We’ve done several posts on Italian genetics due to the complexity of the subject. As I think we all know, Italy was conquered and reconquered for thousands of years. In addition, it is still surprising that many people do not understand that they are not 100% Italian when the DNA test comes back.
We’re going to try and address this as simply as we can, while we post links to the more scientific information on the web, for those who really want to get into the detail on the subject. Suffice it to say that there is an unlimited amount of studies and surveys out there, and we attempted to select the best ones that represent Italian genetics.
By Dr. Orville Boyd Jenkins
From pre-Roman times, it appears there was already a clear distinction of short, darker-skinned, dark-haired peoples from pre-history being overlayed and mixed with taller, sometimes larger built, blond and blue-eyed groups. For instance, the Etruscans, in what is now Northern Italy, did not speak an Indo-European language.
The Etruscans may have been there before the Indo-Europeans arrived. Some scholars suggest they were thought to have been a blond, blue-eyed people. On a mural in an Etruscan tomb, a banquet scene portrays the women with blond hair.* It could indicate the existence of some blond individuals among the Etruscans. Since it is only women who ware portrayed with blond hair, this could also represent bleaching, or could be a stylistic motif.
It is now generally believed that the Greeks also were larger, blond and blue-eyed people, which was the case when Alexander the Great spread his forces and opened up colonies all over the Middle East and Egypt. This is also attested in frescos from the era, as well as in various references to their looks. Do some searching on the Internet and you will find various sources and studies on this.
This may strike us as odd today, since in modern times we think of the Greeks as shorter, darker people, not too different from the Italians. There are blond Greeks, though, as well as Turks.
Centuries before the rise of the Latins, or the establishment of Rome, Greeks already had colonies and trading centres all over the Italian coast, Sicily, and other islands, and all along the Iberian and North Africa coast. This went into the mix of peoples later considered Italian. Were these ancient Greek-speaking (from around 750 BC or earlier) dark or light? But we would likely consider them Caucasian.
Vikings in Italy
Northern Italy was later home to the invading German groups, from times before the development of the Roman Empire, but particularly in the period from the 300s in our era. This introduced another light genetic strain in to the Italian genetic stream.
Germans settled in Iberia and all the way into Northern Africa, resulting in the blue-eyed and lighter-skinned Berber groups in North Africa. Even more recently in history, another primarily blond strain was added to the Italian mix, from the Viking Normans, who, after conquering England in 1066, became an ethnicity of nobles ruling all of Europe, Russia and much of the Middle East in the Middle Ages.
The point of this is that, in fact, not all Italians are dark. In fact, the term “Italian,” as we use and know it today, is primarily a geopolitical designation, although it carries some ethnic and linguistic connotations also. Italy is the name of a peninsula. Italy as a political entity goes back only to 1861.
Additional ethnic strains added to the vibrant variation in the “Italian” genetic stream. Some were darker toned in color. There were Arab colonies in the Italic peninsula and islands off Italy were ruled by Arabs for centuries. Such is still the case in Malta, whose people are partly of Bedouin origin, though ethnically mixed with other peoples, and still speaking a language (Maltese) closely related to Arabic.
Sources, both Maltese and otherwise, differ on their opinion of how much of the Maltese culture and genetic mix derives from the Arab conquerors in the 800s. An Australian correspondent, of partial Maltese extraction, has referred to some of the many recent genetic studies that indicate the Maltese show a similar genetic signature to other Central Mediterraneans. But he likewise notes that this Central set of characteristics is distinct from West Mediterraneans, East Mediterraneans and North Africans. This is consistent with what we know of cultural history in the region.
At any rate, the Arab Empire that included Malta and Sicily included much of the Italian peninsula and other islands in the area. (The rulers of Spain were overthrown by a Moorish dynasty and were a separate Empire from that which included Sicily and southern Italy. In fact these two kingdoms were periodically at war with each other as well as with other parts of the Arab-Muslim world.)
Copyright © 2006 Orville Boyd Jenkins
Permission granted for free download and transmission for personal or educational use. Please give credit and link back. Other rights reserved.
Eupedia has a great article on the History of Italian Genetics. I’ve tried to keep the haplogroup information to a minimum from heir post, but I have included the link at the end if you want to review the entire article. There is also our post below to get a simple understanding of what a “haplogroup” is, and why it is important to know.
They give the following quote:
“Italy is a fascinating country for population geneticists and historians alike. As Metternich said in 1847 “Italy is only a geographical expression”. The peninsula was unified by Piedmont two decades later, but Metternich’s remark still largely holds true today. There isn’t one Italian people, but a multitude of ethnic and cultural groups, often with an independent history of their own going back to ancient times.”
The further go on to say. Countless people have settled in Italy since the Neolithic: Near Eastern farmers, Italic tribes, Ligurians, Etruscans, Phoenicians, Greeks, Celts, Goths, Lombards, Byzantines, Franks, Normans, Swabians, Arabs, Berbers, Albanians, Austrians and more. All have left their genetic print on the populations of the regions where they settled. This page attempts to identify their genetic markers through the use of Y-chromosomal haplogroups, which are passed on nearly unaltered from father to son.
Here some excerpts from their article that gives a brief explanation of the different peoples that have had an impact on Italian Genetics.
Europe has been inhabited by modern humans for over 40,000 years. Three thirds of this time corresponds to the Ice Age, a period when humans lived as nomadic hunter-gatherers in small tribes. During the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), which lasted approximately from 26,500 to 19,000 years ago, most of northern and central Europe was covered by ice sheets and was virtually uninhabitable for humans. Italy was one of the temperate refugia for Cro-Magnons. It is thought that Cro-Magnons belonged chiefly to Y-DNA haplogroups F and I.
There are few surviving paternal lineages of Cro-Magnons in modern Italy. Pockets of haplogroup I2* and I2c (L596) have been observed at very low frequency in Northwest Italy, between the Alps and Tuscany. It is not certain, however, that these lineages remained in Italy since the Ice Age. They could have come from other parts of Europe later on, notably with the Celts, who also brought I2a2b (L38). Germanic tribes are brought haplogroup I1 and I2a2a (M223). Some or all of these lineages might be descended from Cro-Magnons from the Italian peninsula who migrated north when the climate warmed up 10,000 years ago.
The Bronze Age was brought to Europe by the Proto-Indo-Europeans, who migrated from the North Caucasus and the Pontic Steppe to the Balkans (from circa 6,000 years ago), then went up the Danube and invaded Central and Western Europe (from 4,500 years ago). Italic-speakers, an Indo-European branch, are thought to have crossed the Alps and invaded the Italian peninsula around 3,200 years ago, establishing the Villanova culture and bringing with them primarily R1b-U152lineages and replacing or displacing a large part of the indigenous people. The Neolithic inhabitants of Italy sought refuge in the Apeninne mountains and in Sardinia. Nowadays, the highest concentration of haplogroup G2a and J1 outside the Middle East are found in the Apeninnes, Calabria, Sicily and Sardinia.
Italic tribes conquered the whole peninsula, but settled most heavily in northern and central-west Italy, especially in the Po Valley and Tuscany, but also in Umbria and the Latium, who both owe their names to Italic tribes (the Umbrians and the Latins). Etruscans, Phoenicians & Greeks
Between 1200 and 539 BCE the Phoeniciansbuilt a vast commercial empire from their Levantine homeland along the southern Mediterranean as far as Iberia. In Italy they had colonies in western Sicily and southern and western Sardinia. The autosomal data provided by Haak et al 2015(extended data figure) shows that the Sardinians only differ from the Basques by the presence of Bedouin-like (purple) and Caucaso-Gedrosian (greyish green) admixture, and a slightly more elevated percentage of Neolithic farmer ancestry (orange). These three components are found in roughly equal proportion in the modern Lebanese, and lumped together would account for 10 to 15% of the Sardinian DNA. This is the best estimate at present of the genome-wide contributions of the Phoenicians to the modern Sardinian population. It is not surprising that the presumed percentage of Phoenician Y-DNA should be a bit higher, as men typically made up a larger proportion of colonists in ancient times.
Another key player in the make-up of Iron Age Italy were the Etruscans, who appeared circa 750 BCE apparently out of nowhere. Some have postulated that they came from Anatolia, but their origins remain uncertain to this day. Although their territory matches closely the extent of the Italic haplogroup R1b-U152, the Etruscans were non-Indo-European speakers, and their language is unrelated to any other known ancient languages apart from the Raetic language of the Alps and the Lemnian language of the Aegean Sea. It is likely that the Etruscans came from somewhere in the Eastern Mediterranean and imposed their language on the Italic tribes living in Tuscany, then to the Po Valley, thus splitting Indo-European-speaking tribes in two. Based on the non-Indo-European halogroups found in central and southern Tuscany today, the original Etruscans probably belonged to an compound of haplogroups. This would appear to support of Greek or West Anatolian origin. The high frequency of R1b-U152 found in Tuscany today can be attributed to Italic tribes absorbed by the Etruscans, and to the Romans who resettled part of Etruria.
