Angela
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True ...a very bad decision as things turned out. However, mtDNA can only be passed by women. I doubt that the Carthaginians would have made very many of their own women trudge over the Alps on campaign. Even most of the troops were either Spaniards or men from Gaul.
Since you don't seem to have been turned off from this site, I just want to clear up what are, in my opinion, some incorrect assertions that have been made on this thread.
Neither Doug McDonald nor anyone else can tell you when your particular branch of mtDNA "L" arrived in Italy or Europe as the case may be. If you were very lucky indeed, and some geneticist found it in some archaeologically datable area, and then some much more detailed analysis of it was done, you might get a reasonably accurate idea.
Absent that kind of data, one way to get something of a handle on the more reasonable speculations is to look at the date assigned to your particular mutation. Now, something may be published tomorrow about mutation rates for mtDNA which would change all this, but until then, I think the best source for dating for mtDNA is Doron Behar's A Copernican Reassessment of the Human Mitochondrial DNA Tree from its Root.
It can be found here:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3322232/
The ages by mtdna mutation can be found in the Supplement. On page 30 of the supplement I found your particular mtDNA clade. It is dated to 11,358 years ago with a Standard Deviation of 3274.
That puts it right around the pre-Neolithic or Neolithic. Many mtDNA lineages expanded around that time, and these expansions are probably related to the agricultural revolution.
Given that the agricultural revolution didn't reach East Africa until quite a bit later, I think it's probably a good guess that the mutation did not occur there, but rather might have occurred in the Near East or North Africa at that time.
Now, there are many possibilities for when the various "L" lineages might have arrived:
During the latter part of the Mesolithic.
During the Neolithic with the Cardial peoples who first brought agriculture to the Ligurian coast.
Later Neolithic peoples from LBK derived groups.
Bronze Age people by way of Greek colonists, although the most that I can find for Genova is a small trading post. Of course, they had a much bigger presence, an actual colony, in Massalia, and as you know the border there in western Liguria/Provence has always been very fluid, and people could have migrated down the coast.
Then there is the possibility that a slave, or wife, for that matter, from the Near East or North Africa brought it to Liguria during the Roman era. I think this is slightly less likely because as you also know this was hardly a place that was suitable for the latifundia system. A house slave might have brought it, of course, and have had a number of very healthy and lucky descendents.
The early Middle Ages, when Saracens from Spain settled the area from Provence all the way into the Alps of Switzerland, is also a possibility, especially given that they were not just raiders...there are actually some attested settlements.
In the later Middle Ages Genova played an extremely important role in the Crusades, as you know. Eastern rite Christian women might have been brought home as wives, Muslim women in bondage etc. Also, the Knights of St. John, as well as battling the infidel in the Mediterranean, engaged in a very profitable slave trade of their own, and a slave woman from North Africa might have wound up in Liguria.
So, you're spoilt for choice here...take your pick.
Just a word about all the studies thrown against the wall on this thread to see what would stick. Not all studies are equal. Just as an example, two studies on Italian DNA were bandied about, Brisighelli et al and Boattini et al. There is no comparison in terms of quality in my opinion. The university group that produced the Brisighelli paper is notoriously sloppy in its work, as was proved once again when they had to revise the paper long after publication (you might well ask what peer review is supposed to be about) and aeons behind the times in terms of their methodology. (the level of resolution is shamefully low, and they are actually, in an era where others are using 500,000 snps to do autosomal analysis, they are using a few AIMS!) Boattini et al is a level above, in terms of resolution, but also in terms of their sampling technique. Every researcher of Italian DNA should use it, in my opinion. So, each study has to be evaluated for its reliability, and not for whether it supports or doesn't support any pet theory.
