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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   10219 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 4, 2026

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Some significant clarifications:

  • Sicily has between 3-7% North African admixture, in some cases up to 12% reportedly, not insignificant but also not dominant and not really stratified across Southern Italy. That North African admixture is almost entirely isolated in Sicily and is 0 - (low) throughout the rest of Southern Italy.
  • The Southern European phenotype is not derived from North African admixture, it's derived from the Early European Farmers. The Sardinians are a unique people in that they retain basically an entirely EEF admixture, and their phenotype was not inherited from Africa or Arabs. It's the closest you can get to seeing what a Early European Farmer looked like from thousands of years ago.
  • What you do see more significantly stratified across North Italy to South Italy is not Arab/African admixture but Indo-European admixture.

So the story there is more dominantly "Early European Farmers - Indo-European" spectrum from South to North and not really "African/Arab - European". Sicily is somewhat the exception given it does have non-negligible North African ancestry and that shows up in the Genetic analysis as well. You propose somewhat of a false dilemma:

You can conclude the South is poorer because of African ancestry. Or you can notice that the South spent a thousand years as a strategic chokepoint that every Mediterranean power needed to control, while the North was a fractured set of city-states that nobody could grab easily. One of these explanations predicts the data and the other is constructing vibes based on a satellite photo.

Not because of African ancestry but Indo-European ancestry. Yes, the Indo European colonizers conquered the Italian peninsula in different waves and different times, first it was the Romans, then the Barbarians and so on. But the HBD interpretation would be that the percolation of various empires and city states in the areas with greater Indo-European admixture is not a coincidence, i.e. the establishment of the Roman Empire with the arrival of the Latin tribes to Italy. That would be the Noticer explanation for why Northern Italy had this high degree of civilizational development that lacked in Southern Italy, not because of African ancestry.

So the Noticing is not a black mark against North African ancestry as much as it stresses that the Indo Europeans really were a colonize and impose civilization everywhere type of people.

The Southern European phenotype is not derived from North African admixture, it's derived from the Early European Farmers. The Sardinians are a unique people in that they retain basically an entirely EEF admixture, and their phenotype was not inherited from Africa or Arabs. It's the closest you can get to seeing what a Early European Farmer looked like from thousands of years ago.

Maybe it's a bad picture, but I could find dozens of guys like him in any MMA club in Dagestan.

The Neolithic Farmers spread into the both Caucasus and Europe, the G2a Early European Farmer haplogroup is concentrated in both Sardinia and the Caucasus region.

Some of the ethnic groups of the Caucasus tend to look quite different physically from Europeans or even from Iranians, and many of the languages of the Caucasus are not Indo-European despite the Caucasus being located very near to the likely origin point of the Indo-European languages and despite the Caucasus having spent thousands of years having strong Indo-European-speaking powers on its borders, so I suppose it's possible that they too retain strong pre-Indo-European genetic traits, although I have no idea whether there is any connection to Early European Farmers.

There's a separate ancestral group, Caucasian Hunter-gatherers, but they seem to be close to EEF according to this chart: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Admixture_graph_of_deep_Eurasian_lineages.png

WSH (Yamnaya culture) are considered a 50/50 mix of CHG and EHG, so ㄟ( ▔, ▔ )ㄏ

Mamma mia, get a load of this guy with the No True HBDer argument. Fuggadaboutit.

Isn't the South originally Indo-European descended? Greeks, Romans, Normans, the Aragonese?

Isn't the South originally Indo-European descended? Greeks, Romans, Normans, the Aragonese?

All of Europe was originally (for purposes of this discussion) inhabited by Early European Farmers who migrated into Europe like 10,000 years ago. And then starting about 5,000 years ago, during the transition between the Neolithic age and early Bronze Age, Indo European tribes invaded Europe.

All Europeans have significant admixture from both groups, but that's the main story in the North/South divide in Italian admixture, not African admixture (really with the exception of Sicily itself).

Isn't the main non-Indo-European zone in Italy in historic times Etruria, today one of the wealthier regions?

To my recollection, the Romans and Etruscans had similar levels of IE vs EEF genes, but the Romans had an Indo-European language and the Etruscans did not. This may reflect a broader difference between the cultures, but of course their influence on one another was so enormous as to kind of muddle any early differences.

Quick edit: Ah, looks like SS's citation covers that.

I'm not aware of Etruria being a non-Indo-European zone, are you referring to the Etruscans? The Etruscans were assimilated by the Romans, but it turns out they were also actually an IE tribe although they didn't speak an IE language. The Sabines and the Samnites were also IE tribes.

According to almost 2,000 years worth of genomic data, collected from 12 sites across Italy, these enigmatic people did not emigrate from Anatolia (a region that's now part of Turkey), but shared genetic heritage with people who lived nearby in ancient Rome.

All were descended from pastoralists who moved into the region from the steppes during the Late Neolithic and Bronze Age. Given that the steppes are thought to be where Indo-European languages originated, the finding underscores another Etruscan mystery – that of their (now extinct) non-Indo-European language, which managed to persist for centuries.

But the indo-Europeans were not a civilized people, they were steppe barbarians, and indo-European-ness doesn’t elsewhere correlate with wealth within Europe- Finland and the Basque Country are both wealthier regions.

The Steppe nomads, Yamnaya culture, were barbarians but then they migrated to Europe and evolved into the Corded Ware culture which became ancestral to Celtic, Latin, Germanic, Baltic, and Slavic cultures. The Haplogroups R1b and R1a are linked to the Indo-European steppe migrations and those haplogroups dominate European Royalty: R1b dominates Western European, British, and French royalty while R1a dominates Eastern European and Slavic royal lines.

Of course Haplogroup R1a is also prominently found in India at high frequencies (40-70%) among Indian Brahmin communities particularly in North India, and that haplogroup was brought to India by IE migrations into India. So that tells the same story as Europe.

The Finns have high levels of IE admixture, much higher than southern Italy.

Just browsing that map of Europe I linked does provide a strong correlation with wealth and development. Looking at that map also suggests there's no coincidence the Industrial Revolution was started in the North Sea area.

Edit: This is not to say I disagree that they were barbarians. But as Nietzsche said "The noble caste was in the beginning always the barbarian caste." The Latin barbarians (dominated by R1b haplogroup) did rampage through Italy and killed a lot of people, and then they built Rome and became the Nobles.

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