Italian for north Italy and Tuscan for central and south Italy etc.
Other has N-Italy for west north Italy and N_Italy for east north Italy.

some have north European meaning ....anything north of the danube river , alps not included, others have north european as commencing in the alps and looking north.

We are mixing for no clear result

----------


## Ike

> How did the ancient Romans turn into Italians ?


They've turned Catholic :)

----------


## Vallicanus

> They've turned Catholic :)


Very perceptive.

Italy was dominated by the Papacy, an internationalist, secretive and essentially corrupt and self-serving organisation.

----------


## errantbit

The world is much more complicated now than then.

----------


## Thulean

> 



HAHAHAHAHA wonderful

----------


## Thulean

> The Etruscan kings once ruled Rome, but were kicked out. The Romans absorbed the Etruscans; notably, for example, we know that Claudius married an Etruscan noblewoman, but that hardly means the Romans were really just Etruscans. It's very clear that the Latin clans were still alive and well at that period, and that these peoples (the Etruscans and the Romans) spoke different languages, from totally different language families, and that the Indo-European Latin language prevailed. 
> 
> As to the precise genetic differences, what I would say is that we don't have any "Roman" dna of that period, or any period for that matter, and as I've posted before, the only Etruscan dna we have is some HVRI values which could just as well have been in place since the Neolithic. So, everything is basically conjecture. The Italici, of which the Romans were one group, may have been significantly different from the Etruscans when they first arrived in the peninsula; we just don't know. What seems obvious, however, even if both groups came from elsewhere during the Bronze Age, or early Iron Age, (for the Etruscans there is absolutely no archaeological evidence of a mass migration at this time, so it would have to have been a small group that formed an elite) is that they would have mingled with the pre-existing population, and then with each other. 
> 
> As to "replacement" in Italy, the actual science doesn't support any such hypothesis; quite the contrary. Rather, it paints a picture of continuity since about the middle of the first millennium B.C., a continuity that is rare in Europe. I don't know why so many people seem to be unaware of the latest research using IBD analysis. 
> Ralph and Coop et al: http://www.plosbiology.org/article/i...l.pbio.1001555
> The discussion at Discovery: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gn...1#.Uhef6T_pxdE
> 
> This doesn't mean, of course, as Razib takes pains to point out, that there wasn't significant population substructure dating from that time, because there was, owing perhaps the most to the Celtic migrations in the north and the Greek colonization in the south. 
> ...



Ganz korrekt, Nobody1!

----------


## adamo

Oh god! I'm just so nervous let me eat this popcorn XD

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## adamo

If he felt the way his expressions look in that photo permanently then I'd love to glamor over him 24/7; I'd be laughing all day

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## adamo

I love the way his fat little fingers scoops up as many popcorns as he can before shoving them into his paranoid mouth

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## Nobody1

> I love the way his fat little fingers scoops up as many popcorns as he can before shoving them into his paranoid mouth







> Ganz korrekt, Nobody1!


Thank you;
But its not from me its from the User Angela;

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## adamo

The crowd on his show laughed at the story he was telling and that last gif file was his reaction

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## adamo

He looks like mister-tarantula with his fingers on that first pic takin the popcorn; he looks like a paranoid s_ _ _ that will never get her dose of calmness; I bet he ran through that popcorn bag in less than 5 minutes.

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## adamo

He'll never recuperate from THAT state.

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## adamo

It's just all doom, at this point on that first pic...zoom in on it

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## Thulean

> Thank you;
> But its not from me its from the User Angela;



Right - I was stuffing my mouth with popcorn and I got distracted. Sorry, Angela

----------


## silkyslovanbojkovsky

> Apart from the change in attitude towards the loyalty to the state, I don't see how it could have affected the Italian character.
> 
> 
> 
> How can you judge a nation's talent for military strategy or discipline if they are fighting between themselves ?
> 
> As for fighting Austro-Hungary, Italy never won a single battle, even when they were fighting at 10 against one . It is either the Prussians and especially the French (thanks to Napoleon III's dream of unifying Italy) who defeated the Austrians and gave Austrian possessions to Piedmont.
> 
> The same happened in WWII. Italy lost on every front. They lost in Greece and needed to be rescued by the Germans. They lost in Egypt against the Brits and needed to be rescued by the Germans. Etcetera.


of course the fact that Italy hadnt been unified sine roman time allows for new ideas of ethnicity and differences cultures to apeare. Napolean is essentially the descendant of ancient romans as well. its all culture the mixing of ethnicities has nothing to do with it, as the biggest contribution to the Italian gene pool after roman times came from germanics who are now organized.

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## silkyslovanbojkovsky

> What about immigration? 
> If Rome was the economic super power of its day it would have been a mecca for economic migrates, just as the US is today. 
> Also is there not a massive north/south divide in culture and genetics in Italy?


ridiculous? Rome was not like the U.S people still mixed far less and only rome had foreigners the rest of Italy didn't

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## Vallicanus

> hes racist against southern euros and predjudice against the Catholic church. Yes Popes and the papal states did do bad things but they did try and hold themselves to a higher standard. While all of western Europe was enslaving Africans for economic benefit the papacy issued multiple bulls condemning it.


The Papacy did nothing PRACTICAL about slavery.

The Catholic church did nothing to stop the purchase of young Muslim girls as servants for rich Italian households.

Italy is a mess largely because the Papal lands in central Italy prevented unity for over a thousand years.

The Papacy set a bad example of hypocrisy and corruption and amorality to the whole of Italy.

No wonder a Protestant Reformation took place.

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## silkyslovanbojkovsky

> The Papacy did nothing PRACTICAL about slavery.
> 
> The Catholic church did nothing to stop the purchase of young Muslim girls as servants for rich Italian households.
> 
> Italy is a mess largely because the Papal lands in central Italy prevented unity for over a thousand years.
> 
> The Papacy set a bad example of hypocrisy and corruption and amorality to the whole of Italy.
> 
> No wonder a Protestant Reformation took place.


what a ridiculous statement. Slavery was outlawed in the early middle ages, and when western Europeans were enslaving Africans like crazy The church issued multiple papal bulls specifically condemning slavery. The papal states were not a super power at the time and had no military influence on other countries back then. all they could do is condemn it which was still very brave as European monarchs could have easly left the catholic church or turned on the papal states. They didn't, they just ingored them. You believe in one of the biggest fallacies of history that somehow the Catholic church was the most evil example of government in the middle ages. The Catholic was always more fair than secular governments at the time, and the inquisition killed far less people than secular governments of the time. That's why when the inquisition was gotten rid of in Spain, there were riots in the street. Charities, hospitals, and hospices all came out of the Catholic church in Italy and Europe at that time. Modern health care, science, and all sorts of other good stuff came out of the Catholic church at that time. Your Scottish. the Anglican church was founded by a guy who wanted to divorce his wife, and murdered a lot of people the protestant churches were not founded on morals and martin luther specifically caused one of the longest wars in Eurpean History. The Catholic church would have happily unified all of Italy under itself. it wasn't unified because certain powerful families didn't want to give up power, and that's it

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## Vallicanus

What Catholic propaganda.

What would you call purchased Muslim girls in rich households other than SLAVES?

The Catholic Inquisition and the Papal-backed Crusades against Muslims, Cathars in southern France and the Fourth Crusade's attacks on Christian Constantinople in 1204 show up the Catholic Church as an organisation which would wade through blood to retain and extend its power.

A united Italy under the Papacy would have been a den of hypocrites, perverts and thieves.

Science came to the benighted Catholic West out of Islam through Islamic Spain not the Papacy!

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## Angela

> The Papacy did nothing PRACTICAL about slavery.
> 
> The Catholic church did nothing to stop the purchase of young Muslim girls as servants for rich Italian households.
> 
> Italy is a mess largely because the Papal lands in central Italy prevented unity for over a thousand years.
> 
> The Papacy set a bad example of hypocrisy and corruption and amorality to the whole of Italy.
> 
> No wonder a Protestant Reformation took place.


I wondered how long it would be before you showed up...predictably, any time Italians are mentioned, you can be counted on to add your superficial, denigrating comments. 

I could write a book pointing out the gross simplifications and fundamental misunderstanding of Italian history, the history of the papacy and the history of Christianity, including Protestantism revealed by your posts...but this isn't the place. Besides, the books have been written; you just haven't read them. Just enroll in some history courses so you have some basic understanding of the topic.

Ed. @Silkyslovan...you're wasting your time, I'm afraid. This is not like having a reasoned, nuanced debate with someone with an academic background. This is mud wrestling with bigots-it's demeaning just acknowledging their comments.

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## LeBrok

> Ed. @Silkyslovan...you're wasting your time, I'm afraid. This is not like having a reasoned, nuanced debate with someone with an academic background. This is mud wrestling with bigots-it's demeaning just acknowledging their comments.


It is hard to side with someone who responds to other's point of view with his customary "It's ridiculous!".

