Comments by "Luis Aldamiz" (@LuisAldamiz) on "Roman Empire DNA: What Was the Genetic Makeup of the Roman Empire?" video.

Someone asked if there could be a bias in the samples and, upon browsing the paper (preliminary look so far), there is: the Republican Era samples are more peripheral (within Lazio-Central Italy), while the Imperial Era ones are almost exclusively from Rome city and Ostia, the most cosmopolitan areas of Italy by far. This may be the actual cause of the differences: Rome city vs Latium and other Central Italian more "rural" or "peripheral" areas, rather than a timeline thing.
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@willmosse3684 - That's an interesting bit of historical context, TY. I was reading a bit more later on and the Late Imperial samples (which are broadly more consistent with the Republican period's) are also somewhat "peripheral" within the region. Nowadays we often live in cities that are much larger in population than their hinterlands but that can only be because of industrialization of agriculture, previously (even in the very urbanistic Hellenistic-Roman era) the vast majority of the population by far must have lived in the countryside one way or another. They go rather unnoticed in the chronicles but they were no doubt the bulk of the population all the time.
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Directly from Central Europe, probably what is now Bavaria, Austria and/or the Czech Republic (that's for Italics, their Celtic cousins would be from Swabia-Rhineland probably). The Russia -> Central Europe migration/invasion was much earlier, in the late Chalcolithic (Corded Ware culture) and then there was what I call "the peace of a thousand years", after the Vasconic reaction of Artenac and Bell Beaker, which kept the divide at the Alps-Rhine-North Sea line until these Urnfields culture invasions of the Late Bronze Age.
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Autosomal DNA tends to be rather homogeneous in populations, as people tend to marry their neighbors. Of course more research is always better.
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On second thought and after browsing over the paper, you may be right in the sense that there could be a sample bias in the dataset, maybe with the Republic era sites being "less Etruscan/Sicel" and the Imperial era ones being "more Etruscan/Sicel" instead for whatever reason. The Republic ·······> Late Antiquity pops are much more similar, but the Imperial pops are quite numerous. The samples of Imperial Era are almost exclusively from Rome city and Ostia, the most cosmopolitan areas of Italy, while the samples from Iron Age and Republican Era are from more peripheral areas of Lazio and thus maybe more representative of the Central Italian population overall: they are somewhat strong in the Anatolian (Etruscan) component, which persists since the Iron Age, but not in the Levant (Sicel or maybe Hebrew) one, which is the great anomaly of this era (per this paper).
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@Ajemone My take is that "Basl Eurasian" is nothing but Dinka-like NE African admixture, which several studies suggested in their supplementary data analyses and not a true West Asian leftover from the Africa->Asia migration. Why? 1. The definition of "Basal Eurasian" does not exclude aboriginal Africans, only those that are more distant than the NE Africans such as Nigerians or Mbuti. It's just an assumption that they represent a leftover population in West Asia, they can also represent the "L3" source population in NE Africa rather. 2. Neanderthals really took over West Asia c. 70,000 years ago: we don't just see them in Central Asia and Iran but also as far south as Yemen (via Mousterian tools, no known human remains yet), so there's very little room for true Basal Eurasians to have remained in West Asia: the marshes that are now the Persian Gulf and little else. The NE African source seems more parsimonious (Occam's razor). I presume therefore that, when the Asian modern humans came back c. 50,000 BP and repeatedly admixed matrilineally with (1st) Asians from the Pakistan area with Y-DNA J, T, H and probably also pre-G and (2nd) with Africans from the Egypt area with Y-DNA E1b (which also contributed very minor L(xM,N) mtDNA surely but not much), they incorporated some African autosomal genetics as well (logically) and those are the "Basal Eurasian" ghost component, which is rather proto-Eurasian: related to the macro-Asian genetics in the same way as "Basal Eurasian" but from Africa (roughly Egypt, maybe also other areas of the Red Sea region) rather than from West Asia. You mention that "Egypt is the country with the most Basal Eurasians". I'm not aware of that study (or blog analysis maybe?) but makes all sense to me if it is, as I believe, the actual source of the "Basal Eurasian" component, which I'd much rather call "proto-Asian" or something like that, really. As a side note: I also believe that that extra (minor but not irrelevant) African admixture into West Eurasians significantly increased our genetic diversity relative to the peoples of East Asia and Australasia (those of South Asia or even the Amerinds have West Eurasian ancestry one way or another so they are a less good comparison).
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@Ajemone Crô-Magnon 1, the archetypal "Cromagnon man", a very robust guy with some sort of round scar on the forehead, was Gravettian. I also suspect that Gravettians were a second migration to Europe, possibly from West Asia but all migrations to Europe were essentially from that area, including the first H. sapiens (proto-Aurignacians and Aurignacians) to set foot in our little subcontinent. In any case it seems that Gravettian also expanded via admixture in a complex manner and that pre-Gravettian populations (also admixed) made a comeback (Magdalenian is after all evolved Aurignacian, very similar concepts) and actually are the foundation of WHG peoples (but Northern Vilabruna type WHG conquered/displaced the Southern Goyet type WHG largely in the Epipaleolithic). Sorry if I have something wrong but it's quite complicated. Take a look at Posht 2023 "Palaeogenomics of Upper Palaeolithic to Neolithic European hunter-gatherers". There's no way of avoiding the issue of admixture and partial replacement. Things do change, nothing remains static. And yes: sadly censorship is out of control in YT but as of late I have even worse at FB, where some mod or auto-mod is all the time censoring every other post I make. We need economic democracy and get rid of the pesky private lack of justice.
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@Ajemone - We don't know that much: samples are few (n=3, I believe). More research is needed (although cremation practices are indeed an obstacle). Re. H. heidelbergensis it replaced the previous name H. rhodesiensis AFAIK, not sure why but I'm guessing because of political issues. Naming conventions are always weird, especially when they apply to humans, people often get it wrong at first what Homo habilis means, while Homo erectus (ahem!) may give totally the wrong impression. Definitely German-sounding names are the worst, no doubt.
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It'd be interesting to have links or otherwise references to the papers used in the video, for further read.
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There is that component, especially in Sicily, which is the more Near Eastern region of all Europe in terms genetic (largely Syrio-Lebanese, which probably owes to the Shekelesh invasion, associated to the Tyrsenian/Teresh one producing the Etruscans, which should be from Asia Minor, near Troy).
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@fabiana.4640 - True but that's an Etruscan legend (inherited by Rome) and not a Sicel legend. Those Sicels = Shekelesh were rather from Syria-Lebanon (judging on genetics), probably some sort of proto-Phoenicians, while the Etruscans = Tyrsenians = Teresh must have been from Western Asia Minor (not exactly like modern Turkish anyhow but close enough).
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@blessed7614 - Because you say so? I beg to disagree. I was just introduced to "Ancient Rome: A genetic crossroads of Europe and the Mediterranean" (by Margaret L. Antonio et al., Science 2019,DOI: 10.1126/science.aay682) and it is very clear that the Bronze-Iron ages' transition introduced lots of not just Central European (West Indoeuropean) genetics but also Anatolian one. This means that what I'm saying about the Aborigines (the original meaning of this word was how the Latins called the original inhabitants of Italy, of EEF/Vasconic-1 stock) and their replacement by two convergent but different invasions (one Celto-Italic at the Late Bronze Age, the other Sicel-Etruscan, "sea peoples" Shekelesh and Teresh, in the Early Iron Age) is surely correct. Etruscans were in any case NOT INDOEUROPEAN.
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@blessed7614 - Cyprus is in Asia and has West Asian genetics, very similar to those of Turkey and Euro-Mediterranean Jews. Even if the population is mostly Greek by language, their genetics are clearly different. Crete and all Greece are not as genetically "oriental" as Sicily and Malta (and maybe also Calabria?). They are a very unique population in the context of Europe because they have lots of Syrian-Lebanese genetics (different to those of Anatolia-Cyprus and Palestine-Jordan). This is best explained by a Shekelesh/Sicel invasion in the Bronze-Iron ages' transition, assuming that they were from that region, what fits the genetics, the name (shekel = weight unit, especially of silver, later coin, thus Shekelesh = mercenaries, pirates or something like that) and the fact that they're described by the Egyptians as circumcised, unlike most other sea peoples.
