The diffusion of genes from the Near East and North Africa may explain why the populations of southern Italy have IQs in the range of 89–92, intermediate between those of northern Italy and central and northern Europe (about 100) and those of the Near East and North Africa (in the range of 80–84) [...]. This also explains the north–south gradient of IQ in Italy in which the regional IQs do not show a clear dichotomy between north and south but rather a gradient in which IQs decline steadily with more southerly latitude. This gradient is shown by the latitudes of the regions given in the right hand column of Table 1. Here we see that the two most northerly regions of Friuli-Venezia and Trentino have the highest IQs (the same as those in central and northern Europe), and that regional IQs decline progressively with latitude to the five most southerly regions of Abruzzi-Basilicata, Puglia-Arulia, Campania, Sardinia and Sicily, which have the lowest IQs (89–92). This gradient is quantified by the correlation of 0.963 between latitude and IQ given in Table 2, suggesting that 93% of the variance in IQs across Italian regions is explained by latitude. The proposed explanation for this gradient is that with increasingly higher latitude the proportion of the Italian population with European ancestry and high IQs increases steadily until in the far north the IQ reaches the average (100) of the populations of central and northern Europe. This explanation also accounts for the IQs of around 90 for several countries in the Balkans [...] and confirmed for Serbia by Rushton and Cvorovic (2009), whose populations are of partly European and partly Near Eastern origin [...]. All these data taken together indicate that the north–south gradient of intelligence in Italy has a genetic basis going back many centuries, and hence predicts the social and economic differences documented in the nineteenth century up to the present day.
