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One of the things I often discuss when discussing Sicilian and southern Italian DNA is that I am interested in seeing which part of Sicily or southern Italy has best maintained the ancient genetic character of the land.
So the question becomes this: should Greek input be counted as "native" or should it be seen as a foreign input akin to that of Phoenicians, Berbers, Jews, Arabs, Normans, Gallo-Italic peoples, and so on? The answer to this question entirely changes which region should be viewed as most and least "native." If we consider Greeks native to the Aegean islands and Crete, lands that were inhabited by pre-Greek people and settled at roughly the same time as Sicily and southern Italy, then they should also be viewed as natives of southern Italy.
If Greek is counted as native, then Apulia, Lucania, and southeast Sicily are unquestionably the most "native" regions, as they have the least input from Normans, Arabs, Phoenicians, Jews, and Berbers and are genetically the closest to Greece of all the southern Italian regions.
If Greek is counted as "foreign," then the aforementioned regions become the most foreign-influenced because the Greek input is more substantial there, and even regions with more Middle Eastern input which have the greatest genetic distance to Greek clusters such as Palermo, Agrigento, inland central Sicily, and southern Calabria then become more native, despite absorbing some foreign input.
The Sarno study considers Calabrese Griko and the Calabria-EastCentral Sicily cluster to be representative of the oldest genetic structure there, and finds the greatest distance between the Calabrese Griko cluster and Greeks themselves, despite them being the only Greek-speaking people remaining in that part of Italy.
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