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## Vallicanus

> I wondered how long it would be before you showed up...predictably, any time Italians are mentioned, you can be counted on to add your superficial, denigrating comments. 
> 
> I could write a book pointing out the gross simplifications and fundamental misunderstanding of Italian history, the history of the papacy and the history of Christianity, including Protestantism revealed by your posts...but this isn't the place. Besides, the books have been written; you just haven't read them. Just enroll in some history courses so you have some basic understanding of the topic.
> 
> Ed. @Silkyslovan...you're wasting your time, I'm afraid. This is not like having a reasoned, nuanced debate with someone with an academic background. This is mud wrestling with bigots-it's demeaning just acknowledging their comments.



I do have an academic background unlike yourself so any book written by you would have no value.

A Catholic apologist calls ME bigoted!

I'm entitled to my own opinions and a proper reading of history PAST and PRESENT places the Papacy on very thin ice when it comes to human rights, scientific progress, bloodshed, forgery and immorality.

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## Aberdeen

I personally don't think that either catholics or protestants have too much to boast about in terms of their past histories. But I also don't think anyone in this argument is going to convince anyone else to change their mind about who did what to who and who's a hero or who's a monster. When people have strongly entrenched views, they see all the evidence through the filter of their own particular lense.

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## joeyc

Deleted for breaking Eupedia rules.

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## John Doe

Being Roman was never bound to ethnicity, being Roman was a way of life, being a citizen of Rome and conforming to Rome, therefore you had Italian Romans, Greek Romans, Gaullic Romans, British Romans, Berber Romans, Jewish Romans, Egyptian Romans, Arab Romans, Syriac Romans, Anatolian Romans etc etc. The story goes that at it's earliest days, Rome was a safe haven for the outcasts of society, the outsiders, further emphasizing Rome's diverse origin, Italians were simply one of many ethnic groups inside this multi-ethnic empire, however what tied them all together was conformity to Rome, cultural, linguistic and by allegiance.

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## John Doe

> Hahahahahaha
> 
> Funny thread. What can I say? The catholic church completely f*cked up the Italians and turned them in to Orientals. Do not forget that Christianity was born in the Middle East. 
> 
> Just compare the Roman myths with the Christian ones. Bring Paganism back please!


Even before Christianity gained dominance throughout the Roman empire, other traditions that hailed from western Asia were adopted by the Romans, Mithras for example was a god that hailed from Persia, and was popular among Roman soldiers.

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## hope

> Being Roman was never bound to ethnicity, being Roman was a way of life, being a citizen of Rome and conforming to Rome, therefore you had Italian Romans, Greek Romans, Gaullic Romans, British Romans, Berber Romans, Jewish Romans, Egyptian Romans, Arab Romans, Syriac Romans, Anatolian Romans etc etc. The story goes that at it's earliest days, Rome was a safe haven for the outcasts of society, the outsiders, further emphasizing Rome's diverse origin, Italians were simply one of many ethnic groups inside this multi-ethnic empire, however what tied them all together was conformity to Rome, cultural, linguistic and by allegiance.


Exactly this. Being Roman was something you could become and many were drawn to Rome. Many Romans were descended from some-one who had came as an immigrant and Rome welcomed immigrants, even needed them just to keep the city going. It was truly a cosmopolitan city, and everything and everyone got tossed into a big pot, stirred round and came out Roman.

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## John Doe

> Exactly this. Being Roman was something you could become and many were drawn to Rome. Many Romans were descended from some-one who had came there as an immigrant and Rome welcomed immigrants, even needed them just to keep the city going. It was truly a cosmopolitan city, and everything and everyone got tossed into a big pot, stirred round and came out Roman.


Indeed. And this was the case throughout the empire, conquered peoples would be gradually assimilated and turned into Romans, and when that stopped happening, the empire collapsed.

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## Vinnie

I still blame the barbarians for the collapse, giving them too much power and freedom. Making commanders in the army from barbarian slaves etc.

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## John Doe

> I still blame the barbarians for the collapse, giving them too much power and freedom. Making commanders in the army from barbarian slaves etc.


And not making an effort to Romanise them. The Celts were Romanised, the Tharcians and Illyrians were Romanised, Rome didn't fall due to these peoples, it fell due to the Germanic peoples who were pushed from their homes by nomadic peoples from the east, those peoples (the Germanic peoples) were therefore pushed west and south into and settled in Roman lands, the Romans then made the mistake of not Romanising them, this caused them to fight and live not for Rome and Roman civilisation, but for gold and their generals, a fatal mistake.

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## hope

> I still blame the barbarians for the collapse, giving them too much power and freedom. Making commanders in the army from barbarian slaves etc.


Yes..but we can add to this other reasons also I think. 
Such as financial problems, helped along by constant wars. 
Decrease in slave labour due to halt in expansion [ Rome relied heavily on slave labour]
Political instability, civil war and corruption within the government.
And the division of the empire into West and East, which did ultimately lead to the two halves drifting somewhat apart. It also left the Western half weaker I feel and more vulnerable to attack. 
Add all these to-gether and I think we get a fuller picture for Romes final collapse.

----------


## John Doe

> Yes..but we can add to this other reasons also I think. 
> Such as financial problems, helped along by constant wars. 
> Decrease in slave labour due to halt in expansion [ Rome relied heavily on slave labour]
> Political instability, civil war and corruption within the government.
> And the division of the empire into West and East, which did ultimately lead to the two halves drifting somewhat apart. It also left the Western half weaker I feel and more vulnerable to attack. 
> Add all these to-gether and I think we get a fuller picture for Romes final collapse.


Indeed, nothing is ever simple or generalised, one has to dig in and be specific, otherwise the picture gets distorted.

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## LeBrok

> I still blame the barbarians for the collapse, giving them too much power and freedom. Making commanders in the army from barbarian slaves etc.


Why Eastern Roman Empire didn't collapse then, but 1,000 years later!?

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## LeBrok

West Roman Empire collapsed mainly due to climate cooling, failed crops and couple of plagues. Mind you that in agricultural societies 90% of people are employed on farms producing food. Rome experienced deep economic crisis lasting couple of hundreds of years. When there is no food even for villagers, during decades of terrible crops, how can the cities survive? Not taking much from hard working farmers, but the schools, libraries, trades, and power centers were located in the cities. If they didn't survive, Roman civilization collapsed.
As you can see from chart below, cold weather lasted till 700 hundreds. Consequent warming meant end of Dark Ages and Medieval revival of Europe.

----------


## Yetos

> West Roman Empire collapsed mainly due to climate cooling, failed crops and couple of plagues. Mind you that in agricultural societies 90% of people are employed on farms producing food. Rome experienced deep economic crisis lasting couple of hundreds of years. When there is no food even for villagers, during decades of terrible crops, how can the cities survive? Not taking much from hard working farmers, but the schools, libraries, trades, and power centers were located in the cities. If they didn't survive, Roman civilization collapsed.
> As you can see from chart below, cold weather lasted till 700 hundreds. Consequent warming meant end of Dark Ages and Medieval revival of Europe.


and I thought it was the Christians who slain all paysants as pagans, and all scintists as mages

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## hope

> West Roman Empire collapsed mainly due to climate cooling, failed crops and couple of plagues. Mind you that in agricultural societies 90% of people are employed on farms producing food. Rome experienced deep economic crisis lasting couple of hundreds of years. When there is no food even for villagers, during decades of terrible crops, how can the cities survive? Not taking much from hard working farmers, but the schools, libraries, trades, and power centers were located in the cities. If they didn't survive, Roman civilization collapsed.
> As you can see from chart below, cold weather lasted till 700 hundreds. Consequent warming meant end of Dark Ages and Medieval revival of Europe.


Yes, that`s true. The decline of the empire did of course also coincide with climate cooling.

----------


## John Doe

> West Roman Empire collapsed mainly due to climate cooling, failed crops and couple of plagues. Mind you that in agricultural societies 90% of people are employed on farms producing food. Rome experienced deep economic crisis lasting couple of hundreds of years. When there is no food even for villagers, during decades of terrible crops, how can the cities survive? Not taking much from hard working farmers, but the schools, libraries, trades, and power centers were located in the cities. If they didn't survive, Roman civilization collapsed.
> As you can see from chart below, cold weather lasted till 700 hundreds. Consequent warming meant end of Dark Ages and Medieval revival of Europe.


Yeah, that's also true, let's forget that provinces such as Egypt were the bread basket of the empire, the east supplied the west, and when the empires divided, the west was going to either stand or fall on it's own, and it fell. This coincided with many reasons for the fall of the western empire, also the fact that the east was less targeted as was the west, the east also had a richer land, and more manpower, the east didn't have to fill all the migratory peoples as did the west, because the east wasn't targeted as much. The west also didn't really make an effort to Romanise these immigrants, thus leaving a large population that was used in the army, but the soldiers weren't fighting for Rome or Roman civilisation, but for gold and their generals, therefore as soon as the money ran out or as soon as the generals (who themselves weren't quite Roman either) decided to rebel, that was it, then to persuade them, the Romans gave them more land and in return again granted the soldiers, that was a never ending story, if the Romans would have Romanised them, the western Roman empire might have survived for longer.

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## kamani

The Western Roman Empire collapsed because they grew too rich and too famous in a world full of organized aggressive barbarian tribes. It became 1 old lion against 10 hyenas...and then 10 more. However, if we don't consider the Celts, all Roman victories have been against people who were more civilized than them.

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## John Doe

> However, if we don't consider the Celts, all Roman victories have been against people who were more civilized than them.


You're talking about the Carthaginians, Etruscans, Greeks, Egyptians, Judeans and Persians?

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## kamani

> You're talking about the Carthaginians, Etruscans, Greeks, Egyptians, Judeans and Persians?


Yes, also the Illyrians (the ones close to Greece for sure).

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## mihaitzateo

I think ancient Italians/Romans were conquering other states by very superior military technique and also,by far superior organization in their military.
Remember that they were trained from a young age to be good soldiers.
You can see that today Central Italians and North Italians retained their genius at inventing things.

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## kamani

> I think ancient Italians/Romans were conquering other states by very superior military technique and also,by far superior organization in their military.
> Remember that they were trained from a young age to be good soldiers.
> You can see that today Central Italians and North Italians retained their genius at inventing things.


Yes and No, against the Celts who practiced disorganized rushing yes, against Macedonians they were inferior in terms of military technique, but had more man-power and resources to sustain a long-term war. 
Hannibal completely out-smarted them in almost every battle wining consistently with inferior numbers and resources, when they were at their military peak. He would have gotten into the city of Rome, if it wasn't for the crazy gamble idea the Romans had to go around him straight for Carthage.

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## Enlightenup Awaken

Bravo! This is one of the most intelligent forum discussions I have had the pleasure to read

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## SuperStalin

I think this is just a comparison between roman and italian stereotypes given to us by movies, literature, culture... but not necessarily realistic.

People who killed their relatives were mostly the high ranking politicians and power-people, you know, the kind that get books, and novels and plays written about them,
these are people who are more similar to today's mafioso families ( who may kill family members for power gains, or adopt people as 'made men' ) 
Regular ancient peasants mostly lived like peasants have lived for millenia - and they couldn't easily own slaves, or get away with murder like rich people do even today.

Roman empire is an example of how a state with institutions can be a superior force, especially in a world where rarely anyone else has a complex and branching governing system.
Everyone in Europe wanted to be Rome, they copied Rome, and when they clashed with Roman culture and institutions, the barbarians would learn the lessons that it's smarter to emulate Roman institutions and settle down.

As for the military power - Italy as a province couldn't compete with other Roman provinces. Even when it comes to commerce and development, they were hogging resources from the rest of the empire for several centuries,
until they became essentially a backwater to some more geographically advantageous cities like Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch... ( Constantine was just one of 17 Roman emperors born in the Balkans, this doesn't account for emperors and powerful men born on other locations, Romans who conquered Italy by political or military force, not because Italy was an essential part of the empire, but because of its traditional role. Constantine for example didn't really care about the city of Rome, and didn't even meet with the senate, thus displaying how insignificant these old places were in a new Roman world which gravitated towards the east ).

Even in the fabled days of Caesar, the riches and military power of Pompei lay in the east. Pompei just got outmanouvered by Caesar several times, but if history went some other route, and Pompei was at full force of his eastern legions, he'd have won ).

So, my point is that Italy, even in Roman times wasn't a geographically important location for building an empire around the rich parts of the mediterranean. Even before the barbarians it was invaded and laid waste several times by Hannibal, soon after that Rome almost succumbed to Cimbri and the Teutones ( a barbarian invasion 600 years before the fall of western Rome ), and then a series of generals, would-be emperors and emperors succesfully conquered italy.

On the other hand, you forgot about Venetians and their dominant role throughout the medieval era and the mediterranean. They were a sort of empire in a new world where trade was more lucrative than outright conquest and occupation.

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## joeyc

ROFL

What have Belgians done in history?

They never won a single foreign battle on their own (apart from Congo, which have no merit as they greatly outnumbered the locals and defeated them using vastly superior weapons).

The same happened in WWI and WWII. Belgium lost on every front. They lost in WWI and needed to be rescued by the Brits and the French. They lost again in the WWII and needed to be rescued by the Americans. Etcetera.

Anyway when will Belgium split up in various pieces and start a huge civil war between Wallons, Flemish and Arab/Turkish islamic immigrants?

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## Tosapai

Since you are from Belgium I am now asking you: are muslim terrorists playng with Bruxelles in these days enough well organised?? I suppose you admire them LOL

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## Tosapai

And..did you know that right know Italian army is training Kurdish Peshmerga in order to help them fighting ISIS?????

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## Tosapai

Romanians are smart  :Smiling:

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## LeBrok

> Romanians are smart


Welcome to Eupedia Tosapai. Try using "Reply With Quote" button, so we all know who and what you are referring to.

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## Tosapai

Maciamo, you follow the theory of the white supremacists.

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## Tosapai

Nyway if you search on the web you can see that Italians have the higher IQ score among all the countries in Europe.

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## johen

RE:The Romans were very organised, disciplined, serious, rather stern and stoic, military-minded, cared little about family ties.

Those are not the characters the rulers of big empire should have first. The first one for the ruler to have is charismatic character. It seems to me that current italians have that one from the ancient Rome people. Not nowadays, but it was so usual that latin people swept the head position of international organizations.

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## LeBrok

> RE:The Romans were very organised, disciplined, serious, rather stern and stoic, military-minded, cared little about family ties.
> 
> Those are not the characters the rulers of big empire should have first. The first one for the ruler to have is charismatic character. It seems to me that current italians have that one from the ancient Rome people. Not nowadays, but it was so usual that latin people swept the head position of international organizations.


Use the Reply With Quote button instead of "RE...". Much easier and we know who you are talking to.

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## johen

sorry, however new member like me is not allowed to reply with quote until posting ten times.

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## Minty

> Ancient Rome was a civilization, with a state, a citizenship, a capital, laws, and so on. Germanic and Celtic tribes had not yet reached the development stage of civilization. You cannot compare the two anymore than you could compare the maturity of a child and an adult. Celtic and Germanic societies have since reached adulthood, so now we can compare them more fairly with Italy.
> 
> 
> 
> There is little relation between wealth and organisation. The ancient Celts were utterly disorganised and tribal, yet extremely rich (far richer than the Romans until the conquest of Gaul by Caesar). In contrast the Chinese have always been a very organised nation, but that did not prevent them to face the most abject poverty and starvation of millions under Mao Zedong.
> 
> Like most Italians I do not regard Italy as a united culture or nation. Italy became a country by accident. Lombards and Venetians share precious little in common with Campanians or Sicilans. Even Tuscans contrast harply with the people of the Marches just across the Apennines. 
> 
> If North Italy (or Padania as the Lega Nord calls it) were an independent country it would be the richest country in the EU after Luxembourg. So there is no denying that at least half of Italy is very rich. That doesn't make Italians, even Northerners, organised, disciplined, self-restrained and punctual people. How can you not see that wealth has nothing to do with organisation ?


Now the starvation the Mainlanders went through under Mao has nothing to do with organisation. I don't think whether a civilization is organised or not has anything to do with prevention of starvation and poverty. 

Toward the end of the 18th century British ships began importing a more controversial item into China. Opium is an addictive narcotic, extracted from the poppy flower and usually taken through smoking. This turned into the opium war later on. - See more at: http://alphahistory.com/chineserevol....6QumlItC.dpuf

With the doors to China thrown open, foreign diplomats, officials, traders and missionaries poured in through the second half of the 19th century. The more aggressive foreign imperialist powers – Britain, France, Germany, Russia and Japan – negotiated with regional officials and warlords to construct their own ‘spheres of influence’ within China. Foreign merchants and agents came to exert strong influence, if not control, over government and commerce in these regions. The growth of these ‘spheres of influence’ created a patchwork of foreign enclaves that functioned almost as virtual colonies within China’s borders. The Qing rulers retained their sovereignty and control of the national government, though in reality much of China was under foreign control. Many observers believed China would eventually disintegrate into several discrete colonies, each controlled by a foreign power. - See more at: http://alphahistory.com/chineserevol....6QumlItC.dpuf

To make matters worse, in 1894 China again found itself at war, this time with Japan. The First Sino-Japanese War, as it became known, began over disputed territorial control of the Korean peninsula. This war was another disaster for China. - See more at: http://alphahistory.com/chineserevol....6QumlItC.dpuf

In 1899 yet another foreign power, the United States, entered the fray. Concerned that the European and Japanese carve-up of China threatened American commercial interests, US diplomats negotiated an ‘open door policy’ for American trade in China. These negotiations, however, were done with the other imperial powers in China – not with the Qing government. Beijing was informed rather than consulted, a measure of how impotent and irrelevant the Qing regime had become. As the 19th century came to an end, China found itself drug-addled, divided, exploited by foreign interests and plagued by corrupt officials. - See more at: http://alphahistory.com/chineserevol....6QumlItC.dpuf

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## odysseus1

> One of the great mysteries of European history in my eyes is the complete reversal in character between the ancient Romans and medieval or modern Italians. 
> 
> The Romans were very organised, disciplined, serious, rather stern and stoic, military-minded, cared little about family ties (they frequently adopted people unrelated to them or murdered their blood relatives), and were unusually ready to sacrifice themselves for the common good of their nation (as legionaries). 
> 
> The Italians are just the opposite in all these respects. ....



