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PaperclipPerfector  2yr ago (text post)   33531 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 12, 2023

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North African admixture is 0-2% of Italy depending on the location, with the exception of Sicily where the DNA contribution is highest and maxes out around 6% overall. The largest non-Italian genetic legacy in Italy is the Greeks in Sicily.

The Bell-Beaker tribes that conquered the Italian peninsula emerged from the North. As you move North to South, you get relatively less Indo-European admixture and relatively more admixture from Early European Farmers. The outliers are the Sardinians who have almost no Indo-European admixture and are ~95% genetically identical to the EEF of Neolithic Italy. Sardinians provide a good illustration for how Southern European phenotype is derived from European populations and not Arab admixture.

There is somewhat a lack of DNA samples from Latin Romans since they practiced cremation, but Wikipedia has a pretty good description:

Latin samples from Latium in the Iron Age and early Roman Republican period were generally found to genetically cluster closest to modern Northern and Central Italians (four out of six were closest to Northern and Central Italians, while the other two were closest to Southern Italians).[16] DNA analysis demonstrates that ancient Greek colonization had a significant lasting effect on the local genetic landscape of Southern Italy and Sicily (Magna Graecia), with modern people from that region having significant Greek admixture.[17][18] Overall, the genetic differentiation between the Latins, Etruscans and the preceding proto-Villanovan population of Italy was found to be insignificant.[19] In 2019, aDNA analysis of Roman fossils detected substantial genetic ancestry shift towards Central and Northern European ancestry in the inhabitants of the city of Rome in late antiquity and the medieval era. The authors tentatively link the origin of this ancestry with Visigoths and Lombards.[2][20] A 2020 analysis of maternal haplogroups from ancient and modern samples indicates a substantial genetic similarity and continuity between the modern inhabitants of Umbria in central Italy and ancient inhabitants of the region belonging to the Italic-speaking Umbrian culture.

The barbarians, ironically, brought the genetic profile of Rome back to be more in line with the Iron Age / Early Roman Republic and reversed the massive changes in the Imperial Age with almost no genetic legacy of non-Europeans from that time:

In the Medieval and early modern periods (n = 28 individuals), we observe an ancestry shift toward central and northern Europe in PCA (Fig. 3E), as well as a further increase in the European cluster (C7) and loss of the Near Eastern and eastern Mediterranean clusters (C4 and C5) in ChromoPainter (Fig. 4C). The Medieval population is roughly centered on modern-day central Italians (Fig. 3F). It can be modeled as a two-way combination of Rome’s Late Antique population and a European donor population, with potential sources including many ancient and modern populations in central and northern Europe: Lombards from Hungary, Saxons from England, and Vikings from Sweden, among others (table S26)... This shift is consistent with the growing ties between Medieval Rome and mainland Europe.

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