5
Sarno et al 2017: South Italians and Greek islanders plot together.
"The Mediterranean shores stretching between Sicily, Southern Italy and the Southern Balkans witnessed a long series of migration processes and cultural exchanges. Accordingly, present-day population diversity is composed by multiple genetic layers, which make the deciphering of different ancestral and historical contributes particularly challenging. We address this issue by genotyping 511 samples from 23 populations of Sicily, Southern Italy, Greece and Albania with the Illumina GenoChip Array, also including new samples from Albanian- and Greek-speaking ethno-linguistic minorities of Southern Italy. Our results reveal a shared Mediterranean genetic continuity, extending from Sicily to Cyprus, where Southern Italian populations appear genetically closer to Greek-speaking islands than to continental Greece. Besides a predominant Neolithic background, we identify traces of Post-Neolithic Levantine- and Caucasus-related ancestries, compatible with maritime Bronze-Age migrations. We argue that these results may have important implications in the cultural history of Europe, such as in the diffusion of some Indo-European languages. Instead, recent historical expansions from North-Eastern Europe account for the observed differentiation of present-day continental Southern Balkan groups. Patterns of IBD-sharing directly reconnect Albanian-speaking Arbereshe with a recent Balkan-source origin, while Greek-speaking communities of Southern Italy cluster with their Italian-speaking neighbours suggesting a long-term history of presence in Southern Italy."
Spoiler!"Modern Southern Italian and Southern Balkan populations are located at the centre of the PCA plot (Fig. 2, Supplementary Fig. S1), forming an almost uninterrupted bridge between the two parallel clines of distribution where most of the other modern populations are found, one stretching along the East-West axis of Europe and the other from the Near East to the Caucasus, respectively (see also Supplementary Information). In particular, Sicily and Southern Italy (SSI) appear as belonging to a wide and homogeneous genetic domain, which is shared by large portions of the present-day South-Eastern Euro-Mediterranean area, extending from Sicily to Cyprus, through Crete, Aegean-Dodecanese and Anatolian Greek Islands. We will refer to this domain as ‘Mediterranean genetic continuum’. On the other hand, the continental part of Greece, including Peloponnesus, appears as slightly differentiated, by clustering with the other Southern Balkan populations of Albania and Kosovo. Finally, North-Central Balkan groups (Southern Slavic-speakers and Romanians) show affinity to Eastern Europeans (Fig. 2, Supplementary Fig. S1, Supplementary Information).
Admixture results further show our newly analysed populations as a blend of the major ancestry genetic components detected in the broader Mediterranean region, namely the European-like, Caucasian-like, Sardinian-like and Near Eastern-like ones (Supplementary Fig. S2a, Supplementary Information). Importantly, three of them find empirical correspondence (see Supplementary Information for more details) to ancient population ancestries, represented respectively by European Hunter Gatherers, Caucasus Hunter Gatherers and Early Neolithic farmers (Supplementary Fig. S3). All populations from Southern Italy (SSI), Greece (both mainland and insular) and Southern Balkans share a predominant Sardinian (Neolithic-like) genetic component which accounts for more than half of their ancestry. This is followed by a relevant Caucasian-like ancestry, which is present at around 24% in all our population samples (Supplementary Fig. S2b). The other two major components instead show opposite patterns. The Near Eastern-like ancestry is more frequent in SSI and the Greek-speaking islands (i.e. the ‘Mediterranean continuum’), whereas increasing frequencies of the European-like component are observed in Albanians and mainland Greeks as well as in the rest of the Balkan Peninsula (Supplementary Fig. S2b). Interestingly, Grecani of Calabria (GRI_BOV and GRI_CAL) and Cypriots share lower frequencies of the European-like ancestry (2.5% and 0.5%, respectively) compared to the other surrounding populations (Southern Italy: ~8%; Continental Greece and Albanians: ~15%).
[...]
The emerging patterns have been further explored with the fastIBD analysis, by comparing values of IBD-sharing between the Southern Italian and Southern Balkan analysed populations (Fig. 4, Supplementary Information). Overall, patterns of IBD-relatedness suggest that ‘continuum’ populations (i.e. both Southern Italy and the Mediterranean Greek islands) share relatively more segments with the Caucasus and the Near East, while Albania and continental Greece appear significantly more related with Central and Northern Balkans, as well as Eastern Europe. Interestingly, despite showing much lower values of sharing, some Balkan IBD-relatedness also emerges in Greek-speaking islands as well as in Apulia and Western Sicily, presumptively reproducing some forms of interaction with Greece and the Balkans in the very recent ancestry of these areas, as consistently signalled by a common sharing of individuals in the FineSTRUCTURE AW-Sicily cluster (see also Supplementary Information).
