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Ever since I began researching Sicilian history and studying the DNA results of Sicilians, I have come across a persistent historical footnote in nearly all online sources, and even across anthrofora, and it always goes something like this:
Sicily and Malta were inhabited by an ancient people called the Sicanians, the people who built the Malta's Megalithic Temples. It is unknown what they would have been like genetically, but my best guess is they would have been similar to Minoans. The Minoans were, according to mythology, in contact with them, such as in stories like Daedalus and Icarus, and while we cannot treat ancient mythology as a historical source, it does suggest that they were in contact with the Aegean.
The arrival of the Siculi in eastern Sicily and the arrival of the Elymians in western Sicily pushed the Sicanians toward the center of the island.
The Phoenicians/Carthaginians merged with the Elymians in western Sicily. The Elymians sided with the Phoenicians over the Greeks.
Some of the Sicanians, whose territory overlapped both with the Greek and Phoenician settlements, being a more advanced culture who had been receiving Aegean influences even before the Greek colonists arrived, were peacefully Hellenized and others are believed to have assimilated into Punic culture. Any remaining descendants of the Sicanians would have been overridden by later waves of migration: Arab era settlement from the Middle East, Byzantine Greek settlement, and so on.
The Siculi on the other hand fought vigorously against the Greeks and were pushed further and further inland, into the region that is now Enna, the eastern part of Palermo, and the inland east. They were eventually defeated by the Greek colonies and ceased to exist as a distinct identity.
The question becomes, were the Siculi mostly Hellenized, or were they pushed out of Sicily and/or killed? If we believe the commonly cited history, we would believe that, at least, coastal Sicilians have almost no ancestry from the Siculi.
Based on genetics, the people in the region inhabited by the Siculi in ancient times, today are very close to Cretan and Dodecanese Greeks, and are much less similar to central Italians, where the Siculi were believed to come from. Haplogroup R1b is common in eastern Sicily but is often R1b-L23 which is of West Asian origins. I do not see any strong evidence of their presence in our DNA today.
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