Why y-dna R1a1a and I2 are much higher in Greece than southern Italy/Sicily?

[Twistedmind]

In DAI it was recorded that Byzantines transported some Slavs to fight off Arab invasion in Southern Italy. I dont remember which chapter exactly, but it was something between 29-32.

[Scholarios]

Could you prove it by some sources?

Sure, there is first of all some more recent Croatian settlers in Sicily from time of Ottoman Conquests:

http://www.faqs.org/minorities/Weste...-of-Italy.html

and furthermore, the Slavic invasions and the campaigns of the Byzantines and Arabs in South Italy lead to their settlement there.

Slavic traces are also visible in place names on the Gargano peninsula. First of all, there is the name of the littoral village of Peschici (castellum Pesclizzo in 1053) – whose literal meaning would be “small sands“, which is in accordance with the geological appearance of the area. The even more important settlement of Lesina, mentioned in 1023, is connected with the Slavic name of the Dalmatian island of Hvar, which derives from the Slavic word les – forest. This connection between the name of the island and the settlement on Gargano was pointed out by an expert in languages and dialects spoken in South Italy, Gerhard Rohlfs. While studying the Garganic dialects in the 1940s and 1950s, he recognized about 17 words of Slavic origin, especially in the aforementioned Peschici, but also in some other nearby places, such as San Giovanni Rotondo or Vico. For example, the Croatian word skakavac – grasshopper – is almost identical with Garganic scazcavázzə, while some others show traces of Slavic – such as the words for little girls (ciúrcia = Cr. curica), worm (langlistə = Cr. glista), different kinds of lizards (vúschərə, salambachə = Cr. gušter, zelembać), the coast, the snail (pugghiáca = Cr. puž), etc

Slavs but Not Slaves: Slavic Migration to Medieval Southern Italy:
biblio.irb.hr/.../544007.Slavs_but_Not_Slaves.doc

[Sikeliot]

Maybe that's where my haplogroup comes from if not Greece.

[Arch Hades]

Polako has told me that R1a1a in Greece is mostly M458 and Z280, at a ratio of about 60/40 so far.

Even though Underhill 2009 dated M458 to well over 10,000 years ago, it's likely way younger. Likely Z280 is pre Slavic and did exist at least to a small degree in the classical Greeks.

Anyway, there's an interesting study that still has not been release but Greeks do certainly have a detectable Slavic signal from the North. How big it is I can't say. I don't expect it to be anything greater than 1/10.

LD patterns in dense variation data reveal information about the history of human populations worldwide. S. Myers1,2, G. Hellenthal2, D. Lawson3, G. Busby4, S. Leslie5, B. Winney5, P. Donnelly2, W. Bodmer5, The. POBI Consortium1,2,5, C. Capelli4, D. Falush6 1) Dept of Statistics, Oxford University, United Kingdom; 2) Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics, Oxford University, United Kingdom; 3) Department of Mathematics, University of Bristol, United Kingdom; 4) Dept of Zoology, Oxford University, United Kingdom; 5) Cancer and Immunogenetics Group, Department of Clinical Pharmocology, Oxford University, United Kingdom; 6) Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Department of Evolutionary Genetics, Leipzig.

"A detailed understanding of population structure in genetic data is vital in many applications, including population genetic analyses and disease gene mapping, and relates directly to human history. However, there are still few methods that directly utilize information contained in the haplotypic structure of modern dense, genome-wide variation datasets. We have developed a set of new approaches, founded on a model first introduced by Li and Stephens, which fully use this powerful information, and are able to identify the underlying structure in large datasets sampling 50 or more populations. Our methods utilize both Bayesian model-based clustering and principal component analyses, and by using LD information effectively, consistently outperform existing approaches in both simulated and real data. This allows us to infer ancestry with unprecedented geographical precision, in turn enabling us to characterize the populations involved in ancient admixture events and, critically, to precisely date such events. We applied our new techniques to combined data for 30 European populations sampled by us, or publicly available, and the worldwide HGDP data. We find almost all human populations have been influenced by mixture with other groups, with the Bantu expansion, the Mongol empire and the Arab slave trade leaving particularly widespread genetic signatures, and many more local events, for example North African (Moroccan) admixture into the Spanish that we date to 834-1394AD. Dates of admixture events between European groups and groups from North Africa and the Middle East, seen in multiple Mediterranean countries, vary between 800 and 1700 years ago, while Greece, Croatia and other Balkan states show signals of admixture consistent with Slavic migration from the north, which we date to 600-1000AD. At the finest scale, we are able to study admixture patterns in data gathered by a project (POBI) examining people within the British Isles. Our approaches reveal genetic differences between individuals from different UK counties, and show that the current UK genetic landscape was formed by a series of events in the millennium following the fall of the Roman Empire."

[Papastratosels26]

I voted the second.

[Dimitri159]

So you don't believe that the very high J2 comes from Greece? I mean, it probably can't now that I look again considering J2 in eastern Sicily is higher than all of Greece except Crete, and it's even higher in western Sicily than much of Greece and there was not as much Greek settlement there.

J2 in western Sicily is probably Phoenician and thus more like what you find in Lebanon.




Then what makes you think Greeks would have mixed in Sicily either? If anything it looks like Normans, Moors, and Romans had only negligible genetic impact, which means they likely left few descendants because the Greek core of the population refused to mix with them.

It IS very possible that northern Greeks were just more Eastern European genetically in antiquity even still and that the divide is ancient.. and not recent. I am unsure.

Greeks really aren’t J2 or E1b all that much, that’s a big myth that everybody spread about Greeks.

Greek Haplogroups according to FamilyTree DNA: