Peoples and Cultures

Question:
I was told by some guy that 90 percent of Italians are black.  Is this true?  He states it all goes back to Hannibal having sex with the Italian women.  He figures that only 10 percent of Italians are 100% white.  I would find it hard to believe that every Italian woman I know is mixed race, instead of white.

Answer:
Thanks for this fascinating question.  You are right to be skeptical of such a hilariously outrageous and emotionally-charged prejudiced claim like that!  It displays a disrespectful prejudice and an extreme ignorance of the issues involved!  The claim contradicts the extensive body of details known about the people of the Italian peninsula.

First of all, Hannibal was not black!  He was Semitic!  And what could he mean by "black?"  Has he seen any black Italians?

This is such a general statement it would be impossible to test or verify.  People of modern Italian origin live all over the world, so you can see how impossible such a statement would be.

On Record
There is an extensive and detailed body of literature about the historical overlays of culture and genetics that have settled in parts of the Italian peninsula.

The largest population in the northern third or so, especially the alpine north of Italy, is of largely Germanic origin.  In the south there is a large percentage of Berber-Arab background.

Other components dating into prehistoric or early historic times are Celtic, Semitic (Phoenician/Carthaginian), Etruscan and Greek, as I comment in other articles.  This is all on record.

I am not aware of any African (Negroid or "black") component.  I would suggest a basic search on some of the key terms here.  This should turn up extensive information on the Roman-Carthaginian era.

Semitic
Everyone knows Hannibal was the ruler of Carthage, a Semitic sovereignty, established originally as a Phoenician colony and trading center.  (The city was where the Berber-Arab city Tunis, Tunisia is now.  Tunisians are still mostly "White" in appearance.)  Some scholars have proposed that the Phoenicians had trade with the Americas before the rise of the Etruscan empire which preceded the Romans.

Carthage became powerful and independent and continued its trading empire, with heavy trade with Britain before the time of the Roman Empire.  Hannibal probably had black people in his populace, but the greatest portion of the Northern Africans seems to have been Berber, not Negroid Africans.

Besides the early population of northern Africa, DNA indicates that one ancient (prehistoric) source of the North African population was from the European early strata, a population that migrated back to Africa from the Italian or Iberian peninsulas in early pre-history, thousands of years ago.  You can see this on National Geographic Genographic Project online.  I have links to that in my articles.

Do the Math
But even more important, it is ridiculous to think that Hannibal or even all the total of his Carthaginian forces could have ever possibly had sex with enough women of the Italian peninsula to cause all of them to have a child by a Carthaginian.  Can you imagine how many months and years this would take?  The Carthaginians weren't even there that long.

They did not even colonize the peninsula.  Hannibal did conquer and rule the Roman territories for a period of 15 years of the Second Punic War (218-201). But ultimately the Carthaginians lost the war.

Even if they could ever have had a child by all or most of the women in the peninsula, that would make at most 33% of the population who would be even part Carthaginian.  With women about 1/2 the population, if every single one had a baby, that would still only add 1/2 again, and so it would take at least two birth cycles to bring the foreign genetic contribution to even 1/2.  You can see it would take generations for the population to be 90% ANYTHING.

But they were White anyway, a Semitic populace perhaps mixed somewhat with the earlier "Berber" ("Moorish") population, with maybe some black population.  A large force of warriors from the Berber tribes were Hannibal's allies in his successful march through Iberia, over the Pyrenees and through the Italian peninsula.

No one really knows for sure.  But the Carthaginians continued to maintain the Semitic culture and language all through their history.  Even today, blacks are not the major population of Northern Africa, though there is a high presence and admixture.