I know how it can be explained. I am not sure what the genetic studies say, but my theory is as follows: When the Eastern Romans (so called Byzantines) wanted Italy back and waged war in sixth century under Emperor Justinian - that was a very devastating war and Italy as it was then, NEVER RECOVERED from that time 6th century. Many of the high quality Romans of that day from Italy FLED, EMIGRATED (as Syrians and other come to Europa now) to the northern Germanic lands - and those Germanic lands, now Germany, Austria, Switzerland are now the true successor states of the Romans... which ofcourse later actually became the Holy Roman Empire - those ideas came as having people of roman decent in their population.

Italy as is now is diluted, Greece the same, Romania the same, Portugal, Spain the same. 

The true spirit of the Romans and their best genetics (educated families, rich families) had to survive by emigrating to the north during the war of Justinian.

Just my two cents,

Best regards

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## Yetos

ok ok

But I do not see someone mentioning the corruption of society, and the economical class destruction, etc etc,

When Rome started was major a country of patrcians, patricians tend to be more patriotic with land and traditions, and stable
at the end was more plebeians, crowd, plebeians tend to gather money and rich, create bigger things, like many and bigger legions, palaces and empire buildings, etc etc, but the idea of homelend and patriotism drops to second degree,
by bringing many ΜΕΤΟΙΚΟΙ mutatio, new ideas, religions pass to ground, so the Rome of early empire, was not the Rome of late empire,
Same happened to many states, From Athenean Koinon to East Roman empire where Rum (Greco-Romans) were minority in an Army that had mercenairies, Varaggians, Slavs, Goths etc etc.
*at the decline of East Roman empire, young prefer to become monks and priests, than to serve country,
same at Rome, at the start of Roman empire Senates and generals and emperrors, were stronger than every religious officer,
At the End, the High principle of Rome and Italy generally was the Pope,*
At the end of Roman empire, all military, majors, politicians, etc etc were at the mercy of pope, 
same happened at East Roman empire, many times,
1rst was with John Chrysostom
2nd) with Julian and Basileios of Caesareia
*3rd was the Beginning of Schisma, cause what ever the differences among East and West by changing a Patriarch by an emperror is the ultimate deny of religious authorities*
*For First time emperrors change the high priest at 858 AD
*That time West Rome already was weak,
But the change of Patriarch gave breath, oxugen, and life to East Roman empire.

same things we also see at the West Europe,
for example at England, where the head of the church is not a pope or a patriarch but a King or a Queen,
the degradation of high priest under Political persons might be the reason that Britain manage to make its huge british empire.

*The difference among Patrician and Plebeians in how they think of state, country, patriotism, capital, is recently seen in Brexit 


*London like ancient Rome is more plebeians, full of Mutatio residence, they wanted to stay at EU which support banking and money capital system, sending at second degree the nationality and nativity,
But England's country side is full native british, means more patricians, who still give respect to nationality nativity and ethnicity, than money and banks,
so the Brexit results show that UK is at the same dilemas that Roman empire had before milleniums,
by understanding that, and that history is repeating her shelf, you can predict the next problems at England,
I do not know how or with what, But if England did not solve soon her problem, we might be eye-witnesses of repeating the history of Roman empire decline.

PS
*the balance among patricians and plebeians is a must,
if that ballance is lost, the chain reaction of collapse is certain,*

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## Longsword

The same transition of cultural character can be observed in any great fallen Empire as the surviving inhabitants try to culturally distance themselves from the perceived evils of the previous regime. Britain for example - at it's 19th Century imperial peak the national character was: sexually repressed, reserved, an iron sense of benign superiority and a love of amateurism. Today the British character is more stereotypically sexually promiscuous, hedonistic, self-deprecating and devoted to professionalism. Almost a total volte-face as a people attempt to disassociate themselves from the perceived evils of the British Empire. No doubt Christian Italians of the last 1500 years have experienced similar rejections of the fundamentals of the Roman character of discipline and so on (although this was almost completely absent by the time of the Fall). Modern Italy, furthermore, seems to be a stark divide between the north - a Germanic and highly industrious people - and south - a largely Mediterranean/North African people more accustomed to corruption and so on who arrived, it seems, as the Aragonese tried to pump as much money as they could from their Italian kingdoms while they could. There are, therefore, probably very few Romans left anywhere - more likely to show up in pockets of France and Spain than in Italy, if anywhere.
It is even apparent in the Italian language - a language of revolt against Latin. We know that while Italian is structurally closer to Latin than French, for example, the pronunciation of Italian words is wilfully incorrect. In fact, the Latin root words in German and English are closer to true Latin pronunciation as the popular languages in those countries were never Latin based. So 'vincere' in Italian is all wrong as Latin pronunciation. 'Victoire' in French is closer, with a hard 'c'. The truncated 'win' in English is also close. The Latin would have been 'winkere', phonetically. Same with 'kaiser'/'caesar' in German. The Germans never adopted a Latin replacement for 'Sieg' though...probably as they were more accustomed to saying it than hearing it than the French and British tribes. The same decimation of R.P. is happening in British English now - anyone who speaks that way these days is seen as a figure of ridicule, and British English is on direct course to become an American English dialect with Carribbean/Middle Eastern inflections. So this explains the phenomenon - cultural pride in 'anything but the past' far outweighs any notions of a genetic predisposition to logistics and discipline. The Italians will always be the least Roman people of all, in this respect.

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## Angela

Are you guys on anthrofora feeling bored or something?

I probably shouldn't even bother to respond, but just for the record, northern Italians are not "Germanic", and southern Italians are not "North African". If you knew anything about uniparental markers you would know that. Just as one example, unless the Lombards and Ostrogoths carried more than I1 and R1b U-106, their impact was minimal. _All_ Italians are carriers of a great deal of EEF ancestry from the Neolithic migrations upon which subsequent migrations from different directions has acted. Genetic variability is on a cline, and people of neighboring regions which have experienced similar gene flows have more similarity, but that doesn't make Northern Italians "Germanic" or southern Italians "North African". If you knew anything about autosomal genetics you would know that. Perhaps you should pick up a good introductory book on genetics like Jean Manco's Ancestral Journeys to clear these things up for you. It goes without saying that the combination(s) were fortuitous and designed to create the best possible outcome. :)

The "character" of the Romans of the Republic, not atypical of rather simple farming cultures of their era, had gone the way of the dodo bird by the time of Augustus.That's what happens when you become a sophisticated empire open to the influences of the world rather than some isolated, simple farmers. Plus, it may have escaped your attention, but the Etruscans who lived right next door to them were totally different. There would have been no "Romans" without the influence of the more sophisticated and advanced and life loving "Etruscans". They would have stayed in their little huts on top of their hills, and the world would have heard no more of them.

Since you seem to have skipped English history, there was nothing sexually repressed about the British of the Elizabethan Era, or the Restoration, or the Regency period. For goodness sakes', right before the ascension of Victoria women of the aristocracy, once they'd provided the "heir", went on to do as they liked, having numerous children by numerous fathers, all of them accepted and legitimated by the husbands. Read the biography of the Duchess of Devonshire and open your eyes. Heck, go all the way back to the Middle Ages and read some Chaucer. The British have always had a very bawdy streak. They seem to seesaw, for complicated reasons I won't go into here, between a rather sexually promiscuous and a more repressed profile. Much of the "repression" of the Victorian Era is down to Victoria herself and that self-righteous twit she married. She abhorred her loose living uncles and the atmosphere they created, and she swept it all away almost overnight. As for "loose living" today, the most promiscuous countries in Europe are in northern and eastern Europe; I personally find it rather abhorrent. 

There's a whole field of study you may not have heard of: it's called linguistics. Languages change, pronunciation changes. None of that changes the fact that just knowing Italian I can read a great deal of Latin. Who cares if there were some sound changes? That means we "revolted" against Rome? 

Now, take your longsword and put it...well, I'm sure you get the drift.

http://www.regencyhistory.net/2012/1...uchess-of.html

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...stral-journeys

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## binx

> The same transition of cultural character can be observed in any great fallen Empire as the surviving inhabitants try to culturally distance themselves from the perceived evils of the previous regime. Britain for example - at it's 19th Century imperial peak the national character was: sexually repressed, reserved, an iron sense of benign superiority and a love of amateurism. Today the British character is more stereotypically sexually promiscuous, hedonistic, self-deprecating and devoted to professionalism. Almost a total volte-face as a people attempt to disassociate themselves from the perceived evils of the British Empire. No doubt Christian Italians of the last 1500 years have experienced similar rejections of the fundamentals of the Roman character of discipline and so on (although this was almost completely absent by the time of the Fall). Modern Italy, furthermore, seems to be a stark divide between the north - a Germanic and highly industrious people - and south - a largely Mediterranean/North African people more accustomed to corruption and so on who arrived, it seems, as the Aragonese tried to pump as much money as they could from their Italian kingdoms while they could. There are, therefore, probably very few Romans left anywhere - more likely to show up in pockets of France and Spain than in Italy, if anywhere..



