Since the Ralph & Coop paper on IBD patterns across Europe I’ve been keen to see what gets uncovered about Italy. Recall, if you will, that in that paper the authors noted that Italy in particular of European nations exhibits a lot of deep population structure. Whereas the network of descent ties together many European nations and regions, in Italy there are deep regional differences which seem to go back to antiquity. Additionally, more recently Sardinia has come under focus as possibly particularly informative in the ethnogenesis of European peoples. Until recently I was moderately skeptical of the utility of Sardinian samples in the HGDP data set. After all, it was an isolated island, and perhaps subject to peculiarities of low effective population size. Well, it turns out that it may be that modern Sardinians are the best approximation we have today to Southern Europeans ~5,000 years ago.
A new paper in PLoS ONE has a huge sample of Italians, and applies standard techniques to ascertain population structure. An Overview of the Genetic Structure within the Italian Population from Genome-Wide Data:
In spite of the common belief of Europe as reasonably homogeneous at genetic level, advances in high-throughput …