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@Ajemone - Greeks and other Balcanic peoples are very typical Europeans for their geography: they are somewhat close to Turkey-Caucasus-Kurdistan but that's expected and works also well for North-East Europeans who tend to Caucasus a lot because of Indoeuropean admixture (super-layer). Sicily tends not to Turkey-Caucasus but to Syria-Lebanon instead and does very strongly and shows up in every single PCA (and other types of analysis). This is not explainable by Phoenicians, who only settled the Western part of the island, nor by the Muslim century (too short and Tunisia-related), it should be older and IMO it is Sicel = Sekelesh, who arrived to the region along with Etruscans = Teresh in the Bronze-Age transition era. Alternatively the slave plantation economy of the island that Syracusans first and Romans later established fed only or mostly on "Syrian" slaves (definitely the leaders of the First Servile War were from that region of Syria-Cilicia) but I'd rather expect them to be from "all over the place", follow no particular geographical pattern. In any case I was not talking haplogroups but autosomal (nuclear recombinable) genetics. The Y-DNA signature of such Levant roots could be a balanced mix of J2 and J1. while one from the Pelasgo-Tyrsenians would be high in J2 but not J1, and Italy (not just Sicily but all of it, especially the "Roman", or should I say "Etruscan"? central region) is very strong in that lineage that is not at all Indoeuropean (R1a would be the most clear signature for these in Europe) nor Vasconic (G2a, E1b-V13, I2 Sardinian-Pyrenean, R1b in various cases even, all them documented in the archaeogenetics). Y-DNA J2 was also clearly expanded west of Italy by the Roman imperial colonization almost exclusively and is strongest where we know Rome founded the most colonies and where the Italian autosomal admixture is also strongest (Baetica = Andalusia).
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@MrOmegaRobloxIcon - But the Indoeuropeans (Celto-Italics) of Urnfields culture did cross the Alps, there's no doubt about it, and also crossed the Eastern Pyrenees into Catalonia. One of the reasons is probably that there were no defending armies in the passes, another that they were already familiar with the mountains (from the northern side). These were the same kind of people like the Celts who looted Antigonid Macedon centuries later and founded Galatia, they definitely prefered flatlands or hill country over mountains but they could clearly pull a 'Hannibal' or two if need be. For more primitive human migrations however the coastal routes in and outside Italy were definitely the easier ones and the only used ones, including crossing the Strait of Otranto or from Albania to Bari, etc. This last was not only done by Cardium Pottery skilled sailors but c. 47,000 BP by the first Homo sapiens in South Italy of Uluzzian culture, shared with Greece (but not North Italy). Similarly in Iberia the Central Pyrenees have never been crossed by any invasion: the coastal passes must be used even more clearly than in the Alps, which actually have several usable mountain passes all across.
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@Ajemone Italian with R1b-U152? Your patrilineal ancestor was surely German at some point (Goth, Lombard or Frankish surely). Nowadays it is an almost exclusively Germanic lineage and it may well have re-expanded with the Iron Age Germanic expansion on former Celtic lands north of the Alps (more research is needed to be certain about this).
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@Ajemone - Sorry, you are absolutely right in your deleted comment (I read at the notification), I was confusing U106 with U152. U152 is part of R1b-S116, which is most common in East France, Switzerland and North Italy (it also exists in Germany but it's not the way I put it). All S116 seems to have spread with Bell Beaker (or some other related cultures) from probably what is now France. In the context of Italy it can be associated to Ligurians or also later Celts but not so much Germanics. My apologies for the confusion.
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@Ajemone - Well, regardless, you were right and I was wrong.
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@gianlucarossi5672 - That's a widespread problem with the Iron Age and also the Late Bronze Age in some areas, notably those affected by the Celto-Italic expansion under Urnfields culture (confusingly called "proto-Villanovan" in Italy). Your point is IMO a very correct objection. Sicilians do have a peculiar genetic distinctiveness but it is Syrian-like, not Moroccan-like. This has been shown in in many studies and IMO should correspond to the Shekelesh (proto-Sicels by destination but also probably proto-Phoenician by origin) migration to that area, which is probably associated to the Etruscan one c. 900 BCE (Tyrsenian = Teresh, probably from the area near Troy but not Troy itself, those would be the Tjekker = Teucrians rather -- this of course links to the legend of Aeneas = Wanax, so loved by the Romans but surely Etruscan in origin). Besides Sicilian genetics and namesakeness, my reasons to consider the Shekelesh Levantine in origin are two: (1) the Egyptians described them as circumcissed, in contrast to most other Sea Peoples, and (2) the name seems to relate to "shekel", which was then a weight unit, often used for silver (later coin as well) much like the Western pound (but of smaller weight), what seems to imply that they were a group of either mercenaries or pirates and not an ethnic nation strictly speaking (they'd be probably North Canaanites, proto-Phoenicians, but these city-states were often also vassal of Egypt, so it gets a bit confusing where exactly they operated from, Cyprus maybe?, Cilicia?, wandering around in ships?) In any case in those days of the Late Bronze Age and earliest Iron Age, Italy suffered major political, ethnic and demographic changes; the LBA collapse did not only happen in the Eastern Mediterranean but also in the West, especially in Italy, driven first surely by the Celto-Italic expansion (Urnfields culture) and then by other events, in Italy the arrival of some Sea Peoples from the East and the clear archaeogenetic signature of migration of peninsular refugees to Sardinia, which was Vasconic in language all the way to Romanization as demonstrated by my acquaintance linguist Juan Martin Elexpuru ("Euskararen Aztarnak Sardinian?", a book I collaborated in with an appendix on prehistory and genetics, published in 2017 or 2016), and thus surely supportive of the "Aborigines", who were nearly erased by these radical changes -- Ligures were surely also Vasconic anyhow, as were the barely documented Ausones of Southern peninsular Italy, who are archaeologically shown to have piratically raided Greece often and IMO could be the same as the Weshesh of the Sea Peoples (Lat. singular of Ausones is Auso, which is phonetically more similar, the Nuraghic Sardinians are very obviously the Sherden).
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@gianlucarossi5672 - I think I understand something of what you're saying but not fully. Do you mean that those anomalous Roman Era samples seem to be not just Berbers but a type of Berbers that was unadmixed with European Neolithic peoples (Cardium Pottery, EEF, Sardinian-like)? If so, it'd be very intriguing because the West Iberian 10% North African component, of very mysterious origin (Bronze Age maybe?) seems to reflect an older type of Berber, which has stronger affinities to West Sahara than should be expected. Also it's apparent that modern Berbers, even if surely derived ethno-linguistically from late local HGs (plus the Cardium Pottery admixture) have their language unified in a much more recent timeline, quite possibly the barely pre-Roman time of the formation of the Numidian and Mauretanian realms. So, whatever the exact details, there were surely internal conquests and demographic changes in the region too. A key detail is the presence of the "Paleolithic European" Y-DNA haplogroup I, not just in the Guanche mummies of Canary Islands (associated to R1b) but also in various populations of Sudan (again associated to high frequencies of R1b) but not in modern North Africans (among which R1b is c. 10% but there's no trace of I anymore). So there should have been significant rearrangements in North Africa but, because the archaeology is so badly understood, which ones is anybody's guess.
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@Ajemone - Incest? In Egypt? Nah, I don't think that's even thinkable (pharaohs may have practiced that but not commoners). Anyway inbreeding should be visible in some genetic analyses and I'm pretty sure that Egyptians are not inbred (Ashkenazi, Finnics or some isolated Berber or Bedouin populations are but not such a massive nation as Egyptians). It's much more likely that it is in fact a deep Egyptian native component that leaked to West Asia, just as did Y-DNA E1b (in fact they're likely associated in a deep early Upper Paleolithic timeline).
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@Ajemone - Paleolithic people were surely more inbred, although I think that prehistoric reconstructions of demographics (for example in Europe) err a lot by the lower end, so I tend to favor their maximum estimates rather. This is because of the actual sizes of modern hunter-gatherers and also because if, as I happen to known from local studies, in the nearby district o Encartaciones-Castro, there was a population of maybe 150 people in the middle of the UP (Solutrean or Magdalenian, can't recall right now), and this was not at all the richest district in all the Franco-Cantabrian region (those were the ones of Dordogne but even nearby central Cantabria or many other areas were surely much richer), then you easily reach populations of 25,000 for all the country from Asturias to Provence and from the Pyrenees to the Loire, not 2,500. They were somewhat inbred but not that much, another thing may be in poorer areas holding smaller populations like Moravia or Ukraine.
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@Ajemone - I don't think Bell Beaker was "Indoeuropean" but rather a late Vasconic phenomenon at the core originated in Southern Europe 300 years before its translation to North Europe (via the Rhône probably), where it was a mixed bag rather. R1b-S116 is not an Indoeuropean haplogroup but clearly spread from "France", probably Aquitaine or somewhere nearby. The real Indoeuropeanization of Italy and Western Europe only happened since the Urnfields culture, culminating with the Roman Empire, as many peoples were not yet Indoeuropean, from Sardinia and Liguria to the Atlantic Ocean, when Rome took over. Now, Italy or Europe belongs to those who inhabit it, as happens with every country or region. People is people and democracy is the power of the people (should be at least). Thousands of years have passed through and History and Prehistory are good to know and understand, even cry about, but we are actually living present day History-in-the-making and our resposiblity is with those in the present and the future, not with those from the past. We can't change the past but maybe we can improve the present and future, maybe. Understanding the past is to better understand ourselves as product of history, not to fix what can't be fixed. Word of Basque. The sad reality is that Humanity for all its occasional lights has got a very horrible history, hard to celebrate as many, especially in the far right, do. I love History but I know that History is mostly evil: ultimately History began after the militarist, classist and patriarchal elites of the Metal Ages took over everything (or almost so) and the end result was Rome: an oligarchic empire of colonial plantations and mines that wasted all the silver of Hispania and Dacia into importing silk and cinnamom from Asia for the posh patricians of Rome, while it brought many animal species to extinction at the anphitheaters of all the Empire. I'm part Italian by recent ancestry: my grandpa came here as new Roman invader with Mussolini's 70,000 "volunteers" (he was probably one of the few actual volunteers) and married a local fascist also descendant from older invasions such as the last Carlist War, which had half of Basque youth forced to emigrate to America. I'm also descendant (mostly on my father's side) from native Basques who were probably here since the Neolithic, maybe with even Paleolithic and I identify as such Basque, but even these are admixed with posh invaders from the Middle Ages and partook in the savage destruction of Biscay's ecology by the Industrial Revolution of a century+ ago. Should I feel guilty? Nah, I'm not them and I've tried to do the right thing at my own peril: I'm not guilty and I'm constructively responsible to my capacity. I do feel a bit alienated however. Let's build something better than this disaster of History. It's not easy at all but it's necessary. I did mention in passing those lights of the past: from achievement of some semblance of democracy in the ancient Greek cities, which were able to defeat Persia and Sparta but succumbed to Macedonia and Rome, to the glorious uprisings of Spartacus and the Western Bagaudae (peasant revolts). More modernly from Machiavelli and Petrarca to Garibaldi and the partigiani (yes there are also lights in Italy in spite of all), from the French to the Russian revolutions and beyond (from Bolivar to Che, from Vietnam to Burkina Faso). Thinking in the past is important but we must do it for better understanding how to shape today and tomorrow, not just for crying about it. It's always a new world, life is always changing, nothing remains. I was last month re-reading Il Gattopardo and it surprised me to discover that it's not just about "changing something so nothing changes", in the end, the protagonist discovers to his dismay that maybe "that bearded Vulcan", Garibaldi, might have won after all, that maybe changes are happening after all at much faster pace than he hoped for.
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@Ajemone - Nice. My Italian family is from not far away but actually only because they supported the Austrians; they were centuries-long vassals of the Este-Habsburgs, first in Ferrara, later in Modena and then they fled the Italian unification to Feltre (Veneto) but they were too Italian to actually flee across the Alps when Veneto was liberated. 😅 We should all have more self-rule, be more like Switzerland, less like France.
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@Ajemone - No, Ajemone: they did not become extinct just as Mexicas did not became extinct with small pox and flu epidemics and the related Spanish invasion, they just got admixed and "under new management". Modern Europeans have very large WHG (Paleolithic European) ancestry, even if skin color comes (just because of vitamin D selection reasons) from the EEF (Neolithic European, Vasconic and not yet Indoeuropean) side. Sorry to break it to you 😜but that's how sexual reproduction works: no purebreeds can remain in the long run, admixture is always in the near future, every new generation is admixed and so it will be unless trans-genetics somehow manage to change things in the distant future (not any time soon: we know too little about how genetics actually works). But you're indeed onto something with the first known bubonic plague that the Indoeuropean invaders seem to have brought to Europe (west of the Gdansk-Odessa line). That was an extreme game changer, although it doesn't seem to have affected Italy, where EEF people remained unchanged until the Indoeuropean (Urnfields, Celto-Italic) invasions of the late Bronze Age. Va bene.
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@Ajemone - Haplogroup (Y-DNA) C is still present in Europe albeit at very low frequencies. In any case we don't know that was the Aurignacian lineage: most Paleoeuropeans were actually I2, a much more common haplogroup even today. You're probably thinking in the two Pestera cu Oase individuals, which are absolutely anomalous for proto-Aurignacian or Aurignacian era (no extra admixture with Neanderthals that we know of) and are not associated to any material culture (they can't be described as "Aurignacian" therefore). While we don't know what actually happened to them, it's perfectly possible that they were killed because "Aurigancian" people thought of them as "hybrid monsters" in a context in which Neanderthals were definitely not being treated anymore as "fully humans". I say this because the whole Upper Paleolithic settlement of West Eurasia seems to be a long conflict against Neanderthals, beginning by the killing of Shanidar man by ranged projectile, but most notably by the ability of taking all those Neanderthal lands in such a little time, reaching the Pyrenees (52 Ka BP) even before Altai (47 Ka BP). My take is that the out-of-Africa migration happened c. 125 Ka BP in West Asia (when the Neanderthal admixture event happened probably in Palestine, Skhul 5 looks like such kind of hybrid) and c. 95 Ka BP in India and beyond (dates for SE Asia are confusing but mtDNA M strongly suggests a massive demographic explosion from India into SE Asia with little time difference, also maybe as early as 86 Ka BP in Australia). Then c. 70 Ka BP Neanderthals expanded massively in West Asia: it's then when they reached Altai, replacing the Denisovans but also when they reached as far south as Yemen, where Mousterian tools have been found with that chronology. Around 70-60 Ka BP, after the Toba supervolcano catastrophe, a specific population in SE Asia, dominated by mtDNA N and especially its "daughter" R, but also by Y-DNA K2 (ancestor of P1 and its "sons" Q and R in West Eurasia and the Amerinds but also of NO in East Asia and some related Papuan lineages), which probably also included some Y-DNA C, rapidly spread in the SE Asian region (incl. into Papua and gradually also into China). A key branch however migrated westwards to Bengal-Bihar area (where P1 seems to have originated and may also be important re. mtDNA R) and then via the Ganges corridor to Pakistan (approx.), where they matrilocally incorporated some men (Y-DNA IJ, T, probably pre-G and definitely some H as well) but not a single mtDNA lineage (quite notoriously). These people then proceeded westwards into "the Neanderlands" of West Eurasia, maybe via Uzbekistan (more research is needed but there's at least one very old UP site in that country). The next we know is that they reached the Western Alps and Pyrenees c. 52,000 BP. In the meantime they killed Shanidar man and probably many other Neanderthals, who were scarily strong but were now at a disadvantage vs our longer legs and slimmer bodies, aided by ranged weapons (atlatl) and almost certainly also dogs (probably domesticated in SE Asia and soon to appear in the archaeological record in Altai and Belgium). Our lighter constitution and longer legs also helped with better exploitation of the lands (archaeologically documented that Neanderthals exploited smaller territories for every single ecosystem). There were almost definitely some serious Neaderthal Wars, even if they extended in time for 10,000 years or so. While these early West Eurasians were apparently matrilocal and willing to incorporate other H. sapiens (mostly men, not just in Pakistan but also in Egypt), they were strongly biased against Neanderthals and now they had the means to defeat them. Other than Oase, we know of no further Neanderthal admixture in this westward march of our distant ancestors. They may have been kind among them and with other H. sapiens but definitely they were "racist" against Neanderthals, at least in most cases: they rapidly displaced them in most areas and they definitely killed at least one of them (it was no "hunting accident"), and there was no more interspecies sex either, at least not any that had long term consequences. Anyhow, Aurignacians were not the first Homo sapiens to settle Europe, although they were part of that diverse population: the oldest dates for modern human settlement are now as old as 52,000 BP (earlier were rather 49-48,000 BP) and that's 10,000 years before the actual expansion of Aurignacian proper (which was then confined to Istallosko in Hungary). As you may know, there was a massive supervolcano erupting in Naples area approx. at the same time when Aurignacian proper expanded and most Neanderthals and also many modern human cultures collapsed, that's probably how Aurignacian "senso stricto" became the only culture of Europe (barring a handful of Neanderthal pockets).
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@Ajemone Re. Neanderthals, I don't know anything about longer breastfeeding. San (Bushmen) woman breastfeed their kids for 4 years, while my mum thought 6 months was more than enough and my ex (and other women with similar ideas I get to know in my youth, look up "La Liga de la Leche" maybe) believed that at least one year was desirable and that weaning was to be gradual and mostly led by the toddler because of psycho-emotional reasons, because it's not just about food but about love. It's not something written in stone in any case, not for us and probably not for Neanderthals either. I don't know that Neanderthal originated specifically in Italy but surely they did evolve in Europe, although from a pan-Asian complex (of African derivation ultimately) that is being unraveled these days and seems relatively complex and debatable in the fine detail. They and the Denisovans are rather distant relatives, separated from us maybe a million years ago, that's why hybridization was complicated and a reason why we surely treated each other as NOT fully equal. The narrative I'm telling you about how H. sapiens returned to West Asia (and by extension to Europe, etc.) and was not in good terms with Neanderthals is, I believe, based on the archaeological and genetic facts, especially the lack of extra Neanderthal admixture in us, which should be there if our relations were "cozy". Of course in 10,000 years or more there was occasion for all kinds of interactions but overall I think we were not in good terms with the Neanderthals in most of that period and in most of localities. Oase, whatever their story, were the exception, not the rule.
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@Ajemone - Re. Nordicist prejudices, first of all is a bit of idiotic (all such racisms), but notably it's worth observing that Southern Europe is much more diverse than Northern Europe and that each of the three peninsulas has its own peculiarities and are not really that much related to each other (although there's been interaction and admixture, and also with Northern Europe, of course). Re. the Indoeuropean issue, I'd say it's clear that it is strong in Central Europe (especially to the East), Scandinavia (to some extent) and Eastern Europe (obviously, although the Uralic component is also very strong). It's roughly there where Indoeuropeans expanded first and did so quite dramatically with that bubonic plague, etc. It's a false narrative re. Britain and Ireland however, where the genetics are Basque-like at the core and even the English (who are the most Indoeuropeanized, i.e. Germanized, of all) are very much Basque-like anyhow. This biased narrative tries to maximize the "Indoeuropeanness" of Western Europeans by artificially and forcedly distorting the interpretation of the data, artificially exaggerating the Indoeuropean autosomal component by cherry-picking the controls/comparisons and wrongly claims that all R1b is of Indoeuropean origin, when archaeological early Indoeuropeans were generally R1a rather (except Khvalysk and its successor East Yamna, which were R1b but of a very specific sublineage that still exists only in that region of the Lower Volga and is only distantly related to Western European R1b). Western R1b and specifically R1b-S116, which is strongly associated to Bell Beaker expansion (from SW Europe necessarily, i.e. Vasconic background and Vasconic Megalithic continuity anyhow), is not Indoeuropean at the origin: it clearly expanded from what is now France (probably Aquitaine) in three directions (three main subhaplogroups): north to the Islands, east to the Alps and south to Iberia. Was maybe re-expanded a bit by the Celts? Maybe but unclear, but in Iberia it is clearly associated with Vasconic populations such as the first well documented genetic Basque ever (which Nordicists claim was "Indoeuropean" with no justification whatsoever) and in the Islands (where it was only very slightly admixed with Indoeuropean genetics, surely in the frontier area of the Rhine) it must have been pre-Indoeuropean as well, because they show cultural continuity with the pre-existing Megalithic (and other ancient) practices (and it's anyhow almost indistinct with Basque and Iberian genetics). In general this Bell Beaker (plus) process was quite apparently one of replacement of Vasconic 1 (EEF, Anatolian Neolithic, Sardinian-like) peoples by a more Paleo-admixed population resembling Basques (Vasconic 2) but there is general cultural continuity in all the region west of the Rhine, while East of the Rhine (Indoeuropean country by conquest) we observe strong cultural intrusion of these Vasconic 2 (Bell Beaker plus) customs and a mor tenuous genetic intrusion as well in Germany... but not in Moravia, where the Indoeuropean type remains unaffected in spite of quite strong cultural shift. This may be the time when the legends of Loki and Prometheus (same character and probably the same as the Basque male God Sugaar, the snake or dragon) were established and maybe when Morrigan (same as the Basque female Goddess Mari, known to the Greeks as Gaia primarily, name that still translates in Basque as "the matter" and "the potential") became part of the Celtic legends. Re. Italy, it's a more complicated issue: the few mainland samples we have all the way to the Chalcolithic show that Vasconic 1 (EEF) was