Genetic study The arrival of the Near Eastern ancestry in Central Italy predates the onset of the Roman Empire

[D.L.M]

Show me a massive southern shift towards the aegean in the imperial era in places like milan, and then a secondary northern shift from central europe with a broad spread between the two during the middle ages and I'll agree with your idea. So far the data from late antiquity is not reflecting a CEU repeopling of Italy.

That's fair, time will tell.

 

[Vitruvius]

That's fair, time will tell.

Agreed. Let's wait and see what the dna shows.

 

[HereToLearn]

Are you certain? If you genetically do have many recent relatives in Germany your family history may be atypical compared to other Lombards. One first has to ask how far removed the most recent common ancestors are from you and your foreign distant relatives. There is no recent history of Germanic settlement in Lombardy so this is quite removed from the topic of the Germanic speaking Langobards that entered Italy in the 6th century.

Vitruvius, you are right. I'm sorry but I'm still learning to use these tools, in fact I need to correct my post above picking only those relatives with 4+ grandparents from the same area. In that case, the picture is quite different and not very telling.

Excluding the New World and the UK, I only have DNA relatives with 4+ grandparents from Croatia (2), Germany (only 1), France (1) and Poland (1).

I tried to use this tool to predict deep ancestry connections since as I've told you, my family history is well rooted in the region and if I had foreign recent ancestors I would definitely know. Only as a side note there is in fact minor recent Germanic settlement in Lombardy in the form of a few burgeois Austrian and Swiss-German families, but those surnames in a family tree are recognizable.

 

[Vallicanus]

Germanic admixture is ~0 in both north and south. The northern Italian autosomal profile reflects that of the Italic Picenes precisely without any northern pulls of ancestry necessary. There is no reason to assume the lombards settled more heavily in the north as far as I can tell and many seem to forget that the north had the largest Italic population to begin with. One can speak all they want about Y dna but at the end of the day it codes for less than 1% of human traits. You could tell me 100% of Italian Y haplogroups are germanic dervied but it still doesn't change the much more important autosomal history which right now is implying total continuity with Italics like the Picines.

Show me a massive southern shift towards the aegean in the imperial era in places like milan, and then a secondary northern shift from central europe with a broad spread between the two during the middle ages and I'll agree with your idea. So far the data from late antiquity is not reflecting a CEU repeopling of Italy.

In the Ravasini Picenes study, most of the Pesaro Late Antiquity samples veer more towards the Eastern Mediterranean/Imperial Italy.
How do we explain this?

 

[torzio]

In the Ravasini Picenes study, most of the Pesaro Late Antiquity samples veer more towards the Eastern Mediterranean/Imperial Italy.
How do we explain this?

was not the initial migration from the steppe ?

where is eastern med. ?
hope you do not mean the levant, but stopping at the aegean islands

 

[torzio]

we have concluded that there was no near eastern in central italy prior to the roman republic......unless people think the Umbri migration was near-eastern

 

[torzio]

if people want to state greeks as near-eastern.....then we can also state all the greek towns and areas in southern FRANCE are also near-eastern

 

[Vallicanus]

we have concluded that there was no near eastern in central italy prior to the roman republic......unless people think the Umbri migration was near-eastern

Pesaro Late Antiquity means samples from after the period of the Republic, i.e. under the Late Empire.

They are closer to the Imperial Roman samples than to the Iron age Picenes.

 

[torzio]

i was reffering to the title of the thread.......so.....there is NO near-eastern

 

[Vitruvius]

Vitruvius, you are right. I'm sorry but I'm still learning to use these tools, in fact I need to correct my post above picking only those relatives with 4+ grandparents from the same area. In that case, the picture is quite different and not very telling.

Excluding the New World and the UK, I only have DNA relatives with 4+ grandparents from Croatia (2), Germany (only 1), France (1) and Poland (1).

I tried to use this tool to predict deep ancestry connections since as I've told you, my family history is well rooted in the region and if I had foreign recent ancestors I would definitely know. Only as a side note there is in fact minor recent Germanic settlement in Lombardy in the form of a few burgeois Austrian and Swiss-German families, but those surnames in a family tree are recognizable.

No need to apologize, friend. I was just genuinely surprised to hear that you had so many distant relatives in foreign lands, but if we are talking about being related to outliers with known not local ancestry then that begins to make more sense. I, too, have rather significant heritage from Lombardy, but I've never considered myself "Germanic" to any extent other than maybe a percentile or two at maximum. The alps have indeed remained a strong barrier to geneflow despite the historic migrations that have taken place through them on occasion.

As for this idea of 10% or more Germanic admixture in any ethnic Italian - I'll believe it only when the aDNA really shows it on a broad autosomal and historic level. Beyond that I have extreme doubts.

 

[Vitruvius]

In the Ravasini Picenes study, most of the Pesaro Late Antiquity samples veer more towards the Eastern Mediterranean/Imperial Italy.
How do we explain this?

Pesaro is not northern Italy. It shows an autosomal profile typical of modern northern Italy but it was likely affected in much the same way that latium was. The big revelation is that the modern northern Italian genetic profile is represented by an Italic group in the iron age. This means that we are likely to see the same profile in more iron age italics as we get more samples.

Couple that with what we know about Illyria and the data points to Northern Italy having the same profile even in ancient times. It's not definitive quite yet but highly indicative.

