The "Mediterrenean Race" does not exist

In this house, we call them Southern Europeans.

One of the most devastating mind viruses to ever grace internet race discourse is the perception of a “Mediterranean race”. You see it a little bit from Nordicists, and more often from the intolerable “Med Supremacists” who stalk the internet. Many of these people are not who they seem. I won’t lie, there are unfortunately some Southern Europeans who pedal this nonsense, but often times it is these Levantine types and particularly Middle Eastern Christians or Anatolian Greeks who really don’t feel a connection to the surrounding Arabs. Oh yeah, also they are often Mexican for some reason. I think they are so stupid that they think being brown by virtue of native American ancestry makes them brown in the same way that Arabs and Nafri Nogs are brown. If anything, the Native American ancestry pushes them further away from Southern Europeans than it does from Northern Europeans (due to the ANE ancestry of Amerindians).

However, this Mediterranean race is very difficult to explain, because from an outside perspective it just sort of seems like an intermediate between two extremes. No other mainstream racial category can be though of like this, they all peak in some deep ancestral component. Just so you know, the deep distinction between Europeans and Southwest Asians is the mysterious “Basal Eurasian” component which comes either from a very early branch off of Eurasians, or a very late branch before the out of Africa moment. Natufians and Neolithic Iranians are rich in this ancestry, while Caucasus Hunter Gatherers and Anatolian farmers are lower in it but still had it. Expectedly, the defining characteristic of Europeans is their high West Eurasian ancestry. In a genetic sense, I mean. Groups like the Epigravettians (Villabruna Man, 90% of the genome of WHGs) are purely of West Eurasian ancestry with no Basal Eurasian ancestry.

Some people claim that the Romans and Greeks are the original source of a “Med race”, however there is little evidence for this. The Greeks considered all non-Greeks to be Barbarians. That’s what the word meant, it was an ethnic connotation for all non-Greeks. In the same way the Jews use Goyim, or the Iranics used Anarya. The Romans were somewhat similar, even often viewing their Greek cousins as decadent. Both Romans and Greeks certainly had very negative things to say about the inhabitants of the Levant and to a lesser extent Anatolia, with no evidence that they shared an ethnic connection with the exception of a few old kings and queens such as Cadmus and Andromeda. Even as far back as the Greek Dark Ages, Homer describes the Phoenicians as “greedy” and “of many tricks”. Certainly, other groups on the Mediterranean like the Egyptians and Hebrews did not recognize a “Med race”, quite the contrary. The Egyptians split up human races between themselves, the Nubians, the Libyans, and the Asiatics. The Israelites identified various other Mediterranean groups as Hamites or Japhethites.

The only real genetic component that can be called the core of a “Mediterranean race” is Anatolian Neolithic Farmers, but these farmers actually comprise a higher proportion of ancestry in Central Europeans than they do in many Levantines. Druze, who are the most Anatolian-rich Levantines, have similar proportions of Anatolian ancestry as Austrians.

In fact, let’s compare the only real traditional racial enemies of the Romans from Northern Europe — the Celts, and compare them to Iron Age Levantines.

As you can see, the samples from the Hallstatt and La Tene cultures (early Celtic cultures) as well as the southern Gauls, largely outscore the Levantines.

Ladies and gentlemen, the superior Med Race.

Also, Levantines are not necessarily more genetically similar to these “Near Eastern” farmers.

Measuring with F3 and F2, we get mixed results. The Northern Europeans consistently have slightly higher F3 scores with respect to both Greek Neolithic and Turkish Neolithic (both pretty much 100% Anatolian Farmer, but I thought it’s possible drift could play a role so I included both). F3 scores measure the amount of alleles distinct from a basal population (genetic drift) which are shared by the two populations, so a higher score signals more genetic similarity as long as you are using the same root population (I use Mbuti Pygmies as the root population, as they have virtually no admixture from anyone in Eurasia). F2 measures the total drift between two populations, so a lower score indicates more genetic similarity. For some reason — I do not know why, the F2 scores suggest that the Levantines are actually closer, contrary to the F3 scores. So even purely in terms of genetic similarity to this root population, it does not seem like there is a very cohesive “Mediterranean race”.

And what would a post about Meds be without a Boob break?

Classic Gracile Med phenotype. Shiftymine (Italian) was one of the best frontgyatts in gaming before she degraded herself and became an OnlyFans whore. SAD!

But let’s disregard the Anatolian Farmers for a minute. What about the genetic similarity between Levantines and Southern Europeans with respect to Northern Europeans?