dominant in the peninsula all the way to the LBA Indoeuropean conquests (Urnfields culture, Celto-Italics). However there's something also very Balcanic-Anatolian (most obviously in Y-DNA J2, which is neither Vasconic nor Indoeuropean) and that I attribute to the Etruscans (the Teresh of the "sea peoples", surely behind the Roman legend of Aeneas, as they were closely related to the Trojans) and more locally in Sicily to the Shekelesh, who were probably Semites from Syria-Lebanon, some sort of proto-Phoenicians. More research is surely needed but my take is that these arrived c. 900 BCE (early Iron Age) and had a major impact (even Rome was surely part Etruscan). This results in greater Caucasus-like affinity of Italians (without the EHG of Indoeuropeans, who otherwise are also Caucasus-like) and the strong presence of Y-DNA J2, which I associate with this "Pelasgo-Tyrsenian" expansion, relatively recent in Italy but much much older in Asia Minor and parts of the Balcans (before 5000 BCE). Sardinia as we know is the last refuge of "purebreed EEF" (Vasconic 1, the Basque-like legacy in terms of vocabulary, toponimy and customs like the mamutzones is massive, I contributed to a book by linguist J.M. Elexpuru on this matter and it is absolutely unquestionable that Sardinians spoke a Basque-like language until Romanization, the evidence is all over the place). More debatable are Ligurians (at both sides of the Western Alps, and by extension Corsica), which I believe must have been also Vasconic of some type (the were under strong Celtic influence but remained distinct and pre-IE anyhow). Another intriguing population would be the Rhaetians in your area, who adopted a variant of the Etruscan alphabet but it's very unclear if they were Tyrsenians or something else. A bit of my interest is also on the vaguely remembered Ausones of South Italy, who seem to have been raiding Greece piratically and could be the same as the Weshesh of the "sea peoples" (sing. of Ausones is Auso, more similar phonetically). In any case it's clear that since the Late Bronze Age and well into the Iron Age, Italy suffered major demographic and even more so ethno-linguistic changes, and it is as such changed ethno-reality that it emerges into history, first with the Etruscan hegemony, then with the astonishingly fast Roman conquest. The Romans may have only retained vague memories of these Vasconic "Aborigines" but they were indeed the natives of Italy just a thousand years earlier. An interesting bit is that Sardinians got actually more Ötzi-like in this LBA-EIA transition, probably because of refugees from mainland Italy. Earlier they were more admixed with WHG.
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@Ajemone - I can't say but to me it's clear that racism is (mostly) a modern emergent phenomenon, caused by the need of the system to justify inequality and exploitation on pseudo-biological basis. Therefore it's been declining in intensity, very clearly so, however stupid people will generally tend to it (it's a clear inverse correlate of IQ score: racist people are dumber on average) because their thought is overly simplistic and emotionally they need to be part of something bigger and supposedly "better" than their own lmitations. But even in such cases actual living together easily overcomes such ideas, a distant perception of exotic blackness (for example) may be treated as stereotype but a constant interaction with black people actually makes us perceive as individual humans with variable geometry and not anymore a stereotype. Now "you" don't hate anymore the black Basque-speaking colleague who cheers along you for Athletic Bilbao... but you are still free to hate the Spanish-peaking white who cheers of Real Madrid (I guess). In the end it's what we perceive as "us vs them" and that's contextual and also ideological. Something we see re. racism is that Antique peoples had no or almost none of it at all, that it was developed by the politics of colonialism and slavery only or mostly: exotism was made grounds for exploitation. Said that there's one thing in what skin color does matter: vitamin D and vitamin B9. That's how whiter colors were generally favored in terms of latitude and diet (blue fish and sun-radiated mushrooms do provide dietary vitamin D). Originally darker colors were selected, not just to prevent sunburn and potential skin cancer, but to prevent birth defects associated with radiation's destruction of vitamin B9 (Australia is the country with most neural tube defects in newborns), later, as people moved to higher latitudes (generally darker, especially in winter), this became less important and instead the need to produce more vitamin D was decisive (hence darker pigmentations were selected against, especially after Neolithic changed our diets, generally for the worse). This is AFAIK the only real effect of "race" in terms that should be considered when not just choosing where to live (you often can't choose) but when supplementing diet, very especially in pregnancy and for infants. Otherwise it will be a growingly intergrated world and the people of the future will tend to be of very mixed global ancestry, growingly so. And we will learn to live with that because "divided we fall".
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@celtichistorydecoded - Thank you very much. 🤩
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