Recent content by HereToLearn

Not surprisingly the country with the starkest internal difference is Italy. It should also be considered that a lot of young southern Italians migrate to work in central and especially northern Italy, so a lot of those who stay are those who don't work nor study.

If memory serves, I find much more freakish (and suspicious of being wrong) the eye pigmentation results of a sample of 20 Etruscans where not even one of them had light eyes (or maybe one did...).

It probably varies a lot by region too.

If I go out to lunch, or attend a meeting with six or seven people — the same size as the sample considered here — it is entirely possible that half or more of them will have blue eyes. Naturally blond hair (not light brown) is rarer, even in such a small group, but there would still be a...

As you know, the relationship between DNA and phenotype is not always straightforward, given the potential impact of different admixture events, sexual selection, and other population-specific factors. To take a simple modern example, Italians and Spaniards have, on average, broadly similar...

I don't know, I wouldn't rule out those results in a sample of 6 or 7. In general, small samples have higher variance, so they are more likely to produce extreme results (law of small numbers).

Very interesting, thanks. The Umbrians were a very fascinating people.

To my mind, the treatment of Italy looks rather arbitrary. It is as though the author knew in advance what the map was supposed to look like, but had no real idea how to distinguish between different areas except by relying on a stereotypical south-to-north gradient. Southern parts of Lombardy...

Honestly I don't see that as surprising. First because we're discussing minimal differences at the end of the day but also geographically, the northern part of Tuscany is aligned with Romagna - it is not like we're talking of Romagna and say Campania after all.

Documented yes, but family lore speaks to possible more distant input from Emilia and Veneto too.

Are you of Northern Italian origin?

In my case the closest foreign averages were: Catalan_Mallorca @0.0281 Occitan_Marseille @0.0281 Note one of them is Balearic too. I just don't understand if it's native or Catalan (yes, very similar language but not the same thing).

It would be cool to have the Italian members of this forum with G25 coordinates on a PCA plot also including ancient samples.

I am @0.02610451 from this sample, not too bad (a distance comparable to his top25 modern averages). Also my heatmap kinda looks like that: