Pax Augusta
Elite member
i read a bit more into the topic with etruscan. there are many different studies that look at the genome of etruscans and some of them think they are not autochonous while others think they are. let's assume they were autochtonous then we could also assume that the pre-steppe-indo-european italic people spoke a similar language. since there was lemnian on lemnos it could be possible that those languages were spoken in whole southern and south eastern europe. what if those languages are connected to the increase of CHG ancestry in south eastern europe, starting 3800 bc., that did not come together with steppe? and that then later the steppe people conquered the south coming from the north.the problem would be that lemnian and etruscan are a bit too similar for beeing seperated that long.
it would also be interessting to know what language the minoans were speaking. some people think that minoan could have been related to etruscan. the same is the case with the pelasgians who probably were inhabiting greece before the indo europeans entered it from the north. greek has certain characteristics that could come from anatolian languages or it could come from the language that pelasgians were speaking which could mean that they spoke a form of anatolian or something related to anatolian languages.
Actually the studies based on ancient Etruscan samples are very few. And generally speaking Etruscans can't be the primary source of an increase of CHG in Italy, because CHG in Italy is higher in non-Etruscan areas.
One of the few paper (Ghirotto et al, Origins and evolution of the Etruscans' mtDNA, 2013) based on Etruscan samples states that
Comparing ancient (30 Etruscans, 27 Medieval individuals from Tuscany) and modern DNA sequences (370 Tuscans), with the results of millions of computer simulations, we show that the Etruscans can be considered ancestral, with a high degree of confidence, to the current inhabitants of Casentino and Volterra, but not to the general contemporary population of the former Etruscan homeland.
By further considering two Anatolian samples (35 and 123 individuals) we could estimate that the genetic links between Tuscany and Anatolia date back to at least 5,000 years ago, strongly suggesting that the Etruscan culture developed locally, and not as an immediate consequence of immigration from the Eastern Mediterranean shores.
More specifically:
Assuming an average generation time of 25 years [16], [21] and no migration after the split from the common ancestors, the most likely separation time between Tuscany and Western Anatolia falls around 7,600 years ago, with a 95% credible interval between 5,000 and 10,000 (Figure 5). These results are robust to changes in the proportion of members of the initial population being ancestral to the two modern populations (Figure S7B). We also considered an expanded Anatolian sample (total sample size = 123 [11], [22]) coming from all over Turkey, to test whether a founder effect might have enhanced the role of the genetic drift in the previous analysis, inflating the divergence time estimates; the resulting distributions of separation times completely overlapped with those previously estimated, with a lower bound of the 95% credible interval never smaller than 5,300 years ago (Figure 5).
Close similarity between Etruscan and Central European Neolithic mtDNA.
However, even under the unrealistic assumption of complete reciprocal isolation for millennia, the likely separation of the Tuscan and Anatolian gene pools must be placed long before the onset of the Etruscan culture, at least in Neolithic times; if isolation was incomplete, the estimated separation must be placed further back in time. Consistent with this view is the observation that Etruscan and Neolithic mtDNAs are close to each other in the two-dimensional plot of Figure S4C
Another study that analyzed Etruscan genome (Tassi et al, Genetic evidence does not support an etruscan origin in Anatolia, 2013)
Ancient DNA evidence shows that only some isolates, and not the bulk of the modern Tuscan population, are genetically related to the Etruscans. (...)
For the time being, it seems safe to say that, based on the best available data as analyzed by the most advanced biostatistical methods, ancient and modern DNA evidence converges in not suggesting a biological origin of the Etruscans outside Italy. The existing similarities between the Anatolian and Tuscan genepools (Achilli et al., 2007) can simply be accounted for by the effects of older, or much older, prehistoric contacts, unrelated to the later development of the Etruscan culture.
Then we have a PCA with three Etruscan samples: ETR2, ETR5, ETR9. Probably not enough yet, but better than none.