[...]
While Albanian-speaking Arbereshe trace their recent genetic ancestry to the Southern Balkans, the Greek-speaking communities of both Apulia (Griko) and Calabria (Grecani) show no clear signs of a recent (i.e. from the late Middle Ages) continental Greek origin, instead resembling the ‘continuum’ populations of Southern Italy and the Greek-speaking islands (Fig. 3, Supplementary Table S5, Supplementary Fig. S7, Supplementary Information).
Different hypotheses, either counterpoising or combining the Hellenic (Magna Graecia) and Byzantine colonization, have been historically proposed to explain the presence of present-day Greek-speaking communities in Southern Italy. Although different extents of Hellenic and Byzantine pressures were suggested to have demographically and culturally affected Calabrian and Apulian Greeks respectively, both historical and linguistic data agree on the fact that the current extension of these groups is a remnant of a wider Greek-speaking area, originally extended to larger parts of Apulia, Calabria and Sicily24. In the whole area, the Greek-language was well represented before the spread of Latin, and this Greek substratum has influenced the local Romance varieties in various respects. In fact, contacts between Greek and Romance speakers have been frequent and systematic27. Accordingly, historical and linguistic data suggest that this area was characterized by a pervasive multilingualism at least from the antiquity27, 37, 38, thus showing that both cultural transmission and genetic admixture may have played an important role in the formative process of these groups since the very beginning.
In this light, the tight genetic similarity between Salentino Greeks (GRI_SAL) and Italian neighbours (particularly from the province of Lecce-LE; Fig. 3, Supplementary Table S5, Supplementary Information), may be explained both as the result of extensive admixture events (coupled with lesser geographic isolation) or as the result of cultural transmission of Greek languages to Italian local populations. Importantly, these scenarios are not mutually exclusive, on the contrary the most recent syntheses tend to hypothesize a long-term Greek presence in Southern Italy, starting from the classical period and subsequently reinforced by continuous genetic and cultural interactions (e.g. during the Byzantine period) at least until medieval times - and even later.
In this context, the Grecanic groups from Calabria (GRI_BOV and GRI_CAL) remarkably show evidences of genetic differentiation, as suggested by PCA (Supplementary Fig. S7, Supplementary Information), ADMIXTURE (Supplementary Fig. S2) and fineSTRUCTURE (Fig. 3, Supplementary Fig. S5, Supplementary Table S4). These results are further confirmed by the presence of significantly high within-population average IBD-sharing and number of homozygosity runs (RoH) (Supplementary Fig. S8, Supplementary Table S6, Supplementary Information), as expected for more isolated and inbred populations. Beyond the linguistic differences, their marked geographic isolation and lower effective population size may have favoured the action of drift phenomena. This may have modified their genetic composition through the random amplification/fixation (or loss) of specific parts of the original genetic background.
Furthermore, we observed that both Calabrian and Apulian Greeks from Southern Italy almost completely lack the ‘Southern Balkan’ genetic component detected in Continental Greece and Albania, as well as in the Arbereshe. In both cases, this is consistent with the fact that their arrival in Southern Italy should at least predate those population processes associated to the more recent (i.e. late medieval) differentiation of continental Greek and Southern Balkan groups (cf. paragraph below). This does not exclude migrations from Aegean/Dodecanese and Crete islands, that presumptively did not (or only marginally) experienced - by virtue of their higher geographic marginality - the North-South Balkan gene flow that instead interested the continental part of Greece.
[...]
