Pompeii Samples

[Idilinaa]

Rome was a very heterogeneous place prior to and during its height. There was a very variational core East Mediterranean component that was more MENA-shifted than today which would eliminate them in being classified as "White" in the strictest sense. Etruscans were not even Italic in language, Pompeiians were Italics that experienced the same broad interactions with the MENA world the rest of Romans had, so they were not an exception at all. We have people deep in Serbia from the Danubian sample set that illustrated how every Roman region had considerable heterogeneity.

Secondly, the people of higher MENA origin were mixed and would usually be the wealthy ones and be Romans just as the ones with higher Italic ancestry. Remember, Rome expanded and absorbed and acculturated other peoples in the Italian mainland who were not even Roman themselves in the beginning, i.e., these Pompeii samples are as Roman as any East med profiled anywhere outside where Rome expanded which was basically the majority of Italy. The non-Latin Italic tribes were not more Romans than those Pompeiians who I must remind you are basically locals that mixed over time and had stronger cultural ties to Romans even before the domination. A crucial component is to recognize Pompeii at the time was Roman.

The notion that so-called core people were true Romans and brown people were low class is not correct. Roman identity did not follow the modern conception of ethnicity - that is why it was so diverse in the first place. Usually, those brown people were buried in wealthy places with strong Roman cultural traditions. What you see on TV where White people rule, where slaves, servants, and lower-class people are brown and black is nonsense. Every Roman elite burial we have gotten study from has shown them to be highly mixed and none of them were on average "White."

Lets for the sake of argument say the core was Italic (which it was not. It was a diversified East Med but in a sub-populational sense that was very much not White. The coherency of the demographic was too complex back then compared to Italy today which is very phased, stabilized, and gradient-based). Those people were of low Steppe ancestry and would probably look like people of Turkey today or Caucasus because they lacked the enriched ancestry that we associate with the beginning of White people. It would be like saying "Armenians fit the strictest sense of White" when we know they don't unless it is some loose category that encapsulates major parts of the Near East of people with distinct backgrounds removed from the Germano-Slavic sphere.

My statement still stands, a racist white today who identifies with Rome as a White European civilization would not even accept the average Roman as his kin. Racists apply the strictest sense of White, even when they don't fit into it themselves. Rome was indeed whiter (notice how I don't say they were White-proper) in its first establishment, but it became heterogeneous and then more and more relevant across the board. There is a reason why identity became loose and wealth distributed very diversified throughout and not specially preserved for people with less mixture. The irony is, that the initial non-Romans of the Italian outskirt regions would have a bigger East Mediterranean component but they were not even Roman, to begin with, similar to Pompeiians. Rome proper was highly mixed and they were the culture bearers and transformers. The definition of what was a Roman also changed several times and during the Pompeiian samples era, would have been Roman in every sense. Nationality and ethnicity as you frame them now were an obsolete concept at that time.

Even their legionaries were of diverse roots if i remember correctly. There emperors as well at times.

I heard someone compared the Roman identity to the modern American identity, do you think that's accurate?

Even the foundational slave-economy part is similar if you even deep it.

 

[Step a side]

The populations of the geographic region of modern Greece had geneflow with the Near East since the Bronze Age (speaking of historical period). The Copper Age was mainly Anatolian Farmer with minor WHG.

Bronze Age for Italy was different. They received Yamnaya-type signatures at an appreciated level for the more central region, so they would not look far from modern central Italians on a cluster in terms of relevant position between Nordics and Levant.

Let's not get this mixed up further, the Italians during the Neolithic and Chalcolithic were descendants of the MENA group.
View attachment 347675

Neolithic:
View attachment 347677

In the south one sees the retention of the Neolithic profile, outliers that look like central Italy BA, and ones that seem Greek (one with minor Iberian) - it's mainly the Iron Age where one sees considerable Punic presence in the genetic architecture.

Don't get it confused. Sometimes people might pop up and look like this:
View attachment 347678

This was classified as Neolithic, but it is dated 2345-2146 BC, fitting right within the Bronze Age timeline. This result illustrates how interaction with the outside European continent (since Yamanya DNA was an incursion to the region in that period as well) started picking up during the Bronze Age. Maybe we'll see samples in the future of pockets carrying elevated values of NA and Levant, granted being more distinctly outlier-based.

The Jews are actually not like Italians in their genetics on a signature basis when one looks beyond the macro perspective. The differences are in the details of the complexity, obfuscated by broad, yet intricately related (on several levels) lineages that might indirectly give close distances and adjacent PCA plot clustering for parts of the Italian variation (southern) and European Jews.

General makeup of Ashkenazi Jews:

Higher Levantine. Germano-Slavic and Turkco-Scythian. Greco-Roman with strong Eastern Mediterranean/Levant.