Well, let’s look at an Fst Matrix which contains Italians, Greeks, Lebanese, Druze, and various Northern European populations. Fst is arguably the gold standard for genetic distances, but it is contingent both on the genetic diversity within a population and on sample size, so I did not use it for comparisons with ancient samples especially because even the amount of modern samples in my dataset is usually low.

Italians score closer to Germans, Northeast Europeans, and Irishmen than they do to Druze, Bedouins, and Palestinians. Greeks score closer to Germans and Eastern Europeans than they do to Druze, Bedouins, and Palestinians. Because Greeks are genetically no more “southerly” than Italians, I suspect that other reasons are at play for making them more distant to groups like the Irish. Russians, Finns, Sards, and Basques are different due to Balto-Slavic Drift and endogamy/isolation.. Spaniards are closer to all European populations listed than they are to all Middle Eastern populations listed. There is a substantial genetic gap between the most southerly Europeans, and the most northerly Southwest Asians. In case any of you were wondering (especially if you had seen those old Sforza Fst trees showing Greeks linked to Iranics), Iranians are similar with respect to distance from Europeans as Levantines. Southern Italians are closer genetically to Britons than to Iranians.

Southern Italians, the most southerly continental European population, also share more drift with the English than they do with the Lebanese.

Southern Italians have a strangely close Fst to Lebanese in the Human Origins dataset that is not shared by Sicilians or Greeks, and I think this is a data artefact or bias, or some product of the Fst estimation used in ADMIXTOOLS. This affinty is also not shared between other related Levantine groups like Syrians, Druze, and Palestinians. The Fst distances between Lebanese are too high to these groups and between Lebanese in general, Lebanese Christians, and Lebanese Muslims relative to their distance to Southern Italians for me to believe it, and this also contradicts Fst heatmaps I’ve seen in studies. Sicilians, by the way, are genetically typical for Southern Italy. People think they’re very different, they aren’t. Probably not even the most genetically “southerly” group in Southern Italy.

# A tibble: 9 × 4
  pop1             pop2            est       se
  <chr>            <chr>         <dbl>    <dbl>
1 Greek.HO         English.HO  0.00514 0.000305
2 Greek.HO         Lebanese.HO 0.00614 0.000353
3 Greek.HO         Syrian.HO   0.00795 0.000382
4 Italian_South.HO English.HO  0.00531 0.000658
5 Italian_South.HO Lebanese.HO 0.00359 0.000666
6 Italian_South.HO Syrian.HO   0.00686 0.000667
7 Sicilian.HO      English.HO  0.00575 0.000371
8 Sicilian.HO      Lebanese.HO 0.00555 0.000404
9 Sicilian.HO      Syrian.HO   0.00714 0.000457

All of this deals with the strongest case for a Med race, ignoring the North Africans let alone the Saudi-like SSA-infused population of modern Egypt, but in reality classical race science was really much more focused on North Africans than Levantines. Most Levantines were recognized as belonging to the Orientalid or Armenoid subtypes. Mediterranean was more observed among North African groups, particularly the Berbers of the Atlas Mountains, who often display fairly European looking phenotypes. This is actually an astute observation on the part of these scientists, because now we know that almost half of these groups’ DNA comes from a massive Neolithic invasion of European (Anatolian) Farmers. These groups brought the Berber languages most likely, and possibly also the Chadic languages as Chadic speakers mostly have a Y-haplogroup which originates in Mesolithic Europe. However, African DNA (both Subsaharan and Iberomaurusian) has a very strong drift effect which makes the idea of a “Eurafrican” Med race out of the question in terms of genetic distance. North Africa was also invaded a lot by Europeans afterwards. The Bell Beakers invaded it and may have imparted some DNA on it. The Romans established most of their colonies in North Africa and there is even a sample from North Africa of a very Iron-Age-Italic like Roman in the 2nd century AD. Port cities like Kerkouane were mostly European in ancestry from Italic and Greek sources. The Egyptians illustrate Libyans as lighter-complexioned than Asiatics.

Some people will insist that there is some sort of cultural existence of “Mediterrania” but I don’t see it at all. The Greeks have some cultural influence from the Middle East because of Ottoman occupation, but Italians and Spaniards? The former seems to only really have fragments of Arabian influence in Sicily and the latter has constructed its identity against the old Arabian occupation of their land. Southern Italy does, on the other hand, have quite clear architectural and cultural intakes from the Spaniards and Normans who ruled it for some time. The greatest Arabian influence of Europe was the introduction of the food that would eventually become the Cannoli.