Are there any significant new results?
No, it is the same paper that has already been discussed in the past several times over the past few years, on which several threads have already been created.
In a nutshell, Steppe ancestry in Prehistoric Etruria is present as early as 1900-1600 B.C., the samples from Pian Sultano (formerly Pian Sodano, Tolfa area, modern-day Latium) archaeologically have some materials from Appeninic Culture according to the paper but not clear if all the samples can be attribuited to the Appenninc culture (Pian Sultano is a complex necropolis, frequented from the Early Bronze Age to the Iron Age, in historical Etruscan times, linked since Prehistory to the Etruscans). In any case the study, as was the case of the previous studies, associates the strong presence of R1b in central Italy during the Iron Age to the Bell Beaker culture. So an Etruscan-like profile already exists around 2000-1600 BC. Etruscans were predominantly R1b, particularly R1b P312, R1b P311, R1b U152-L2, R1b U152... and G2a (maybe predominantly G2a L497), and perhaps also I2a1a, a marker that decreseas (found also in the Remedello culture if memory serves me). And it is the discovery of hot water that the closer we get to the end of the Second Iron Age more and more foreigners appear in the graves. In the case of R10337 and R10341, which are clearly two Levantines, and it is misleading to attribute them as a population to IA Central Italy, they are dated rather late, between the end of the 2nd century B.C. and the end of the 1st century B.C., when the Tarquinia area had already entered the orbit of Rome for at least a century and the process of Romanization had already begun. So here again it is a very serious mistake to try to derive information about the Etruscans more generally, since their presence may not even be due to the contacts the Etruscans had with the eastern Mediterranean but to those of the Romans. Adding to these new 11 analyzed samples from Tarquinia, the 11 samples analyzed for Antonio 2019, which also include Latin samples and a Protovillanovan sample from Abruzzo, does not help to bring clarity but only adds confusion in my opinion to an already very confusing paper on its own. Fortunately, some of the paper's raving remarks about Herodotus' tales seem to have been deleted already in the second version of the preprint.
Kerkouane, Tunisia. It is such a cosmpolitan site that it seems absurd to me that any consideration can be made about the Punics, which themselves were a rather diverse population that had assimilated various foreigners, Iberians, Sardinians, and many more. Interesting that geneticists continue to find no evidence in Punic sites of DNA linked to Lebanon and the Levant. This confirms that Punic and Phoenician were not exactly the same thing. I agree with Mount123 that J2b-L283 has nothing to do originally with the Phoenicians or the Punics, given that its presence in the early Bronze Age in the northern Balkans remains the best documented. The case of some older clades, more similar to those found in Sardinia, remains unclear, but here again ancient DNA will help us clarify the picture. J2b and J2b-L283 are not the same thing, and to date no evidence has been provided that J2b is related to the Phoenician expansion. I remind everyone that delusional studies have been published on the Phoenicians in the past that tried to associate J2 with the Phoenicians without providing any evidence, an unproved hypothesis by Lebanese geneticist Pierre A. Zalloua that continues to influence studies in a negative way.
Sant’Imbenia, Sardinia. There are so few new ones tested that no consideration can really be made.
As I have commented in the past, the basic idea that every foreign person who died in a place may have contributed to the subsequent generations is very weak. But geneticists like it so much because it is a very simple, not to say simplistic, idea. Not to mention that late Neolithic Morocco is still being used in this article as a proxy for North African ancestry, when it was the sample that came from a study that showed counter-migration during the Neolithic from Iberia to North Africa and thus has perhaps too high EEF values, which could inflate the supposed North African ancestry in non-North African samples.
Another really significant flaw in this paper, which aims to demonstrate movements, is the huge difference in dating between the samples, ranging from the Bronze Age to the end of the Iron Age.