Italians got a different admixture source, that converges on some level with the Jews, but overall historically distinct, formed from convulsion of separate population history process. So although parts of Jews are from the Eastern Mediterranean side, it is not an offshoot variation of it, entirely, where one could say it is an explanatory adequate. We can find samples within the Eastern Mediterranean (probably mainly from an East Mediterranean-shifted Anatolian) that look almost Jewish-like, but that would be either that they were archaic of European Jew or most likely coincidental.

To the point you linked, the Reddit poster is not a representation of the average Ashekanzi. She has about +50% European side. When you look at the distances between the average Ashkenazi and that sample, the gap is telling:
View attachment 347674

These are over 400 samples, so consider it very legit. I used that specific Tuscany sample too.

Yeah my bad I had the bronze and copper ages mixed up. The Iran/Caucuses related component only reached parts of southeastern Europe (Greece-Anatolia) during the bronze age. They were still in the Middle East during the copper age and if my memory serves me right it was the ancient Greeks like the Minoan Greeks from the Aegean islands that spread this component along with lineages like J2 in southern Italy and Sicily.

Northern and Central Italy is pretty straightforward, mostly Anatolian Neolithic with the introduction of diluted steppe related ancestry (corded ware) during the Bronze age bringing with them Italic/Celtic languages and the dominant R1b-U152 we see today amongst others. I do know northern Italians received additional Germanic like ancestry after the collapse of the empire. (The region Lombardy is named after a Germanic tribe).

My question is who brought the Natufian related component to southern Italy? Could it have been a combination of migrants from the Levant, Egypt etc during the Roman era + ancient Greek colonist + Phoenician/Punic colonist?

 

[The alchemist]

Even their legionaries were of diverse roots if i remember correctly. There emperors as well at times.

I heard someone compared the Roman identity to the modern American identity, do you think that's accurate?

Even the foundational slave-economy part is similar if you even deep it.

National idealism never blurred the lines between its distinct "racial" identifications that homogenized the populations into separate groupings in the US. Such a defined rule set shaped the genetic history of America on a relational basis that is very alien to Roman history.

To illustrate the intricate mixture: Imperial Rome (started from the Republic) was more like Brazil if the bulk was a multilayer convolution of highly sub-structured "Pardos" (consisting of sub-components that have to increase by several orders) of proportionally heterogenous signatures. Then removing the "Blacks" and "Whites" (such distinct poles never existed during the imperial period), integrate complexities and gene flow from the broader region. Rome was a nexus drawing in many people like a magnet, with the internal being a constant fluid convulsive mixture - within regions, between regions, and with all that in macro-interactions with already adjacent Eastern Mediterranean, including distinct variations that don't even conform to that heterogeneity with random Northern European, Balkan, Anatolian, Iberian, and MENA. All this breaks modern norms of the national ethnohistory of America. The dynamic population change constantly overturned the fixture of stabilization. Extant Italy is stable on a regional gradient basis. Rome had no such thing despite what people think.

So I look at people strangely when they try to ground Imperial Rome as some European-specific historical process, even more ridiculously, "White".

This is the so-called Eastern Mediterranean cluster, characteristic of its complex layers of proportional correlative mixture. Those ancients did not subscribe or demographically conform to the prevailing liberal ethno-theory facilitated by exclusionary national adherence. As such it would be nothing short of ideology to project a modern European perspective of population conceptualization around identity formation towards the ancient period if one thought a parallel sufficiently addressed the realities of the globalized Mediterranean. You have to remove the in-group/out-group-based fractionization, and then expand upon an identity that is value-based at its core.

The Roman senators definitely were mixed as any Roman and most of them were Eastern Mediterranean looking like what existed in Anatolia, a people with a strong Middle Eastern history.

Imperial Romans from Italy were closer to Anatolians before and during Byzantine than the pre-imperial Romans of Italy, showing how they resembled Asia Minor which was an amalgamation of Near Eastern and Eastern Mediterranean mixture.

