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Southern Italians have no ancient Greek ancestry
It seems that the current genetic similarity is practically totally due not to the migration of Magna Graecia but to more remote common ancestors. These estimates suggest a lineage equal to or less than 0.3% on the autosomal genome for eastern Sicily, and being among the southern territories most linked to the ancient Greek gene flow, the southern Italians could be less than 0.1% ancient Greeks overall.
https://www.nature.com/articles/ejhg2015124#Sec2
"Greek colonization of South Italy and Sicily (Magna Graecia) was a defining event in European cultural history, although the demographic processes and genetic impacts involved have not been systematically investigated. Here, we combine high-resolution surveys of the variability at the uni- parentally inherited Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA in selected samples of putative source and recipient populations with forward-in-time simulations of alternative demographic models to detect signatures of that impact. Using a subset of haplotypes chosen to represent historical sources, we recover a clear signature of Greek ancestry in East Sicily compatible with the settlement from Euboea during the Archaic Period (eighth to fifth century BCE). We inferred moderate sex-bias in the numbers of individuals involved in the colonization: a few thousand breeding men and a few hundred breeding women were the estimated number of migrants. Last, we demonstrate that studies aimed at quantifying Hellenic genetic flow by the proportion of specific lineages surviving in present-day populations may be misleading. "
"To quantify the original demographic impact of the Greek settlers inferable from present-day Y chromosome variability, we explored two main census scenarios using a simulation-based approach. In the first scenario, high count, we based our model on the demographic estimates of Beloch, 18, 19 who suggested a census size of 1.35 million people for Sicily and of 3 million for Greece at the time of the Hellenic colonization in the Archaic Period. In the second scenario, low count, we modeled population size estimates that were smaller by an order of magnitude. 21 Nevertheless, the two scenarios have similar source / recipient effective size ratios (S / R). If we assume that the proportions of past Sicilian, Euboean and Peloponnese census and male (and female) effective population sizes is one-sixth of the current census size, we estimate a S / R of 3.65 for the high-count model and a S / R of 3.75 for the low-count model. Simulation results are reported on Figure 3 and Supplementary Table S8. When Considering Y-STR haplotypes, the observed DHS value between Euboea and East Sicily (0.5353) is compatible with an effective number of migrants ranging between 500 and 5000, clearly rejecting larger contributions (10 000), irrespective of the scenario considered. The DHS value obtained for hypervariable region I haplotypes (0.5995) supports an effective number of migrants between 500 and 1000, with larger contributions clearly excluded. When the NRY- and mtDNA-based estimates are paired according to the demographic model, the male-to-female migrant ratio ranged between 1: 1 and 2: 1 under a population growth model and between 2: 1 and 10: 1 under a constant population size model. "
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Originally Posted by manu15151513
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