It is the ancient Greekswho had the biggest impact on the genetic make-up of southern Italy. From the 8th century BCE the Greeks set up colonies all along the coasts of Campania, Calabria, Basilicata, southern Apulia, and Sicily (except the western tip) in what would become known as Magna Graecia. Their genetic signature are essentially haplogroups J2 (18-30%) and E1b1b (15-25%), but the ancient Greeks also carried some R1b-M269/L23 (5-10%), G2a (3-8%), T (1-6%), I2a1b (1-5%), R1a (1-3%), and J1 (1-2%). It is very clear on the haplogroup maps that the areas in central and southern Italy furthest from the coast and from ancient Greek colonies, such as Abruzzo, Molise and the southern Apennines correspond to the highest percentages of haplogroups G2a, J1 and T in Italy, but also the lowest frequency of E1b1b and J2 in the southern half of Italy. There is no better way to contrast the Neolithic population of Italy with the ancient Greek colonists.
The Greeks also colonised Liguriaand the French Riviera, where they founded Genoa, Nice (which was an Italian city until 1860) and Marseille. The Phoenicians and Cartaginians also kept bases in Liguria at some point. Modern Ligurians have the highest percentage of haplogroup E1b1b outside southern Italy (almost entirely the Greek E-V13), but also the highest level of G2a and J1 outside the Apennines, which probably means that this mountainous region also served as a shelter to Neolithic populations during the Italic invasions. R1b makes up about half of Ligurian lineages, among which 22% belong to the U152 subclade, 20% to P312 (the highest level in Italy), 6% to L23, and 2% to L21. The ancient Ligures spoke a language intermediary between Celtic (P312, L21) and Italic (U152) families, and their Y-DNA is split exactly in half between Italic and Celtic. The 6% of L23 are probably of Greek origin. Overall about one third of the modern Ligurian lineages could be of Greek origin.
In the first century Rome became the capital of a vast, cosmopolitan empire. Immigration to Rome made the city grow from a population of approximately 400,000 in the third century BCE, before Rome started expanding outside the Italian peninsula, to at least 1 million under the reign of Emperor Augustus (27 BCE to 14 CE). As those migrants came from every part of the empire it is very hard to estimate how much impact they had on the demographics of Rome and the Italian peninsula, but it was surely considerable in the Latium region.
In the 4th and 5th centuries the cooling of the climate prompted Germanic and Slavic tribes to migrate south and west and to invade the Roman Empire in search of more fertile lands.
The Vandals were the first to reach the Italian peninsula. They had migrated to Iberia, then crossed over the North Africa in 429, where they founded a kingdom that also comprised Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica. Sardinia is the best place to look for traces of their DNA because on the one hand it is the best studied region of Italy, and on the other hand no other Germanic peoples settled there (apart from a very brief Gothic reign), which means that the presence of Germanic lineages on the island would incontestably be of Vandalic origin. Based on the detailed Y-chromosomal study of 1200 Sardinians by Francalacci et al. . The probable the reason for the elevated (Proto-)Slavic R1a and the presence of the Eastern European I2-M423 is that the Vandals stayed in Poland before migrating to the Roman Empire. Over a third of Vandalic male lineages were therefore of Proto-Slavic origin.
In 475, various East Germanic tribes (Herulians, Rugians, and Scirians) were refused federated status by Roman emperor. Under the leadership of Odoacer, a former secretary of Attila, they deposed the last emperor and created the first Kingdom of Italy (476-493), bringing to an end the Western Roman Empire. The kingdom was taken over by the Ostrogoths, who ruled the whole of Italy except Sardinia until 553. The Ostrogoths’s capital was Ravenna. They were succeeded by the Lombards(568-774), who had to contend for the political control of Italy with the Byzantines. Like the Ostrogoths, the Lombards had invaded Italy fromPannoniaand settled more densely in north-east Italy and in Lombardy, which was named after them. The Lombard capital was in Pavia, Lombardy. They set up many duchies, notably those of Friuli (based in Cividale), Trento, Tuscany (based in Lucca), Spoleto, Benevento, as well as in the major cities of Lombardy and Venetia.
