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Genetic history of Italy
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The genetic history of Italy includes information around the formation, ethnogenesis, and other DNA-specific information about the inhabitants of Italy. Modern Italians mostly descend from the ancient peoples of Italy, including Indo-European speakers (Romans and other Latins, Falisci, Picentes, Umbrians, Samnites, Oscans, Sicels and Adriatic Veneti, as well as Greeks in Magna Graecia, Cisalpine Gauls and Iapygians) and pre-Indo-European speakers (Etruscans, Ligures, Rhaetians and Camunni in mainland Italy, Sicani in Sicily, the Nuragic people in Sardinia, and Phoenicians in both Sicily and Sardinia). Other groups migrated into Italy as result of the Roman empire, when the Italian peninsula attracted people from the various regions of the empire (North Africa, the Middle East, and the rest of Europe),[2] and during the Middle Ages with the arrival of Ostrogoths, Longobards, Saracens and Normans among others. Based on DNA analysis, there is evidence of regional genetic substructure and continuity within modern Italy dating back to antiquity.[3][4][5][6]
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In their admixture ratios, Italians are similar to other Southern Europeans, and that is being of primarily Neolithic Early European Farmer ancestry, along with smaller, but still significant, amounts of Mesolithic Western Hunter-Gatherer, Bronze Age Steppe pastoralist (Indo-European speakers) and Chalcolithic or Bronze Age Iranian/Caucasus-related ancestry.[4][7][8][9] Southern Italians are closest to the modern Greeks,[10] while the Northern Italians are closest to the Spaniards and Southern French.[11][12][13][14] There is also Bronze/Iron Age West Asian and Middle Eastern admixture in Italy, with a much lower incidence in Northern Italy compared with Central Italy and Southern Italy.[15][8] North African admixture is also found in Southern Italy and the main islands, with the highest incidence being in Sicily and Sardinia.[15][8][4]