I cropped the image above from the paper Inference of Population Structure using Dense Haplotype Data. The main reason was emphasize the distinctiveness of the Sardinian cluster, on the bottom right. As you can see this population exhibits a lot of coancestry across individuals. This isn’t too surprising, Sardinia is an island, and islands are often genetically distinctive. Random genetic drift prevents populations from diverging through gene flow, but water is a major impediment to gradual isolation by distance dynamics. The original Sardinians are naturally going to diverge from mainlanders over time, and begin to share the same set of common ancestors in the recent past, because their space of reasonable mating possibilities is constrained. The other population which is similar in the heat map above are the residents of the Orkneys, off the north coast of Scotland (the Orkneys has a much smaller population than Sardinia, but, it is also much closer to the mainland).
This is on my mind because Dienekes has a long post where he explores the D-statistic results of various European populations, using Sardinians …