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The question of Northern vs Southern Italy is back with this new graphic. I'm going to dox myself slightly and say I have some perspective on this because both of my parents are Sicilian from Sicily, although I grew up in America. Though I will add it just to interject my general bemusement and provide some Med charm. My background isn't needed to reach this conclusion (though I'm surprised to see so few people arguing it... so maybe!)
Anyway, I presume HBD enjoyers love this North vs South divide because it comes across like that satellite photo of North vs South Korea where the dependent variable is "Communism", except in the case of Italy it's "African ancestry". That's fun to think about, and it certainly has a lot of pop culture roots (that hard scene in True Romance where the Sicilian mob boss is infuriated by being accused of being descended from the Moors), but this link is weak and it mostly ignores the elephant in the room: colonialism.
Yeah yeah we're all sick of hearing about colonialism, but hear me out. I don't mean the kind of colonialism where the natives resist being dragged kicking and screaming into an empire with reading, roads, global trade and capital. I mean the kind of colonialism where your island is considered a useful military outpost and changes hands constantly in wars of dominance.
Quick incomplete list of who ran Sicily over the last thousand years: Byzantines, then Arabs (reasonably good rulers, all things considered), then the Normans rolled in around 1060, then the Hohenstaufens, then the French Angevins, who got kicked out in 1282 in the Sicilian Vespers. A real popular uprising, my people murdering 3000+ Frenchmen over Easter weekend. Much proud. But short-lived! Then the Sicilians, having won, immediately had to invite the Aragonese in to rule them, because a chunk of land in the middle of the Mediterranean does not get to just be independent. The (definitely not gay) hypermasculine types who love the Vesper story seem to not really read to the next chapter where you have to bend the knee to a different imperial lord. Curious!
Anyway then there's the Spanish Habsburgs, who figured out how to maximally extract Naples and Sicily to fund their wars in Flanders. Then the Bourbons. Then briefly Napoleon. Then the Bourbons again. Then finally Garibaldi shows up in 1860 and the place gets annexed into the new Italian state. Run from afar, by people who didn't speak the language and considered the south basically Africa. BTW you knew these regions spoke different languages, right?
Sure, history is sad everywhere. But my point is you can't build anything durable on top of that. Every time a new overlord shows up, the previous administrative class either gets purged or has to switch sides. Whatever institutional knowledge existed gets fragmented. The legal system is whatever the new guy says it is. Tax collection is whatever can be extracted before the next regime change. Land tenure is locked in whatever extractive configuration was useful to the latest set of foreigners, which in Sicily's case meant gigantic estates owned by absentee landlords who lived in Naples or Madrid and never set foot on the property. Nobody is investing in the long term because there is no long term. The mafia isn't a quirk of North African ancestry but rather a survival instinct when you have a long, long standing tradition and belief that the state is illegitimate.
Again, whatever, story of the world. But now we're trying to compare this outpost (these outposts, not just Sicily here) to the seat of the fucking Renaissance up north! Genoa, Venice, Florence, Milan. City-states running their own banks, their own foreign policies, colonial empires of their own. Bit players in bootstrapping the enlightenment! Nobody could conquer the whole north cheaply because the Po Valley was fragmented and the cities played the Holy Roman Empire and France against each other for centuries.
The South had very little of this. It's not so much Guns, Germs and Steel as it is one is a series of defensible mini-Switzerlands and the other are islands easily starved.
The "one peoples, different outcomes, let's Notice" framing seems so off to me because it's clearly more more like smooshing two different countries together and asking why they're still so different. Cultural antibodies hardened over a millenium that rejects the state, trusting strangers, higher IQ institutions doesn't really change in decades.
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.
Some significant clarifications:
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:
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.
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.
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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
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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?
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.
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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.
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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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