This is substantial and out of character for the ancient world, particularly considering the ancient Greeks were not polygamous. "A settler population of 5,000 males, mating with local women, would have had to grow by more than 1% per year for several centuries," Scheidel says in response to Tofanelli and colleagues' conclusions. But if Tofanelli and colleagues' supposition that East Sicily was colonized first is correct, this "points to the lower end of the size spectrum proposed by historical demographers, with values in the order of thousands breeding men and few hundred breeding women," they write. Walter Scheidel, professor of classics and ancient history at Stanford University, has estimated from a demographic perspective that the founding population was likely around 20,000 to 60,000 males. Historians and demographers have also debated just how large the migration population was when they arrived in Magna Graecia. "Despite the multiple alternative explanations for historical gene flow," they write, "it is relevant to stress here that a signature specifically related to the Euboea island in East Sicily was consistently found at different levels of analysis, in line with the historical and archaeological evidence, attesting to an extended and numerically important Greek presence in this region." More specifically, this wave of colonists likely arrived in East Sicily first and then dispersed into West Sicily and South Italy. When the researchers analyzed the Y chromosome data and modeled the typical mutation rate over the centuries, they "recovered a signature of the Greek Contribution to Sicily during the Archaic Period" or between the 8th and 5th centuries BC. Over 800 people native to the areas of Euboea and Corinth, where archaeologists and historians think the first wave of colonizers came from, along with people whose families were native to Sicily and southern Italy, had their DNA sequenced. In particular, they looked for robust gene signatures for Greek contributions to Italy and Sicily, they tested alternative models, and they looked at the relative contributions of males versus females to find out more about the colonizing population. To counter this, Tofanelli and colleagues used both Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA analysis and created demographic models to simulate genetic change over time. Tofanelli and colleagues find fault with these studies of Greek colonization primarily because those studies used specific lineages or haplotypes as markers of colonization, and these contemporary genomes may not accurately reflect the genes that were present in ancient populations. Previous DNA analyses have been interpreted to bolster various hypotheses as well.
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