Italics and Romans

http://www.unz.com/article/what-race-were-the-greeks-and-romans/

https://www.theapricity.com/earlson/history/emperors.htm

Recently on Eurogenes Nordic Bronze Age post (about which I've probably got more to say later) the comments have migrated into a discussion on Italy, Italic and the Romans and Etruscans.  However, what people need to think about, especially in light of the two articles posted above is: who exactly are we sampling, and are they Romans?  For that matter, what is a Roman?  (The same could be done for "American", it should be noted.)  One could plausibly posit genetic continuity going back to the Cardial Ware archeological horizon of 6,000 BC with some steppe admixture, and depending on your samples, you'd probably find it.  But does that represent who the Romans specifically thought of as themselves, particularly the "founding" Romans of the patrician class?  What one has to remember is that anyone who fell under the authority in some fashion of the Roman Republic or Roman Empire wasn't necessarily a Roman, and even when they extended their citizenship to non-Romans of various stripes, citizenship does not make one ethnically a Roman.

People say that in the pre-modern age, people didn't see race the same way that we do, and while that's no doubt correct, they did see very intense tribalism in a way that we can barely understand ourselves today.  So, while the "white" Romans may not have seen themselves necessarily in common brotherhood with the Celts or Germans, because they were an alien people in terms of language, culture and belief, they also had a much more strict idea of what it meant to be a Roman than we really see today as well.  We can see just a bit of it, couched in some somewhat archaic, loaded anthropological terms from the first article I linked to above:

What became of the Nordic Greeks and Romans? Their numbers were reduced and thinned through war, imperialism, immigration, and slavery. Protracted internecine war was devastating. The Hellenes lost relatively few men in their two wars with the Persian Empire (490, 480-479 BC), but they were decimated by the ruinous series of inter-Hellenic wars that followed. The Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC) pitted Athens and her subject Ionian cities against the Spartan Dorian confederacy. That was followed by 35 years of intermittent warfare between Sparta and Thebes (396-362 BC), which pitted Nordics against Nordics. These wars so weakened the Greek republics that they fell under Macedonian rule about 20 years later (338 BC), bringing to an end the classical age of Greece. 

Money was, as always, a racial solvent. Theognis, a noble poet from the Dorian city of Megara wrote in the sixth century BC: “The noblest man will marry the lowest daughter of a base family, if only she brings in money. And a lady will share her bed with a foul rich man, preferring gold to pedigree. Money is all. Good breeds with bad and race is lost.” 

The Roman experience was similarly tragic. All of her later historians agreed that the terrible losses inflicted by Hannibal during the Second Punic War (218-201 BC) were minor compared to the horrendous losses Rome inflicted on herself during the nearly 100 years of civil war that followed the murder of the reforming Tribune Tiberius Gracchus in 133 BC. 

Immigration was the inevitable backwash of imperialism as slaves, adventurers, and traders swarmed into Rome. Over time, slaves were freed, foreigners gave birth to natives, non-Romans gained citizenship, and legal and social sanctions against intermarriage fell away. By the early empire, all that was left of the original Roman stock were a few patrician families. 

The historian Appian lamented that “the city masses are now thoroughly mixed with foreign blood, the freed slave has the same rights as a native-born citizen, and those who are still slaves look no different from their masters.” Scipio Aemilianus (185–129 BC), a statesman and general of the famed clan of the Aemilii, called these heterogeneous subjects “step-children of Rome.”

Because the historical record is quite clear, I'm naturally going to skeptical of DNA evidence that contradicts it, because in order to understand the historical record, we'd need massive archeo-genetic sampling that probably is simply impossible to get.  I think we should take the ancient historians at their word that they knew who their people were and who their people weren't, after all.

As an aside, there are very good cases to be made that Italic separated from the cluster of Germano-Italo-Celtic languages following their unity in the Unetice culture.  And the Unetice culture is a development of a portion of the Central European Bell Beaker culture, which in turn is a development of mostly the Single Grave variant of the Corded Ware horizon.  As a commentator joked at Eurogenes, "everybody is Polish, they just don't know it yet!" (The blog author is Polish, by the way.)  So yeah, the Roman people in a very strict sense that even the most "dat's raciss!" of Patrician families would recognize were probably from a Central European Corded Ware ancestry if you go back to the late Neolithic, with the admixture that the movement of the Bell Beakers entailed.  But the Greeks don't appear to have any Corded Ware ancestry, and Chang's 2015 linguistic phylogeny has the proto-Greeks and their paleo-Balkan "cousins" like most likely the Armenians, Phrygians, and possibly Thracians and Illyrians too break off from Indo-European at a pre-Corded Ware point in time, earlier in fact than any other group besides the Tocharian and Anatolian, c. 3,300 BC.  If that linguistic phylogeny is put next to archaeological horizons, the split happens at the very beginning of the Yamnaya horizon.  Now, obviously the Corded Ware is closely related to the Yamnaya horizon, but exactly the nature of their relationship is still a little bit unclear.  Were they a direct descendant admixted with some central and northern European local hunter-gatherer and farmer ancestry?  Were they close cousins from the Western Sredni Stog region that were displaced into the northern forest steppe by the spread of the Yamnaya-specific culture on the steppes?  Either way, the Greeks (and their related paleo-Balkan) cousins did not go through the crucible of the Corded Ware horizon; they were Yamnaya-specifically who migrated into the Balkans and their admixture would therefore by with Balkan farmer populations like Tripolye, Cernavoda, and other cultures of the late Balkan-Danubian complex.

Either way, this lack of connection to Corded Ware, yet a Corded Ware-like northern phenotype associated with the aristocratic families of the Greeks and patrician families of the Romans suggests that that's the ancestral phenotype for a good proportion of the Yamnaya too.

UPDATE: I'm fascinated by tantalizing hints that early Indo-Europeans (most likely of the Indic variety, so early Andronovo-type variants) were blowing and going in the Middle-East much more thoroughly than we've historically accepted as conclusive.  It is well established that the Mitanni kingdom had some kind of Aryan superstrate, but are the Levantine Maryannu groups merely displaced and politically disenfranchized Mitanni, or a further wave of Aryans?  What about the Kassites, who have some Aryan names among them?  Are they, like the Mitanni, an Aryan superstrate over a Hurro-Urartian linguistic entity?  Even the Hyksos seem to possibly have some Indo-European among them.  Although the Indo-Europeans in the Mideast don't seem to have established an ethno-linguistic entity that lasted (until the Persians, Medes and other Iranian peoples, at least—and this also excludes the Anatolian branch, which obviously lasted for a long time, although on the geographic periphery of the Middle East) they probably brought with them a lot of cultural change that lasted for a long time and is fundamental to the region as we understand it today.  The spread of similar groups of Andronovo-derived cultures as far into Inner Asia as what is today well into China in the form of the Wusun, Yuezhi, and Ordos cultures.

As with the Indian and Iranian groups that make up India and Iran today, these Andronovo-derived people would be hard to recognize today if any where still left, because they were a minor admixture component in a very populous indigenous population.  The same is probably true for Anatolia, Greece, Italy and the Iberian peninsula, if not much of "southern Europe" generally, but in those cases the cultural transmission was more complete and the native population was a more similar phenotype, so our relatedness is easier to spot.  But it (again) raises the tantalizing question of what would the world be like if related Indo-European cultures had spread as thoroughly in the "sun belt" of the Old World as they did in the "ice belt."