There is very little Roman ancestry in Spain. Surely more in France than in Spain, but in France not more than in Italy. And in South Italy there is no more North African ancestry than in Spain or Portugal. You all forget that Italy, unlike Greece, continued to have a leading role in Europe even after the fall of the Roman Empire. Only with the birth of modern nations, around 1600, and with the Counter-Reformation, Italy gradually became a peripheral country because Italy was divided into many small states and this type of model struggled to keep abreast of modern nations. Italy has always been much more than the Roman Empire. 





> It is even apparent in the Italian language - a language of revolt against Latin. We know that while Italian is structurally closer to Latin than French, for example, the pronunciation of Italian words is wilfully incorrect. In fact, the Latin root words in German and English are closer to true Latin pronunciation as the popular languages in those countries were never Latin based. So 'vincere' in Italian is all wrong as Latin pronunciation. 'Victoire' in French is closer, with a hard 'c'. The truncated 'win' in English is also close. The Latin would have been 'winkere', phonetically. Same with 'kaiser'/'caesar' in German. The Germans never adopted a Latin replacement for 'Sieg' though...probably as they were more accustomed to saying it than hearing it than the French and British tribes. The same decimation of R.P. is happening in British English now - anyone who speaks that way these days is seen as a figure of ridicule, and British English is on direct course to become an American English dialect with Carribbean/Middle Eastern inflections



The whole truth is that the Germans have always had a big inferiority complex against the Romans. A so big inferiority complex that they called their empire the Holy Roman Empire. I doubt that nowdays a greater Latin heritage exists in languages such as German or English rather than in Italian or other Romance languages. All that you're talking about is called palatalization and took place in all the Romance languages. I don't doubt that without the Latin no Romance languages would exist, including the French and English and German have a great Latin heritage. But that's it. 





> So this explains the phenomenon - cultural pride in 'anything but the past' far outweighs any notions of a genetic predisposition to logistics and discipline. The Italians will always be the least Roman people of all, in this respect.



Roman ancestry is still there, in Italy. Mostly in North-Central Italy, but South Italy was never fully Roman and was always a bit different from the rest of Italy (but not North African!). Italians are still the most Roman people of all.

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## binx

This thread starts from an assumption that sounds like a stereotype. Italy has always been much more than the Roman Empire. Leonardo da Vinci, Leonardo Fibonacci, Galileo Galilei, Amedeo Avogadro, Raffaello, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Nicolo Paganini, Antonio Vivaldi, Giacomo Puccini, Giovanni Domenico Cassini, Marcello Malpighi, Claudio Monteverdi, Guglielmo Marconi, Cristoforo Colombo, Amerigo Vespucci weren't ancient Roman. The Republic of Venice, Duchy of Savoy, Duchy of Milan, Duchy of Florence /Grand Duchy of Tuscany, Duchy of Urbino, Duchy of Parma, Ferrara, Modena... weren't less organised, disciplined, serious than their European counterparts. Only with the birth of modern nations, around 1600, and with the Counter-Reformation, Italy gradually became a peripheral country because Italy was divided into many small states and this type of model struggled to keep abreast of modern nations. 




> Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950


In his book Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950 the American political scientist Charles Murray stated that Italy is part of the Big Four, and the Big Four alone (Britain, France, Germany and Italy) account for the 72 percent of all the European significant figures from 1450 to 1950. "The concentration of European accomplishment from 1400-1950 is easy enough to sum up if you don't worry about complications the numbers of significant figures (come) from Britain, France, Germany dwarf those from everywhere else except Italy". Even after the fall of the Roman Empire Italy (ok, more North-Central Italy -Venice and Florence - than the whole country) is part of European core. NB not all the modern European countries are part of the European core.





> European accomplishment from 1400-1950

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## binx

> In his book The Moral Basis of a Backward Society, the American political scientist Edward Banfield employed the phrase '*amoral familism*' to describe the inability of modern (mostly southern) Italian villagers to 'act together for the common good, or indeed for any good transcending the immediate material interest of the family'. Interestingly this complete lack of attachment to the state and lack of identification to the wider community is found nowadays in societies that I would qualify of '*short-ranged collectivist*' (in which the collectivity is the family or village) of the Balkans and southern Italy, as opposed to the 'wide-range collectivism' (where the collectivity is the whole nation) of East Asia.


That book is about a southern Italian village that hardly could represent all the country.

In his book, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy the American political scientist Robert D. Putnam evaluated the differences between Northern-Central Italy and Southern Italy and stated that the North-South divide dates back to medieval times.

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## Angela

Southern Italy's tragedy is that the cultural and economic advancements of Sicily during the Middle Ages,including a vernacular poetry much admired and copied by the Tuscans, and of Amalfi on the mainland were followed by centuries of total misrule which kept them out of the mainstream of European advancement. The same thing happened to Greece and the Balkans under the Ottomans.

In the north, on the other hand, large areas were able to free themselves of the yoke of the German Emperors and to form communes which allowed the intelligence, creativity, and entrepreneurial spirit of the Italian people to flourish. These were the first areas where we see actual capitalism, and they were *not*, a la Weber, *Protestant*. Those areas under the strict control of these large autocratic entities stultified, and that includes not only the south under centuries of French and Spanish misrule, but the areas in the center, like Umbria and parts of the Marche, areas where genetically the people are not all that different from the Tuscans or northern Italians, but which were under the control of the Popes. 

These large countries then severely curtailed that flowering by the Habsburg/Valois Wars of the late 15th and 16th centuries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Wars 

Invasions from over the Alps usually spell disaster for Italy.

History matters.

For those unfamiliar with Italian history you can read here about what Sicily was like during the time of the Norman French and even into the rule of Frederick II, and then see what the following centuries of misrule did to it. Why on earth would any people pay allegiance to foreign overlords who grabbed all the land and then let the countryside go to ruin, stifled any innovation or economic growth, and squeezed all the peasants and middle class natives of everything they owned through taxes or confiscation. You would have to be mad.
http://www.bestofsicily.com/history2.htm

The Kingdom of Amalfi:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duchy_of_Amalfi

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## Sile

Italians?

*If Italy was not formed in 1860 their would have been no italian ethnic people NOR any Italian language today
*
The term Italian prior to 1860 is the same level as the terms of Britsh, Iberian or scandinavian.
we have no ethnic british, we do have ethnic, welsh, english, scottish and irish though

we have no ethnic scandinavian, we do have ethnic norwegians, danish and swedish though

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## Angela

Yes, well, then there are no Germans either, and no Germanic ancestry for me to have supposedly inherited. They weren't unified until very late either, and there are language and other differences between the people of northern Germany and southern Germany even if the genetic differences aren't as large as those between northern Italy and southern Italy. 

No French, either, because up until the 20th century a lot of the southern French weren't speaking standard French, and were still referring to the northern French coming down to buy property as "the French". 

Yet because of the process of Germanification, all Germans consider themselves German. A similar process went on in France. Breton, Norman, Poitevin, Alsatien, Gascon, Provencal, you name it, they were French and they were expected to speak French, and no nonsense. Italy, on the other hand, has always given a lot of deference to people who want to hang on to their dialects, and even their dreams of secession, never mind whether or not it makes any sense. Maybe Italy would have been better off if it had taken a hard line initially too, but it didn't, so no use crying over spilt milk. 

I'm just tired of people applying one rule to Italians and another rule to everyone else.

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## Tomenable

> there are language and other differences between the people of northern Germany and southern Germany even if the genetic differences aren't as large as those between northern Italy and southern Italy.


It seems that the difference between North Germans and South Germans is also large, check for example these PCA graphs. It looks like the average difference is almost as large as between North and South Italians, but there is more overlap on individual level:



In some GEDmatch calculators I'm much closer to North Germans than to South Germans. In PuntDNAL K15 North Germans are my 4th population and South Germans only 20th (this indirectly implies that there is a large difference between these two groups):

*Single Population Sharing:*

*# Population(source) Distance*

*1 Polish 2.06*
(...)
*4 North_German 6.79*
5 Belarusian 7.58
6 Slovenian 7.94
(...)
8 Austrian 8.36
(...)
12 Hungarian 9.25
(...)
*20 South_German 13.53*

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## Tomenable

North Germans are more Germanic but they are also Slavic-admixed (especially North-East Germans).

South Germans are probably to a large extent descended from Celts etc. who became Germanized.

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## Angela

Each tool gives slightly different results. One shouldn't rely on just one measure.

In terms of fst, the fst between north and south Germany is .000. North Italy to South Italy is .005, North Italy to France (not South France), which might presumably be closer, is .003, and to Spain is also .003. Oh, and North Italy to south Germany is .004, and to northern Germany is .005.