The most recent literature demonstrated significant impact of Caucasus-related ancestry in the Central European Late-Neolithic and Bronze-Age through the migrations of Yamnaya/Pontic-Steppe herders4. Accordingly, our results confirm that Caucasus-related admixture via Yamnaya is present in Eastern and Central-Western European clusters (i.e. Continental Europe; Supplementary Table S8, Supplementary Information). However, among our Mediterranean groups, evidence of Yamnaya (and EHG) introgression seems to be present at a lesser extent and was detected mainly in Balkan-related groups (Supplementary Table S8, Supplementary Information), which in turn display traces of admixture with Eastern Europe (Fig. 4, Supplementary Fig. S2). In addition, outgroup-f3 values for Late Neolithic/Bronze Age samples (especially Yamnaya) appear lower in all our newly analysed Mediterranean populations (Supplementary Fig. S9). These results suggest that the genetic history of Southern Italian and Balkan populations may have been, at least in part, independent from that of Eastern and Central Europe, involving specific migratory events that carried Caucasian and Levantine genetic contributes along the Mediterranean shores (see Supplementary Information). This picture may bring important implications for our understanding of the cultural history of Europe, and in particular for the diffusion of Indo-European languages. The Steppe in the Early Bronze Age has been supported as a source of at least some Indo-European languages entering North-Central Europe at that time4. In southern Mediterranean Europe, however, our results suggest lower impacts. Any significant Steppe/northern component may have arrived in the south Balkan mainland and southern Italy only later, by which time Indo-European languages of the Italic, Greek and various Balkan branches had already established themselves there. This would suggest that a Bronze Age Steppe source may be not highly consistent with all branches of the Indo-European family (see also Broushaki et al.40).
[...]
Our results demonstrate that the genetic variability of present-day Southern Italian populations is characterized by a shared genetic continuity, extending to large portions of central and eastern Mediterranean shores. This area, which is cored in Southern Italy and the Greek-speaking islands, exceeds cross-linguistic differences, encompassing populations belonging to different Indo-European subfamilies (Greek, Romance, Albanian). Noticeably, Southern Italy appear more similar to the Greek-speaking islands of the Mediterranean Sea, reaching as far east as Cyprus, than to samples from continental Greece, suggesting a possible ancestral link which might have survived in a less admixed form in the islands. Their genetic ancestry traces its heritage to complex and extensive patterns of pre- and proto-historical admixture. Besides a predominant Neolithic-like component, our analyses reveal significant impacts of Post-Neolithic Caucasus- and Levantine-related ancestries, which might be further addressed by future studies with a higher sample coverage for a precise contextualization in time and space and by integrating multiple lines of evidence from different disciplines (e.g. linguistics, archaeology, paleogenomics). More recent historical expansions from Continental Europe added further admixture layers, accounting for the genetic and cultural complexity that currently differentiates present-day Southern Balkan and Southern Italian populations.
This complex genetic scenario opens new insights into the recent cultural transformations associated to the Greek- and Albanian-introgressions in Southern Italy that originated the Italian Arbereshe and Greek-speaking ethno-linguistic minorities. Overall, Arbereshe groups confirm the Southern Balkan genetic characterization typical of their putative source populations, whereas Italian Greeks are related to the Mediterranean ‘genetic continuum’ (i.e. to Southern Italians and the Greek-speaking islands); as a consequence, their arrival in Southern Italy could at least predate the recent differentiation of mainland Greece. A possible key of interpretation would stress the Mediterranean genetic signal as the result of ancient links, which were partly modified by more recent historical movements in the Southern Balkans involving Continental Greece and Albania. In this light, the genetic similarity between Greek- and Italian-speaking groups of Southern Italy may suggest long-standing genetic and cultural exchanges originally diffused over the whole region, also outside the ethno-linguistic enclaves that survived until the present times. This would not exclude that continuous interactions between the Italian- and Greek-speaking populations of Southern Italy, especially in contexts of lower geographic isolation, contributed to their present-day genetic similarity in spite of the preserved linguistic differences. Additionally, Greeks from Calabria revealed remarkable signs of genetic drift, which are presumptively ascribable not only to cultural but also to geographic isolation. This fact led to their partial differentiation from their Italian local neighbours, despite common patterns of IBD-sharing.
While more specific hypotheses could be only elucidated by the discovery of new local sources of aDNA for testing explicit models, our results hint to some important implications from both genetic and cultural viewpoints, illustrating the different and complex dynamics that accompanied the formation of present-day cultural heritage, especially in contexts of extensive - both geographically and temporally - admixture. The genetic patterns observed in Southern Italy integrate the picture of the genomic structure of Europe and the Mediterranean, and support different histories behind the evolution of the Southern Italian ethno-linguistic minorities, moreover emphasizing the importance of considering complementary scales of investigations and detailed population samplings to assess demographic processes involving tightly related ancestries."
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by MINARD777
Bookmarks