We have major studies that underscore what I have stated here:

"We sought to identify the geographic sources of these Imperial-era Romans by coanalyzing the data from Italy with data from the Southern Arc. Unexpectedly, the ancestry of the sample of people whose genomes were analyzed who lived around Rome in the Imperial period was almost identical to that of Roman and Byzantine individuals from Anatolia in both their mean (Fig. 3A) and pattern of variation (Fig. 3B), whereas Italians before the Imperial period had a very different distribution (28, 29). We clustered diverse Roman, Byzantine, and medieval individuals and their immediate predecessors without any knowledge of their population labels and found that the Italian and Anatolian individuals clustered together with those of preRoman Anatolia, whereas pre-Imperial people around the city of Rome were systematically different (Fig. 3C). This suggests that the Roman Empire in both its shorter-lived western part and the longer-lasting eastern centered on Anatolia had a diverse but similar population plausibly drawn, to a substantial extent, from Anatolian pre-Imperial sources. In an irony of history, although the Roman Republic prevailed in its existential militaary struggle against the Anatolians rallied by Mithridates VI of Pontus during the first century BCE, the final incorporation of Anatolia into the Roman Empire and the increased connectivity that ensued may have set the stage for the very same Anatolians to become the demographic engine of Imperial Rome itself. This recreated, in historical time, the mythical journey of Aeneas and his Trojan exiles from Anatolia to the shores of Italy."

"Anatolia exhibited extraordinary continuity down to the Roman and Byzantine periods, with its people serving as the demographic core of much of the Roman Empire, including the city of Rome itself."

When one reads about how Romans defined themselves, what stood in the idealist center was a qualitative effort (according to them) to express superior virtues, cultural embodiment, political and religious inclusion, etc., all were very non-ethno-centric. So it was about culture, morality, and institutional and political philosophical adherence. This sounds lofty but really only elites "fully" could afford these qualities of humanities. That was a Roman. Then there were Barbarians. These had lower qualities, lower cultures, and irrational ways. Although Romans knew civilization existed outside them, Barbarians represented uncultivated people rather than the inherent genetic exclusion that modern imperial Europe expressed based on a theory of social Darwinian essentialism: culture was a mere reflection of genetic qualities. Such thinking was extremely alien to the ancients.

Although one cannot underestimate the demographic impact of slavery, the core Eastern Mediterranean ancestry defined loosely above, came through the expansion of the Roman influence and migration of a globalized region. Slavery I don't think made up the general size of non-local influence; although it had some level of impact. Sea-born Agean-Anatolian ancestry shaped a significant baseline during post-Roman acculturation in an expansionary empiric projection, one cannot ignore the stochastic nature of the independent migration of free traders, skilled workers, etc., by the more distal North Africans, Levantines, and Iberians, etc.

Without sounding too drastic, to call the imperial Romans the same as the Iron Age central Italy would be the same as calling Islamic Age Muslim Egyptians the same as Bronze Age Upper Egyptians.

It's important to interpret this as a form of affinity rather than pure derivative modelling.

Here is an abstract from a new study stating keen observations:

To simplify. Magna Graecia (Southern Italy) had a similar mixture before the imperial period. You had the Anatolian region that already had an Eastern Mediterranean but stronger Near Eastern shifted robust demography. Lesser but noticeable variable frequency would have potentially entered during the late Republic era (upon reading more, I notice that the complexity could not have happened in the Imperial period; one of those Pompeii samples I modeled, including the abstract above reveals earlier presence). The mixture of all these, including a migration of free MENA individuals throughout the periods was what accumulated into what it became. Italy during the imperial period became the average of all of that. Then we have to include sporadic European elements.

For example, the fully foreign individual on the sample turned out to be a wealthy person, not a slave. One woman in Viminiacium turned out to be fully Levantine and she was buried in a sarcophagus (not slave). Many Near Easterners came to the region without slavery. Wars during the Republic Era most likely sourced most slaves, in tandem with a period where rapid Romanization took place, likely make up the most influence of when slavery was potentially most relevant in the Near Eastern shift despite probably not being the big portion. It's good and reasonable to acknowledge it as a source, but certainly many people overemphasize slave dynamics because they want people to play social discrepancy on racial lines as a form of presentism which is unfounded.

So in the grand scheme of things, the Pompeii Romans I posted above are very much representative of what drove ancestry bulk - calling them outliers is unfounded, given we will see a more heterogenous Eastern Mediterraneanterenean/Near Eastern population-dense south move to a more sparse north before the empire (not to repeat myself).

There is a problem among Italian researchers who are very dejected from the reality of the mixture of the Roman empire, while international scholars are very reluctant to lean on the truth that the samples they consider "outliers" became the main components later. It's a Western cope.

Although drawing parallels can reveal usefulness, issues arise when one does it without qualifying, which, in this case, uncritical or vague comparisons are not applicable because the racial element was not present, and slavery itself was very different. I'm an enjoyer in using Rome as an inspiration for the debauched eventualities of the Western world too. But that is less about science or backed by scholarly pursuits and mostly reflects moral trends, lol.

 

[The alchemist]

My question is who brought the Natufian related component to southern Italy? Could it have been a combination of migrants from the Levant, Egypt etc during the Roman era + ancient Greek colonist + Phoenician/Punic colonist?

It was heteregnous introduciton. Read my above post.