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## A. Papadimitriou

> Roman ancestry is still there, in Italy. Mostly in North-Central Italy, but South Italy was never fully Roman and was always a bit different from the rest of Italy (but not North African!). Italians are still the most Roman people of all.


Northern Italy was never fully Roman too. There were Celts and 'Etruscans'.

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## davef

We can't just outright say which italians are closest to Romans without testing actual ancient roman samples. Doesn't help that Rome was a melting pot so finding those valuable corpses that are 100 percent original roman stock doesn't sound easy

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## bicicleur

> In the north, on the other hand, large areas were able to free themselves of the yoke of the German Emperors and to form communes which allowed the intelligence, creativity, and entrepreneurial spirit of the Italian people to flourish. These were the first areas where we see actual capitalism, and they were *not*, a la Weber, *Protestant*. Those areas under the strict control of these large autocratic entities stultified, and that includes not only the south under centuries of French and Spanish misrule, but the areas in the center, like Umbria and parts of the Marche, areas where genetically the people are not all that different from the Tuscans or northern Italians, but which were under the control of the Popes.


the same thing happened in Flanders already in the 11th century when the count of Flanders ruled more or less independent from the French king
commerce and industry florished
Flanders became so rich it was invaded several times by the French in the 14th century to subjugate Flanders again
then, Antwerp just outside of Flanders started to develop
then, by inheritance Flanders and Antwerp came under Spanish Habsburg rule and the inquisition
many merchants fled to Holland which then developped very quickly into an overseas trading nation
there were close ties between the famous Flemish and North Italian painters

there was a free spirit already before protestantism
protestantism developped in Holland and Germany, I guess as a reaction against inquisition and Catholic fundamentalism
the Spanish Habsburgs used inquisition to tighten their grip
as so often there was a mix between religion and politics

and what does it make of the Flemish people genetically?
are they the dumb, underdevelopped class who didn't emigrate to Antwerp, Holland or Italy?

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## Angela

There's a tendency among not only geneticists, but people interested in genetics, imo, to become very deterministic about it and attribute 100% of any differences between groups to genetic causes. I think that leads to sometimes false conclusions.

Does genetic inheritance matter? Yes, I think it does, but environment, and not, according to the studies I've seen, the "home" environment so much, but the "outside" environment, does have an impact. How a country is ruled impacts behavior, certainly economic behavior. As I said above, "history matters". 

My take away is that since the Middle Ages those areas in Europe which either had local rulers who promoted trade and innovation, or local communes which did the same, and also had access to trade routes along rivers, seas, etc., where the people had the wit to take advantage of these circumstances, and where the local government basically then got out of the way and let capitalism flourish, were the areas which saw the most economic development, the most prosperity, and the ensuing flourishing of the arts, science, literature, etc. 

It started in Italy, partly, perhaps, because there was more memory of commerce and urbanization, where some urban centers still existed, if in much reduced circumstances, and because the sea routes were not totally forgotten, nor the routes using the Po and then over the Alps. I think another important factor was that they were ruled by the "Holy Roman Emperors", who weren't, after all, the representatives of a unified, monolithic, authoritarian nation state, but of fractious and competing small states, and which emperors often maintained a rather tenuous hold on power themselves. As a result, the Italian cities were able to free themselves relatively easily, although at some cost, and form relatively free communes. The combination led to the rebirth of trade and commerce and then all the other advancements.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_commune
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_city-states

It then spread quickly to the low countries, where, as you explained, some of the same conditions existed. Amalfi, by the way, suffered much the same fate as you describe in Flanders. They were on the losing side of history and their flowering came to a relatively quick end.

Does that mean that they suddenly became stupid? Obviously not. There's a limit to what you can accomplish given certain circumstances. I do think it's true, however, that certain areas can experience a sort of "brain drain" when this happens. I worry about it in terms of Italy, I have to tell you. I see all these Italian names on genetics papers, but they're at foreign universities. 

Anyway, this is all still operating to a certain extent, in my opinion. I saw the following map of GDP per individual in purchasing power posted on Razib Khan's twitter feed. He then wrote a blog post on it.

Average GDP in purchasing power in EU by region.jpg

The data is from 2014. If my memory serves, it was even higher for Italy a couple of years ago. 

In his Unz blog post on it he makes the "Habsburg Empire" connection, as did Peter Turchin, but they're not getting it quite right, in my opinion, as the fact that Spain/Portugal, also under their rule, lag behind, shows. It's not the greatness of the Habsburgs or the Carolingians and their policies that is important; it's the laxness of their rule in the "central corridor" which provided the freedom necessary for capitalism, added to the access to established trade routes and areas of high agricultural yield.

See:
http://www.unz.com/gnxp/

Turchin, leftist that he is, will probably never acknowledge this.

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## bicicleur

there were 2 Habsburg branches, a Spanish and an Austrian
I don't know exactly how far the Austrian branch reached, but I don't see an immeadiate connection with the map provided

you're right, it was private intitiative and trade that created wealth, not some central government in favor of a few priviliged

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## Angela

> there were 2 Habsburg branches, a Spanish and an Austrian
> I don't know exactly how far the Austrian branch reached, but I don't see an immeadiate connection with the map provided
> 
> you're right, it was private intitiative and trade that created wealth, not some central government in favor of a few priviliged


Exactly. Some of the people commenting on the Razib Khan blog post seem to have an imperfect understanding of the relevant history and geographical spread of the "Holy Roman Empire". To wit, many of the relevant areas actually weren't in the Empire; people were safe on the roads in Spain, too; the Spanish Golden Age was based on New World silver, and once that was gone there was no large mercantile class in place (especially since they had expelled all their Jews) and policies were oriented toward the interests of the large landowner; the same was true in the southern Italy they ruled.

Given the orientation of many amateur geneticists there's also the reflexive Nordicism, to which I can only point out that East Germany, despite these supposedly superior genes, was a mess economically when under communism and the Soviet Union. Also, southern Germany and Austria, more "southern" areas of Germany, are actually more prosperous. Amalfi didn't have much "Germanic" ancestry, I might add. As I said, history and governance matter. (Oh, most of the prosperity of southern Ireland is because it's a tax haven, and that in the North is because of drilling.)

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## Sile

> It seems that the difference between North Germans and South Germans is also large, check for example these PCA graphs. It looks like the average difference is almost as large as between North and South Italians, but there is more overlap on individual level:
> 
> 
> 
> In some GEDmatch calculators I'm much closer to North Germans than to South Germans. In PuntDNAL K15 North Germans are my 4th population and South Germans only 20th (this indirectly implies that there is a large difference between these two groups):
> 
> *Single Population Sharing:*
> 
> *# Population(source) Distance*
> ...


since south-germans border north- Italians ( austrians are south-germans ) why don't you plot their PCA and see how close they match or not

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## Sile

> Exactly. Some of the people commenting on the Razib Khan blog post seem to have an imperfect understanding of the relevant history and geographical spread of the "Holy Roman Empire". To wit, many of the relevant areas actually weren't in the Empire; people were safe on the roads in Spain, too; the Spanish Golden Age was based on New World silver, and once that was gone there was no large mercantile class in place (especially since they had expelled all their Jews) and policies were oriented toward the interests of the large landowner; the same was true in the southern Italy they ruled.
> 
> Given the orientation of many amateur geneticists there's also the reflexive Nordicism, to which I can only point out that East Germany, despite these supposedly superior genes, was a mess economically when under communism and the Soviet Union. Also, southern Germany and Austria, more "southern" areas of Germany, are actually more prosperous. Amalfi didn't have much "Germanic" ancestry, I might add. As I said, history and governance matter. (Oh, most of the prosperity of southern Ireland is because it's a tax haven, and that in the North is because of drilling.)


Venice was never under holy roman lands and even conquests by venetians into holy roman lands removed these lands from the HRE ................same happened in netherlands and france.

The genetic difference between north and south italy is evident by migration, but rich and poor division in Italy was due to the fact that central and north italy areas where ruled by themselves and became rich while the south became poor sitting under Iberian rule ......be it Aragon, Navaresse, Catalan, Castilian or Boubon rulers ...........the south was bled by the iberians

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## Cato

Italians descend from the Pre-Roman peoples rather than from the ancient Romans. At best people from certain parts of Latium could be the descendants of the Latins but in Rome today most the the inhabitants are or the sons or the grandsons of people who came from the Marche, Abruzzo, Calabria, Campania etc. Since the 1870 there has been an huge internal migration from Central-Southern Italy and to a lesser degree from the North toward the capital..already in the antiquity Rome was full of people from all over Italy and beyond

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## Angela

Speak for yourself.

You're apparently forgetting all the colonies of Roman soldiers and others which were established all over northern Italy. Or aren't they teaching Roman history in Italian schools anymore?

https://www.britannica.com/topic/col...man-settlement

https://www.academia.edu/4752147/Sol...publican_Italy

http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/...*/Colonia.html

Some examples from Rome north: Ostia, Rimini, Modena, Parma, Luni.

You're also being far too literal. What definition of Roman are you using? Does it include only the inhabitants of "Rome" itself? How about the Etruscans and Sabines whom they incorporated very early on? 

