Does the average(southern?)italian feels kinship with non-european meditteraneans?

[Tacitus]

Speaking as TA's senior terrone, no, although I do like some Middle Eastern food. FWIW, I was involved with a Lebanese [Muslim] girl in college/uni and there was never an "OMG our cultures are soooo similar" moment.

Sicilians are 100% italians by the way,the "italian" you see in genetic calculations is a dummy variable,indeed,just beacause siclians score less italian doesn't mean they are foreigners to italian peninsula.The levantine contribution is older and in most cases predates the indoeurpean invasions.The very name of Italia was given first ,by greeks, to people inhabiting modern day Calabria.As Cavalli-Sforza noted,Italy's genetic makeup is very homogeneous time-wise;and was shaped mainly in pre-roman times.Usually ,is some detractors of Sicily and S.Italy who claim the opposite,and try to link them with africans and arabs.So to answer the question,99% of southern italians,rightfully, feel kinship with the rest of Italy and consider midlle east people as alien and their culture as distant.

Yeah as far as the genetics stuff is concerned, basically all the Near Eastern/West Asian DNA is prehistoric (from 10,000 to 3,000 YBP). Our closest genetic cousins are Greeks, not any Middle Eastern population.

[Berahthraban]

Their autosomal placement though is close to Cyprus, Druze, Lebanese, and a lot of Jewish groups though, not to Europe.

Nope. You could just as well say that their autosomal placement is close to Iberians, Balkanites and Southern French.

[Sikeliot]

Nope. You could just as well say that their autosomal placement is close to Iberians, Balkanites and Southern French.

For the fact that they are a European population they are shockingly close to some West Asians though.

[Sikeliot]

The levantine contribution is older and in most cases predates the indoeurpean invasions.

Most likely, most of the MENA affinity comes from the Sicanians, the pre-Indo European people of Sicily. If you look at Sicilians today, the regions with the least Greek, Norman, and whatever else input are those who shift autosomally toward Cyprus on calculators, but some people around Palermo do come up shifted toward some Jewish groups like Moroccan Jews which implies they may have a more recent MENA influx from Phoenicians, Jews, or both. The region from Messina down to Catania, plus Caltanissetta, has almost no I1, Italic R1b, I2, R1a, or anything else that is linked to European migrations, they're virtually ancient.

As far as Greece goes, close to people on the Aegean islands, Crete, and southern Peloponnese, yes. Close to people in Epirus and Thrace? No.

[Sikeliot]

Nope. You could just as well say that their autosomal placement is close to Iberians, Balkanites and Southern French.

Using Lebanon, Sicilians are closer to Greeks and Albanians, roughly equidistant between Bulgarians/Iberians and Lebanese, and closer to Lebanese than to Southern French, Serbs, Croats.

[Oddone]

I found a man from italia on tinder and i told him he looks mena and told me back that its country was ruled by them
Italians are not stupids.

Indeed, in fact neither here none is taking you seriously.

For the fact that they are a European population they are shockingly close to some West Asians though.

[Oddone]

want to see his picture? his name is nico

Only if you first send me nude pics of you.

[Tacitus]

Why?
It is well known, that before Italiks, and also in half
of sicily before Romans lived non IE people. And in
addition Sicily was occupied by Muslims for (i dont
remember exactly) some 200 years, and that during
Roman rules, millions of MENA slaves where brought
to Italy (and partialy obviously to Sicily).

So, what do they expect, that they are all pure Nordicks?

BUT is not so bad, as some people suggest here.

Almost 1/3 Sycilians are Indoeuropeans, language is IE, religion
is IE, so, nothing to be bothered about. 2/3 eventualy can feel
solidarity with Copts and chaldeans, but why it should be wrong,
as some here sometimes try to suggest?

And in average, autosomaly, Jews are also Sicilians, so quite it is quite
good connection - financially I mean... money... money... money...

1) The entirety of Sicily was ruled by the Moors for only ~150 years, with the eastern half of the island holding out against them for longer. Most of the invading army was made up of North Africans, and studies show that North African input in Sicily is negligible at best.

At this respect, the distribution of Y-chromosome haplogroup E-M81 is widely associated in literature with recent gene flows from North-Africa [49]. Besides the low frequency (1.5%) of E-M81 lineages in general observed in our SSI dataset, the typical Maghrebin core haplotype 13-14-30-24-9-11-13 [8] has been found in only two out of the five E-M81 individuals. These results, along with the negligible contribution from North-African populations revealed by the admixture-like plot analysis, suggest only a marginal impact of trans-Mediterranean gene flows on the current SSI genetic pool.

2) Everyone has a hard on over "Arab slaves" during the Roman Empire, but what of the thousands of Gaulish, Thracian, and Greek slaves? Did they simply disappear and only the Near Eastern ones remain?

