and again in 1566 The emigration of some 891 Italian exiles to Malta during the Risorgimento in 1849 The posting of some 22,000 British servicemen in Malta from 1807 to 1979 (only a small number of whom remained in the islands), as well as other British and Irish who settled in Malta over the decades The mass emigration occurring after World War II and well into the 1960s and 70s. Many Maltese left the island for the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada and the USA. Following Malta's accession to the EU in 2004 expatriate communities grew in European countries such as the one in Belgium. Over time, the various rulers of Malta published their own view of the ethnicity of the population. The Knights of Malta downplayed the role of Islam in Malta and promoted the idea of a continuous Roman Catholic presence. Genetics Y-DNA haplogroups are found at the following frequencies in Malta: R1 (35.55% including 32.2% R1b), J (28.90% including 21.10% J2 and 7.8% J1), I (12.20%), E (11.10% including 8.9% E1b1b), F (6.70%), K (4.40%), P (1.10%). Haplogroup R1 and I are typical in European populations and E, K, F and J haplogroups consist of lineages with differential distribution mostly in the Middle East and North Africa. The study by Capelli et al. has concluded that the contemporary males of Malta most likely originated from Southern Italy. The study also indicates that Malta was barely inhabited at the turn of the tenth century and was likely to have been repopulated by settlers from Sicily and Calabria who spoke Siculo-Arabic. These findings confirm the onomastic and linguistic evidence presented in 1993 by Geoffrey Hull, who traced the oldest Maltese surnames to southern and south-eastern Sicily, especially the Agrigento district. The study of Capelli et al. 2015 clustered the male Maltese genetic markers with those of Sicilians and Calabrians, and showed a minuscule input from the Eastern Mediterranean. Another study carried out by geneticists Spencer Wells and Pierre Zalloua et al. in 2008 claimed that more than 50% of Y-chromosomes from Maltese men could have Phoenician origins. According to a 2013 study by Iosif Lazaridis et al., Maltese people are genetically distinct from Europeans and shifted towards the Middle East in a principal component analysis. The study concludes that the Maltese people "may have more Near Eastern ancestry than can be explained via EEF (Early European Farmer) admixture". Culture The