The genes of the Goths and the Lombards became quickly diluted into the Italian population owing to their relatively small number and their geographic dispersal in order to rule and administer their kingdom. Both the Goths and the Lombards originated in southern Sweden. Their migration path differed considerably though. The Goths descended through modern Poland as far as the Black Sea, where they surely intermingled with the local populations, then moved into the Balkans in the middle of the 3rd century, where they remained until the 5th century. Considering the high percentage of R1a identified in Vandalic settlements in Sardinia, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to think that the over half of the Gothic lineages had become Proto-Slavic (R1a and I2a1b) by the time they reached the Balkans. It was common practice at the time for Eastern European tribes to converge and retain the name of the dominant tribe. Around the same period the Huns had also been a compound of several ethnicities brought together under Hunnic leadership. The Goths would have subsequently blended to some extent with the native inhabitants of the Balkans in the two centuries preceding their invasion of Italy, a In the 5th century the Goths would have become such a melting pot that their original Germanic Y-DNA might have only represented a small percentage of their lineages. This explains why there is apparently so little Germanic Y-DNA in south-western France and Spain(location of the former Visigothic kingdom) compared to other regions conquered by Germanic tribes in Western Europe, including Italy.
In contrast with the Goths and the Vandals, the Lombards left Scandinavia and descended due south through Germany, Austria and Slovenia, only leaving Germanic territory a few decades before reaching Italy. The Lombards would have consequently remained a predominantly Germanic tribe by the time they invaded Italy.The DNA samples from Campobasso in Molise and Benevento in Campania can give a good idea of what proportion of each Germanic haplogroup the Lombards carried. Campobasso was founded by the Lombards are lost its importance after Lombard rule. Benevento was the seat of a powerful Lombard duchy. Among the Germanic haplogroups identified in Campobasso by Boattini et al.
Some regions were never under Lombard domination, including Sardinia, Sicily, Calabria, southern Apulia, Naples and the Latium. In all these regions the Byzantinesbrought more Greco-Anatolian lineages (especially E1b1b and J2), which were already the dominant lineages from the Magna Graecia period. The Byzantines may have changed slightly the balance of haplogroups in southern Italy, but their impact might have been more contrasting in the parts of northern Italy that belonged to the Exarchate of Ravenna, namely Romagna, Marche, coastal Veneto and Liguria. It may be a coincidence, but these regions happen to be exactly the ones where haplogroups J2 and E1b1b reach frequencies comparable to Greece and western Anatolia. J2 was not a major Neolithic lineage, and the Greeks did not colonise northern Italy (apart from Liguria) in ancient times. The Etruscans could have spread E1b1b and J2 to Emilia-Romagna, but were not present in the other regions. The establishment of a Byzantine population is therefore the best explanation for the high frequency of E1b1b and J2 in Veneto and the Marches. The region of Constantinople has one of the highest percentage of haplogroup J2 anywhere.
The Franksconquered the Lombard kingdom of Italy in 774. Contrarily to other Germanic tribes before them, the aim of the Franks was not to find a new homeland. Consequently, they did not migrate en masseto Italy. They only brought soldiers and administrators (not necessarily of Frankish descent, but also former Gallo-Romans), like the Romans had done when they expanded their empire. Their genetic print is therefore more elusive, although they surely increased a bit the proportion of I1 and R1b-U106.
Soon after the arrival of the Franks, the Saracens invaded Sicily, where they established an emirate (831-1072). Most Muslims left after the Normans reconquered the island in the 11th century. Sicily has nevertheless slightly higher percentages of Southwest Asian haplogroup J1 and North African haplogroup E-M81 than the rest of southern Italy. The Normansleft a much clearer print on Sicily and southern Italy. Originally Vikings from Denmark, the Normans were granted a duchy by the King of France in 911. From 999, invited by the Prince of Salerno, Norman knights started serving as mercenaries for the Lombards against the Byzantines. They quickly acquired counties and duchies of their own and set about to unify all southern Italy under their rule. In 1061 they invaded Sicily, which was completely conquered in 1091. The Norman Kingdom of Sicily was created in 1130, with Palermo as capital, and would last until the 19th century. Nowadays it is in north-west Sicily, around Palermo and Trapani, that Norman Y-DNA.
Author: Maciamo Hay(originally published in July 2013. Last updated on December 2017)
But I know my grandparents came from Italy, how come I’m not 100% on my Italian DNA test? I know where I came from, why should I take a DNA test. Ahh, there just made up anyway, somebody I know took the test and it said they where only 10% Italian, how can that be? All valid questions. One thing we have to remember is that Italy was not united until the mid 19th Century.
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