From a user on Eupedia who knows far more about the subject than you or I:

Where is your proof that this happened? Was there some huge slave market in, say, Sicily, where all slaves from the east were sent?

By contrast, we have a lot of information, including carvings on major triumphal arches in Rome, as well as actual writings, that slaves taken in battle were brought to Rome and marched in the triumphal processions for the conquering general. You can go to the Arch of Titus and look at the depictions of all the Judean slaves. Or you can go and see the depictions of the Dacians, the Gauls, and on and on.

A certain number were executed, but the rest were sold by the general to slave traders. It's said that Caesar sold so many Gaulish slaves that there was a glut on the Roman market and they brought half the normal going rate. The slave traders then transported them to wherever in the Roman world there was a need for certain types of slaves: strong men for the mines, the galleys, or latifundia in various parts of the Roman world, pretty girls for the brothels. None of the preceding was likely to survive long enough to be manumitted and have offspring. People with specialized skills would be disposed of accordingly.

People were also sold into slavery, or sold themselves into slavery, including poor farmers in Italia, or captured by pirates, etc. Every town had a slave market and slave dealers. This was a business. They would send the slaves where they could get the best price, where they were needed. Or, if they had been captured in war, they in fact sent them as far away as feasible. Supposedly, many of my own Celt-Liguri were settled in Samnite country. You can see that distance didn't really pose a problem for the Romans. North Africans incorporated into the Roman military machine were sent to the Wall in Britain and stayed there for a long time. By your reasoning they should have been sent to Iberia. Balkan troops were also stationed there.

The immigrants who came to America in the late 19th/early 20th century didn't wind up along the eastern seaboard because it was closer to Europe. They wound up there because middle men hired by factory owners etc. had gone to small towns in Italy and persuaded people to sign up to go to America to work in the factories in the industrial belt in the east, or on the railroads, or, they themselves had heard about these jobs. Scandinavians made the much further trip out to the midwest because cheap land had been advertised to them. The Irish worked on the railroads for the same reason. There's an economic motive for most things if you know anything about history.

Your proposal is sheer speculation unsupported by any shred of data, and, indeed, contradicted by the data we do have. You can continue to pull it out of your hat for eternity, and I'm sure you will. It won't make it any more credible.

Nor, by the way, does this explain why there are similar percentages of Caucasian in Greece and southern Italy, and, in fact, southern Italians have less Caucasian, Mediterranean, and SW Asian than Greek Islanders. Were all the eastern slaves dumped there? The islands would have sunk under the weight. Nor was there that kind of need there.

Of course, should something come to light that proves differently, that's fine. What difference does it make? I just like my history as objectively interpreted as possible, not agenda driven.

Now, I'm tired of talking about it. I can't believe I got drawn into this dance once again.

So either all foreign slaves who were sold in Roman Italy had an impact genetically or none (and since studies also show that Italian genetics have remained unchanged in over 2500 years, it's most likely the latter).

There is relatively little common ancestry shared between the Italian peninsula and other locations, and what there is seems to derive mostly from longer ago than 2,500 ya. An exception is that Italy and the neighboring Balkan populations share small but significant numbers of common ancestors in the last 1,500 years, as seen in Figures S16 and S17S17. The rate of genetic common ancestry between pairs of Italian individuals seems to have been fairly constant for the past 2,500 years, which combined with significant structure within Italy suggests a constant exchange of migrants between coherent subpopulations.

3) AJs and Sicilians are similar only on the surface, as they're made of similar elements, but that does not make them the same thing. (Why is this a concept so few people understand?)

[Sikeliot]

If Italy only has significant Balkan input in the last 1500 years but not Norman, Moorish or Arab, then this implies that the strongly West Asian genetic character of Sicily is due to the pre-Indo European inhabitants, the Sicanians. Most likely they carried over North African DNA also.

I ran every result I have on GEDmatch. It is clear that Sicilians, Calabrese, and Aegean islanders are all one population and that they are mostly of pre-Greek, pre-Indo European stock. Notice the Greek mainlanders come out differently from everyone... no one is like them.

Many of the Sicilians and Calabrese come out half Greek, half Cypriot OR half Greek, half Moroccan Jew. Sicilians and Calabrese are not like mainland Greeks.

NE Sicily (Messina, Catania) shift genetically east of the Sicilian average, which seems to be based on Syracuse.

http://www.theapricity.com/forum/sho...42#post4196842

[Tacitus]

The origins of the Sicanians is a mystery (and unfortunately will remain one for the foreseeable future). I wouldn't be so presumptuous to assign the non-European origins to them, since they were only recorded as a tribe by early Greek settlers and their historians. I just chalk it up to prehistoric settlements rather than attributing it to a single specific group.