 

[torzio]

pesaro is just south of beach side resort of Rimini ....it is basically still northern italy.

i would split adriatic central italy as....north of Pescara as Nth italy and south of it as Sth italy.

central italy on the adriatic has no true reference.....unlike the opposite side of italy, where central does count

 

[torzio]

samnites also lived on the adriatic...north of Foggia

 

[Vitruvius]

pesaro is just south of beach side resort of Rimini ....it is basically still northern italy.

i would split adriatic central italy as....north of Pescara as Nth italy and south of it as Sth italy.

central italy on the adriatic has no true reference.....unlike the opposite side of italy, where central does count

By modern division of regions, it is not northern Italy (albeit close), but if you prefer to think of it as such that is fine. My point remains that places like Pesaro were significantly shifted by an aegean influx whereas places more northwards like Felsina were far less affected.

 

[Vitruvius]

was not the initial migration from the steppe ?

where is eastern med. ?
hope you do not mean the levant, but stopping at the aegean islands

He's referring to the four samples which plot over imperial Latins and LBA greeks. It looks like there's also one anatolian and one punic outlier in addition to another that retains iron age Picene like ancestry. There is no Levantine ancestry here.

 

[Pax Augusta]

By modern division of regions, it is not northern Italy (albeit close), but if you prefer to think of it as such that is fine. My point remains that places like Pesaro were significantly shifted by an aegean influx whereas places more northwards like Felsina were far less affected.

In Pesaro the local dialect is northern Italian (Gallo-Italic) but geographically it is central Italy, proving that today's statistical-administrative boundaries make little sense when it comes to languages, anthropology, biology, ancient history, archaeology.

I agree with you, it is possible what you say, but in any case, Pesaro is by the sea, Felsina/Bologna is not. It's not so much a matter of being further north in my opinion, but more of the obvious fact that small groups of Aegeans were coming to the coast first.

By the way, today there is a consensus among archaeologists that Felsina/Bologna should be considered Etruscan from the very beginning, from protohistory at least, since the Etruscans were indigenous there as well, and it is not a matter of colonization from Tyrrhenian Etruria. And in Bologna in fact the Villanovan phase continued beyond 750 B.C., and at least so far archaeologists do not classify the later phase as Orientalizing, but they keep classifying it as Villanovan.

 

[HereToLearn]

By modern division of regions, it is not northern Italy (albeit close), but if you prefer to think of it as such that is fine. My point remains that places like Pesaro were significantly shifted by an aegean influx whereas places more northwards like Felsina were far less affected.

Pesaro was part of the Byzantine "Pentapolis" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duchy_of_the_Pentapolis). Could those just be Byzantine foreigners?

 

[Vitruvius]

In Pesaro the local dialect is northern Italian (Gallo-Italic) but geographically it is central Italy, proving that today's statistical-administrative boundaries make little sense when it comes to languages, anthropology, biology, ancient history, archaeology.

I agree with you, it is possible what you say, but in any case, Pesaro is by the sea, Felsina/Bologna is not. It's not so much a matter of being further north in my opinion, but more of the obvious fact that small groups of Aegeans were coming to the coast first.

By the way, today there is a consensus among archaeologists that Felsina/Bologna should be considered Etruscan from the very beginning, from protohistory at least, since the Etruscans were indigenous there as well, and it is not a matter of colonization from Tyrrhenian Etruria. And in Bologna in fact the Villanovan phase continued beyond 750 B.C., and at least so far archaeologists do not classify the later phase as Orientalizing, but they keep classifying it as Villanovan.

Pesaro was part of the Byzantine "Pentapolis" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duchy_of_the_Pentapolis). Could those just be Byzantine foreigners?

It is true that the coastal nature of the city could be at play, but I've a feeling these Aegean shifted samples by late antiquity were in reality Italians and not direct aegean transplants, so there shouldn't be a need for coastal settlement bias if that is the case.

In regard to Felsina, that is an interesting point to note. The autosomal profile to me looks typical of the central Italian iron age and EBA Italics but I do think they are likely at the geographic edge of where this profile would be represented. I don't anticipate the higher WHG pull to be represented much further north. Do archaeologists consider bronze age Feslina a participant in the MBA Terramare phenomenon or is it outside of such a material context?

 

[HereToLearn]

It is true that the coastal nature of the city could be at play, but I've a feeling these Aegean shifted samples by late antiquity were in reality Italians and not direct aegean transplants, so there shouldn't be a need for coastal settlement bias if that is the case.

Jut to clarify, I was referring only to the more south-eastern shifted. I don't think Italic-Aegean mixes would plot there.

Having said that I find it hard to draw conclusions on such small sample as small samples yield extreme results more often than large samples do. Let's hope they get more samples from the area in the future.

 

[Vitruvius]

Jut to clarify, I was referring only to the more south-eastern shifted. I don't think Italic-Aegean mixes would plot there.

Having said that I find it hard to draw conclusions on such small sample as small samples yield extreme results more often than large samples do. Let's hope they get more samples from the area in the future.

Oh, yes, in that case I'd agree that the anatolian/anatolian-caucasian like individual definitely could've been byzantine transplant. That's probably even likely.

And I also agree that we need more samples to draw more definitive conclusions. What I have currently are inferences based off small amounts of data points. They can indeed be overturned if a large enough sample size in the appropriate cultural context points a different direction. For some time I recall that everyone thought that Lazaridis et al 2017 Mycenaeans from the were the end all for the ancient greek genetic profile, but we know now that is not the case.