The people who "built" Rome probably had as much ancestry from the Etruscans and from related tribes of central and central Northern Italy as from the people who lived on the seven hills originally.

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## Angela

Roman colonies:


Once all of Italy was unified, there would have been admixture all up and down the peninsula.

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## Cato

I am referring only to the inhabitants of ancient Rome, the original Romans to be precise (Archaic-Republican period)...Etruscans and the other Italic peoples were Socii Foederati they can't be considered ethnic Romans IMO 

Anyway i'm not Anti-Roman at all..my username is Cato (!)

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

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## Azzurro

Just want to add many great inventions were created by Italians during and after the Roman era.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...ian_inventions

In this list many inventions were created during the medieval ages and the early modern era. The Etruscans were definitely not part the original Roman Patrician families, but the very least to say the Etruscans had an influence on Roman culture and were Italian peoples, they were Socii as Cato stated.

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## Vallicanus

The earliest Romans were *Latins, Sabines and Etruscans,* according to Livy and others.
The Claudii and Valerii among others were Sabine "gentes".

An area near the Forum in Rome was called the *Vicus Tuscus* (Etruscan Quarter) while there was a Latin town called *Tusculum* (near modern Frascati).

The great Tarquin dynasty of monarchical Rome was part Etruscan from Tarquinii and part Corinthian (Demaratus) Greek.

Lucius Junius Brutus, founder of the Roman Republic, was the nephew of the last King of Rome, Tarquinius Superbus.

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## Angela

Indeed.

The precise genetic profile of the first shepherds living in their miserable, thatched huts on the seven hills above the Tiber is rather irrelevant, in my opinion. What did they ever accomplish?

Already by the time they appeared in the annals of history they were probably a mixed group.

" Rome lay 12 miles inland from the sea on the Tiber River, the border between Latium and Etruria. Because the site commanded a convenient river crossing and lay on a land route from the Apennines to the sea, it formed the meeting point of three distinct peoples: Latins, Etruscans, and Sabines. Though Latin in speech and culture, the Roman population must have been somewhat diverse from earliest times, a circumstance that may help to account for the openness of Roman society in historical times."

"Romulus, Rome’s first king according to tradition, was the invention of later ancient historians. His name, which is not even proper Latin, was designed to explain the origin of Rome’s name. His fictitious reign was filled with deeds expected of an ancient city founder and the son of awargod. Thus he was described as having established Rome’s early political, military, and social institutions and as having waged war against neighbouring states. Romulus was also thought to have shared his royal power for a time with a Sabine namedTitus Tatius. The name may be that of an authentic ruler of early Rome, perhaps Rome’s first real king; nothing, however, was known about him in later centuries, and his reign was therefore lumped together with that of Romulus.The names of the other six kings are authentic and were remembered by the Romans."

"According to ancient tradition, the warlike founder Romulus was succeeded by the Sabine Numa Pompilius, whose reign was characterized by complete tranquility and peace. Numa was supposed to have created virtually all of Rome’s religious institutions and practices."

"Rome’s urban transformation was carried out by its last three kings: LuciusTarquinius Priscus (Tarquin the Elder), Servius Tullius, and Lucius TarquiniusSuperbus (Tarquin the Proud). According to ancient tradition, the two Tarquins were father and son and came from Etruria. One tradition madeServius Tullius a Latin; another described him as an Etruscan named Mastarna. All three kings were supposed to have been great city planners and organizers (a tradition that has been confirmed by archaeology)."

https://www.britannica.com/place/ancient-Rome

The Etruscans didn't disappear. They were absorbed by the Romans. 

The following gens are all Etruscan: Lartia, Herminia, Caecina, and I could go on and on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lartia_(gens)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herminia_(gens)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caecina_(gens)

In the time of the four emperors between the Julio/Claudians and the Flavians, Otho, one of the four emperors, was descended from an Etruscan family.

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

As to the Sabines, if the event known to us as "The Rape of the Sabines" has any historical accuracy at all, there was admixture between the "Romans" and the "Sabines.

The initial Roman imperial family was, after the death of Augustus, more Claudii than Julii, and the Claudii were a Sabine family.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claudia_(gens)

After them, we have another Sabine family, the Flavians...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vespasian

Cicero was from a Sabine family southeast of Rome.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cicero

Livy was born near modern Padua, and given the inclusive nature of the "Romans", he might have had some "local" ancestry.

Anyway, if the Flavians and Cicero and Otho weren't "Roman", then nobody was "Roman."

I'm aware that the line has to be drawn at a certain point, but that point is certainly not with some shepherds living in thatched huts on the Palatine. Nor can it be drawn before the first century AD had even ended.

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## Vallicanus

Horatius Cocles who defended the bridge over the Tiber against the Etruscans of Lars Porsenna of Clusium had with him 2 companions with Etruscan names, Spurius *Larcius* and Titus *Herminius.*

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## Cato

> The earliest Romans were *Latins, Sabines and Etruscans,* according to Livy and others.
> The Claudii and Valerii among others were Sabine "gentes".
> 
> An area near the Forum in Rome was called the *Vicus Tuscus* (Etruscan Quarter) while there was a Latin town called *Tusculum* (near modern Frascati).
> 
> The great Tarquin dynasty of monarchical Rome was part Etruscan from Tarquinii and part Corinthian (Demaratus) Greek.
> 
> Lucius Junius Brutus, founder of the Roman Republic, was the nephew of the last King of Rome, Tarquinius Superbus.


I know that early Rome had a Sabine and a southern Etruscan component in its population, obviously i include them in the "ethnic Romans" label since they were there since the beginning and contributed to the expansion of Rome.

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## Milan

There is big span of time discussed here,to the general question how Romans turned into Italians?
Roman empire expanded greatly in size,the same question can be asked about many today nations that emerged on it's former territory.
*However not all people were soldiers and emperors there as to what we have in mind*,there was majority of simple people among them,soldiers were going anywhere where they were required.The soldiers,nobility would have been from the area they started to expanded from.Later on with many "Romans" from the conquered territories.
Locations of Roman legions, 80 CE


When Constantine moved the capital to Constantinople(new Rome) i guess Rome lost it's significance,everything shifted in Constantinople,there were the courts,the nobles etc,simply the capital was there.
Map of all the territories once occupied by the Roman Empire, along with locations of _limes


_for example when Justinian was sending troops against "Goths" in Italy they were gathering in Serdica(Sofia) present Bulgaria.Yes Romans.
Roman was proffesion,common goal,politics bound by Romaness.

Yes ancient Romans somehow turned into Italians and are credited with creation of that empire.

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## Milan

For example Constans II (641 to 668) wanted to move the capital yet again from Constantinople to Syracuse in Sicily,so obviosly that would have been the most prosperous part of the empire,it was smaller empire at the time and with internal as well many external conflicts but still rich and powerful empire,i don't think it is genetics or anything like that,to brought those things in question has to do with one own bias,"behavior" of ancient people vs modern,north better than south,to the contrary culture shift was going opposite in our own perception we call Europe.

In 663 Constans visited Rome for twelve days—the only emperor to set foot in Rome for two centuries—and was received with great honor by Pope Vitalian (657–672)

Rumours that he was going to move the capital of the Empire to Syracuse were probably fatal for Constans. On September 15, 668, he was assassinated in his bath by his chamberlain, according to Theophilus of Edessa, with a bucket.

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## HYGILI4K

> since south-germans border north- Italians ( austrians are south-germans ) why don't you plot their PCA and see how close they match or not


Here you go

pone.0005472.s007.jpg

nelis2009-figS2-detail.png

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/art...e.0005472.s007

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## Angela

Or, we could use fst. The closest similarity is not to Germany.

North Italy to France(langue d'oïl not langue d'oc): .003
North Italy to Spain: .003
North Italy to Switzerland: .003
North Italy to southern Germany: .004
North Italy to northern Germany: .005

I don't remember if North Italy on this study included TSI Tuscans from near Florence. 

In your PCA, the three major groupings in Switzerland are included: the Ticino, Italian speaking, which plots right next to northern Italians, French speaking Swiss, who are overlapping with the French, and then German speaking Swiss who start overlapping with the southern Germans.

It's congruent with what the fst show.

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## HYGILI4K

Thank you, Angela, but my intention was to show that northern italians do not cluster with germans.

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## Angela

Yes, I know. Thank-you for finding those PCAs. I was merely trying to approach it from a different angle. Clearly, two groups with an FST of .004, on a PCA with any reasonable amount of resolution, are not going to cluster together. 

My main point is that as we wait for some Roman era dna from Italy, we should start to define our terms. Are the "Romans" only the shepherds on the Palatine from the earliest period, if in fact we're able to get dna from that period, which I doubt? Are they the people under the rule of the Etruscan kings who first organize and build their city? The Republican era Romans? The early empire Romans? If we're interested in the people who organized the first legions and fought in them, who learned how to improve on Greek architecture, who designed and built the aqueducts, put together the legal system, and on and on, I think we have to include all those people.

