Ligures, Lusitanians... early migrants ?

hrvclv

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The Ligures seem to have spoken an IE language, if we are to depend on their toponymy and anthroponymy.
They are described by ancient sources as much more "primitive" than the Gaulish Celts - though they are sometimes reported to have been "Celts" themselves. They seem to have called themselves Ambrones, which was the name of a few other Celtic tribes - one of them situated in Northern Italy.
They were subdued - assimilated or partially wiped out - when the La Tene Celts arrived. As if the newcomers did not consider them to be "insiders". In other words, they stand somewhere half-way, both in and out of the Celtic world.

They might have been an early (pre-)Celtic pre-iron branch of newcomers to western Europe. The same goes for the Lusitanians. An early split from the Celts stationed in Bavaria / Bohemia might have something to do with the Q-Celtic / P-Celtic partition.

I was wondering whether any of you confirmed geneticists had any data about ancient DNA from the ancient Ligurian area - data that might point to (or disprove) an early Celtic migration from central Europe (say, the early Halstatt culture) at some point in time during the second millenium BC.

I've searched the forum for clues but haven't found anything on that question so far. If there is any already-existing thread on this, please let me know.
 
The Ligures seem to have spoken an IE language, if we are to depend on their toponymy and anthroponymy.
They are described by ancient sources as much more "primitive" than the Gaulish Celts - though they are sometimes reported to have been "Celts" themselves. They seem to have called themselves Ambrones, which was the name of a few other Celtic tribes - one of them situated in Northern Italy.
They were subdued - assimilated or partially wiped out - when the La Tene Celts arrived. As if the newcomers did not consider them to be "insiders". In other words, they stand somewhere half-way, both in and out of the Celtic world.

They might have been an early (pre-)Celtic pre-iron branch of newcomers to western Europe. The same goes for the Lusitanians. An early split from the Celts stationed in Bavaria / Bohemia might have something to do with the Q-Celtic / P-Celtic partition.

I was wondering whether any of you confirmed geneticists had any data about ancient DNA from the ancient Ligurian area - data that might point to (or disprove) an early Celtic migration from central Europe (say, the early Halstatt culture) at some point in time during the second millenium BC.

I've searched the forum for clues but haven't found anything on that question so far. If there is any already-existing thread on this, please let me know.

Ligures are a very ancient people, more ancient than the Celtic migrations in Europe. Ligures were Celtized.
 
It's an interesting argument.

I can speak historically; my grandmother's line is all of Ligurian origin. The Romans called them Friniati (Friniates Ligures). They still inhabit the mountains between Emilia and Tuscany (the Appennines) and they're phenotipically extremely different from all the other Emilian/Lombardian people.

All of my grandmother's ancestors are very short, with relatively dark skin and dark eyes and hair. They seem Sardinian to me (I'm 3/4 Northern Italian, green eyes, light skin, quite high and so on). Since "our" Appennines have been always a difficult zone to travel through, there has never been a significant migration.

We know that the Ligurians inhabited all these mountainous regions, but the plains and the hills were Celtic (in fact my Y haplogroup is the classic Northern Italian/Swiss/French RU152). There are no settlements apart from the mountains. I am an historian, and tracing back surnames all the "Ligurian" surnames of the Emilian mountains are found only there, in the extreme south-west of Emilia or between Liguria and Tuscany.

They were surely pre-Celtic and pre-Roman.. But they left no writings at all, and the Greek sources say only that they were there centuries before Christ, but the Greek historians have never managed to furnish some further information, like on their language or on their origins. We know for sure that both Romans and Greek considered the Ligures an "ancient civilization".

I think that it is still debated whether they were or not indo-europeans. They had surely heavy encounters with the Celts, but more probably they were in that region (southern France, extreme eastern Spain, northwestern Italy) before the indo-european migrations.
 

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