Most of them certainly seem to have substantial Greek ancestry, because there are numerous archaeological, historical and linguistic evidences that Greek presence in Southern Italy dates back even to the Mycenaean period, and colonization by Hellenic cities was intense and involved real large-scale settlement.
Indeed, it’s a reasonably well known fact that the Sicilians and some other South Italians are genetically closer to the Greeks from the Mycenaean era (at least those who few who had their DNA extracted and analyzed so far) than the majority of present-day mainland Greeks.
But is that enough to say that Southern Italians are mostly Romanized Greeks? Hmm not, it isn’t.
Why do I think so?
Well, there are three possibilities for two populations to be very close genetically:
a) one descends from the other;
b) the two are divergent branches from the same ancestral people;
c)
or the two never were the same people, but simply had a very similar
genetic history, subject to similar demographic events like major
immigration and emigration waves and admixture processes during the
formation of their respective and distinct populations.
The strong connection between Southern Italy (including Sicily) and the Aegean area (Greece and, especially in the remote past, the western portion of Asia Minor included) seems to stem a bit from all those factors.
Even before the Hellenic colonies were established in parts of the South Italian shores, eventually expanding into parts of the interior, a centuries-long process that may have started already in the Late Bronze Age (~3,000 years ago), it is highly likely that the South Italians were already reasonably close to the inhabitants of the Aegean zone.
South Italy and Greece share a similar geographical position in relation to population movements spreading through Central-Northern Europe as well those that expanded through the Mediterranean sea.
Migrations from the Near East that shaped the genetic history of Europe usually spread first to Greece (both mainland and especially the islands), and the next stop was naturally South Italy: they just had to cross the Adriatic sea. In the Early-Middle Neolithic, roughly between 7,000 and 4,500 B.C., Anatolians gradually colonized the entire European continent starting in Greece, and spreading via two waves (along the Danubian valley, and along the Mediterranean sea).
Afterwards, from the Late Neolithic down to the Iron Age, successive westward movements into Europe involved people who had much more Neolithic Iranian, Neolithic Caucasian and Neolithic Levantine ancestry and also had a major impact on Greece (generally via Anatolia as before). However, they found a much more populated and technologically advanced Europe and only expanded significantly as far as the other side of the Adriatic sea, while the rest of Europe didn’t see many of those migrants arriving. That created an immediate differentiation between Italy and the southern Balkans on one hand and the rest of Europe on the other hand.
In the Early-Middle Bronze Age, roughly between 3,000 and 2,000 B.C., pastoralists from Pontic-Caspian steppe expanded and boomed demographically all over Europe, but in that process of partial population replacement Greece and South Italy, through different migration paths, were in the fading ends of the genetic impact left by those herders, who were probably the bringers of the Indo-European language family to other parts of Eurasia beyond the steppes of modern Ukraine and Russia.
Indo-European expansion in Europe, mainly between 3,000 and 2,000 B.C.
In a nutshell: South Italy and Greece were both demographically and culturally shaped by a succession of peoples who were genetically similar, though they weren’t necessarily the same in ethnolinguistic identity nor did always belong to the same originary sociopolitical communities. That shared history created populations in South Italy that were already not very distinct from Greeks even before any direct migration of ethnic Hellenes to South Italy. The eventual Greek colonization just brought those regional groups even closer.
It’s thus hard to determine very precisely if South Italians are very Greek-like because they descend from Greeks who were Romanized during the Roman Empire and in later periods (small Greek-speaking areas still exist in Italy), or because the various pre-Greek natives of South Italy were already Greek-like.
I think it’s a bit (or a lot) of both things, but in my opinion there is little reason to believe that the pre-Greek natives of South Italy were overwhelmingly replaced by the Greek settlers, or that since the Greek colonization no further migrations made any relevant impact on the demographics of South Italy (and there were many opportunities for migrations: conquests by Romans, Byzantines/Eastern Romans, Lombards, Arabs/Arabo-Berbers, Normans, Aragonese, Spaniards etc.).
So, apart from partial Greek (Greek proper) admixture, the South Italians probably derive from a particular combination of several populations that, through independent means and distinct genetic makeups, became quite similar to the particular combination of admixtures that also accumulated successively (e.g. Mycenaeans, Dorians, Hellenized Anatolians, Slavs, Arvanites etc.) and became characteristic of many ancient and modern Greeks.
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