Nor should we be including only "Patricians" in that discussion. I highly doubt the architects and master builders and lawyers and writers and artists, or even the majority of the commanders of the legions were of the highest patrician class. Even when discussing that class, the Romans were pragmatic and there was a constant flow of people from the "bottom" as they accumulated wealth and importance. 

Plus, I think there is some degree of misunderstanding of the nature of the entire patrician/plebian divide, but that's a topic for another thread. 

See:
http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2011/2011-04-24.html

In addition to all of that, given the recent discoveries showing how mobile people were, the vast distances that merchants traveled, I think that archaeologists are going to have to be very careful about getting the "context" of the burials right.

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## gidai

> One of the great mysteries of European history in my eyes is the complete reversal in character between the ancient Romans and medieval or modern Italians. 
> 
> The Romans were very organised, disciplined, serious, rather stern and stoic, military-minded, cared little about family ties (they frequently adopted people unrelated to them or murdered their blood relatives), and were unusually ready to sacrifice themselves for the common good of their nation (as legionaries). 
> 
> The Italians are just the opposite in all these respects. They are possibly the least organised Europeans, among the least disciplined. They are fun-loving hedonists. They have made terrible soldiers ever since the Middle Ages (Italians haven't won a single foreign battle in history, except in Libya and Ethiopia where their army far outnumbered the locals in number and fire power). Italians attach a lot of importance to family relations, and often place loyalty to family and friends above that of society or the whole nation. One of the main problems of modern Italy is tax fraud, because people don't feel enough solidarity with other Italians.
> 
> Many character traits are highly inheritable. Cats don't make dogs or vice versa. So how is it possible that modern Italians descend from ancient Romans ? 
> 
> The character traits of modern Italians listed above are far more exacerbated in the southern half of Italy. This is all the more surprising since the ancient Latins originated in the coastal area between Rome and Naples. Since Rome was flooded with immigrants from all over the empire, chances are that the Roman genes survived better in Neapolitans. The region was heavily settled by rich Romans, who had holiday homes in what they called the _Campania Felix_. Campania was even part of the same province as Rome, the _Regio I Latium et Campania_. Some Roman emperors were more often in Capri than in Rome itself.
> ...


evolution ...

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## Salento

... Stereotypes ... not cool! 

Many of us are highly organized.

What’s often perceived as disorganization, in actuality is organized chaos.

Things still get done, and done well.

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## bigsnake49

Well at least the Greeks are consistent. They were disorganized then and disorganized now. Fun loving then, fun loving now. Tax avoiders, tax avoiders now. But I think of it as nurture passed down from generation to generation driven by the need to survive and thrive in difficult times. Survival of the fittest edicts and attitudes. Distrust the state, it's there so the people in power can enrich themselves and those around them, avoid paying taxes because they will rob you of your hard work to give them to their friends, don't work too hard because they will steal your hard work by taxing you to death. You better have fun instead, etc. Witness what happened when Greeks immigrated to the US or Germany or Scandinavia. They worked very hard, changed their attitudes about the state because the state was not out to get them. Yep the exact same Greeks that were so suspicious of the state.

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## Salento

> evolution ...




*Glory #4*  :Grin: 
_Grazie Azzurri_

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## mihaitzateo

Maciamo take a look at the paternal lines of Ladin people.
Just out of curiosity.
What do you think are they Celtic people, Celto-Germanic, Celto-Italic-Germanic or Celto-Italic?
A strange paternal line found in Ladin people and also found in some few parts of Italy is L.
A simple thing:
South Tyrol which is currently under the administration of Italy is the richest area of the EU and one of the most civilized.
There are lots of Ladin people in South Tyrol.
Also what if current Swiss people are rather related to Old Romans?
In some parts of Italy R1B-U152 was found as high as 75%.

Italy got a lot of migration during Roman Empire times, I suppose the soldiers that were doing great services for the Empire were receiving land into Italy.
Also, is known lots of Goths settled in Italy. Goths assimilated various people before settling in Italy.
In Lombardia, lots of Langobards settled.
Maybe Ladin people are actually related to the Romans.
They tell the name of their language comes from Latin - and Latin was the mother tongue of Romans.

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## Sile

> Maciamo take a look at the paternal lines of Ladin people.
> Just out of curiosity.
> What do you think are they Celtic people, Celto-Germanic, Celto-Italic-Germanic or Celto-Italic?
> A strange paternal line found in Ladin people and also found in some few parts of Italy is L.
> A simple thing:
> South Tyrol which is currently under the administration of Italy is the richest area of the EU and one of the most civilized.
> There are lots of Ladin people in South Tyrol.
> Also what if current Swiss people are rather related to Old Romans?
> In some parts of Italy R1B-U152 was found as high as 75%.
> ...


the first paper I recall of the Ladin DNA was by Thomas in 2008, he split the german speakers and italian speakers and below is the ydna split
GV (German, n=102): ~R1b 42%, ~G+I 25%, J 14%, R1a 9% , ~E 8%, *L 2%*
ITA (Ital.speakers BZ, n=59): ~R1b 37%, ~G+I 25%, J 15%, ~E 12%, ~*T 5%*, R1a 3%, *L 2%*
.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17712356
New genetic evidence supports isolation and drift in the Ladin communities of the South Tyrolean Alps but not an ancient origin in the Middle East.
Thomas MG1, Barnes I, Weale ME, Jones AL, Forster P, Bradman N, Pramstaller PP.

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## Salento

- Edited -

Transferred to:
https://www.eupedia.com/forum/thread...l=1#post564801

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## Carnimirie

Wow I accidentally stumbled upon this thread, truly baffled by the servile attitudes of certain North Italian subgroups

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## schön

I really don't believe that moderns italians, should we compare them to the great ancient romans and patricians.

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## EV13SON

I came across a video on this topic, I haven't run into any Italians that refer to themselves as Romans, but I have run into Iranians that refer to themselves as Persian...

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## Salento

… most Italians don’t feel the need to compare themselves to the Romans. We take it for granted!

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## thejoker

> One of the great mysteries of European history in my eyes is the complete reversal in character between the ancient Romans and medieval or modern Italians. 
> 
> The Romans were very organised, disciplined, serious, rather stern and stoic, military-minded, cared little about family ties (they frequently adopted people unrelated to them or murdered their blood relatives), and were unusually ready to sacrifice themselves for the common good of their nation (as legionaries). 
> 
> The Italians are just the opposite in all these respects. They are possibly the least organised Europeans, among the least disciplined. They are fun-loving hedonists. They have made terrible soldiers ever since the Middle Ages (Italians haven't won a single foreign battle in history, except in Libya and Ethiopia where their army far outnumbered the locals in number and fire power). Italians attach a lot of importance to family relations, and often place loyalty to family and friends above that of society or the whole nation. One of the main problems of modern Italy is tax fraud, because people don't feel enough solidarity with other Italians.
> 
> Many character traits are highly inheritable. Cats don't make dogs or vice versa. So how is it possible that modern Italians descend from ancient Romans ? 
> 
> The character traits of modern Italians listed above are far more exacerbated in the southern half of Italy. This is all the more surprising since the ancient Latins originated in the coastal area between Rome and Naples. Since Rome was flooded with immigrants from all over the empire, chances are that the Roman genes survived better in Neapolitans. The region was heavily settled by rich Romans, who had holiday homes in what they called the _Campania Felix_. Campania was even part of the same province as Rome, the _Regio I Latium et Campania_. Some Roman emperors were more often in Capri than in Rome itself.


First of all i doubt you can find some modern people close to Romans. Romans were the yardstick of discipline and military organization, stocism and whatnot. Maybe Nazis were as disciplined as Romans but they lasted as a candle in the wind compared to them and we also have some interesting stuff reports about the Nervitin drug they took to be so "heroic" , so big deal. Second, Italians have won several battles abroad, included the Italo-Turkish war before WW1 and many battles in North Africa. Some of those battles in N.Africas were accounted to Germans by Brits but historians are now shedding light on. Also in Russian campaign we have won some battles in desperate conditions and with little to no weapons . Take a look at Tridentina Battalion. In a bullettin of Supreme Russian Command they called those Alpine soldiers "the only Army Corp that went undefeated on Russian soil ". That if we don't consider the importance of Venetian, Genoese, Pisan and Amalfitan soldiers all over the mediterranean fighting Muslims and rejecting them back and Italian merceneries who were basically the backbone of many armies everywhere in Europe since the middle age. We could also talk how Italy was well present in Lepanto with Venice, Genoa, Florence etc for that matter.
Obviously we were not a united Nation like France or Spain in the middle age, but saying that we have never won a battle abroad is pure fantasy not supported by any historical source.

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## thejoker

> Yes and No, against the Celts who practiced disorganized rushing yes, against Macedonians they were inferior in terms of military technique, but had more man-power and resources to sustain a long-term war. 
> Hannibal completely out-smarted them in almost every battle wining consistently with inferior numbers and resources, when they were at their military peak. He would have gotten into the city of Rome, if it wasn't for the crazy gamble idea the Romans had to go around him straight for Carthage.


Rome wasn't at all its peak during punic wars. 🤣

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