Pax Augusta
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The cline affects all Italians, not just those in central Italy. Therefore, it is necessary to consider a model that works for everyone.
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(QUESTION) How to model central italians on qpadm
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The cline affects all Italians, not just those in central Italy. Therefore, it is necessary to consider a model that works for everyone.
Jovialis
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I have moved this to a proper section (Not Maciamo's blog)
I have also adjusted the title to properly reflect the OP. It is a question, and not a how-to guide.
Please be mindful of both of those issues going forward.
Also, g25 is not a robust genetic calculator, it measures PCA-distances totally dependent on the 25 dimensions handpicked by the author, with no documented methodology. It is not a rigorous tool, despite popularity.
I have also adjusted the title to properly reflect the OP. It is a question, and not a how-to guide.
Please be mindful of both of those issues going forward.
Also, g25 is not a robust genetic calculator, it measures PCA-distances totally dependent on the 25 dimensions handpicked by the author, with no documented methodology. It is not a rigorous tool, despite popularity.
How would you model central Italians on qpadm? Could italic+east med+germanic be a good model?
Jovialis
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Defer to AARR, convert it to PLINK, then you can make these custom population out of samples.
Jovialis
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Admixtools Thread 'admixtools2 TUTORIAL for WINDOWS.'
—BoNe—
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Model Italians using ancient German and Eastern Levantine samples?
Sadly, this is not the first time I’ve read something like this.
The damage that the Anglo-Saxons have done to archaeogenetics with their circular “Knights of the Round Table” reasoning is insane—especially on internet forums, where they distort and twist academic narratives from years ago that were based on very few samples.
Italic U152 does not descend from any German population.
Bell Beaker Italics expanded from the south into Central Europe.
NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND.
The J2, T, E, Z2109, PF7562, PF7589 lineages of Southern Italy are of “Mycenaean”/Aegean ancestry that expanded into the Levant with the “Sea Peoples.”
NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND.
PCAs and modelling are pure schizophrenia if you don’t know what you’re doing. An African father, a Siberian mother, and their mixed child would appear as three totally separate points covering the entire PCA spectrum—but 90% of hobbyists doing modelling seem to ignore this fact.
Autosomal PCAs are extremely biasable; they have no temporal or genealogical order—only phylogeny reveals the true order.
Autosomal PCAs are meant to try to infer which Y chromosome contributed what percentage and when. People use them for the opposite purpose: trying to force schizophrenic narratives like the Steppe theory, which has not passed peer review since 2022, because the refinement of the Y chromosome in southern populations does not fit that narrative. Ideological–narrative consensus is not science.
Italics can only be modelled with 50% Rasenna (Italics Bell Beakers, Latins, Etruscans, Oscans, Umbrians, Picenes) + 25% Roman Deities (elite Rasenna) + 25% Greek Deities (elite Mycenaean/Aegean), with those percentages varying depending on the region.
Genealogy in mammals always reduces to the last 32 ancestral pieces prior to the individual being analysed:
(16 mtDNA pieces + 16 Y pieces)
50% (parents) – 25% (grandparents) – 12.5% (great-grandparents) – 6.25% (great-great-grandparents).
Doing this with 5 levels and 64 pieces makes no sense, because great-great-great-grandparents would already contribute only about 3% each.
By simple population statistics, any Italic—regardless of which haplogroup they carry—will on average always have 3–4 U152 great-great-grandfathers out of 8 possible male great-great-grandfathers if they are from the North, or the same with Aegean/Mycenaean haplogroups if they are from the South.
An Italic G2 would have more than 6,000 uninterrupted years in the Italian peninsula; what would change in their genealogical tree is that in the Neolithic more than half of their great-great-grandfathers would also be G2, but from the Bell Beaker period onward that same uninterrupted line would be U152.
Sadly, this is not the first time I’ve read something like this.
The damage that the Anglo-Saxons have done to archaeogenetics with their circular “Knights of the Round Table” reasoning is insane—especially on internet forums, where they distort and twist academic narratives from years ago that were based on very few samples.
Italic U152 does not descend from any German population.
Bell Beaker Italics expanded from the south into Central Europe.
NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND.
The J2, T, E, Z2109, PF7562, PF7589 lineages of Southern Italy are of “Mycenaean”/Aegean ancestry that expanded into the Levant with the “Sea Peoples.”
NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND.
PCAs and modelling are pure schizophrenia if you don’t know what you’re doing. An African father, a Siberian mother, and their mixed child would appear as three totally separate points covering the entire PCA spectrum—but 90% of hobbyists doing modelling seem to ignore this fact.
Autosomal PCAs are extremely biasable; they have no temporal or genealogical order—only phylogeny reveals the true order.
Autosomal PCAs are meant to try to infer which Y chromosome contributed what percentage and when. People use them for the opposite purpose: trying to force schizophrenic narratives like the Steppe theory, which has not passed peer review since 2022, because the refinement of the Y chromosome in southern populations does not fit that narrative. Ideological–narrative consensus is not science.
Italics can only be modelled with 50% Rasenna (Italics Bell Beakers, Latins, Etruscans, Oscans, Umbrians, Picenes) + 25% Roman Deities (elite Rasenna) + 25% Greek Deities (elite Mycenaean/Aegean), with those percentages varying depending on the region.
Genealogy in mammals always reduces to the last 32 ancestral pieces prior to the individual being analysed:
(16 mtDNA pieces + 16 Y pieces)
50% (parents) – 25% (grandparents) – 12.5% (great-grandparents) – 6.25% (great-great-grandparents).
Doing this with 5 levels and 64 pieces makes no sense, because great-great-great-grandparents would already contribute only about 3% each.
By simple population statistics, any Italic—regardless of which haplogroup they carry—will on average always have 3–4 U152 great-great-grandfathers out of 8 possible male great-great-grandfathers if they are from the North, or the same with Aegean/Mycenaean haplogroups if they are from the South.
An Italic G2 would have more than 6,000 uninterrupted years in the Italian peninsula; what would change in their genealogical tree is that in the Neolithic more than half of their great-great-grandfathers would also be G2, but from the Bell Beaker period onward that same uninterrupted line would be U152.
Vallicanus
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Who are these Roman Deities and Greek Deities you mentioned?
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U152 is a macro-haplogroup; without proper refinement everything looks the same. However, Etruscans, Latins, Umbrians, and Picenes cannot share the same clades. We will only be able to differentiate them through large-scale population studies specifically designed for this purpose.
We all know what the four major branches of U152 are, but we do not yet have enough data to form a clear picture. Still, there is sufficient diversity to be confident that all of them have been present since around 2600–2400 BC.
Z56, being concentrated near the origin of Rome, has good chances of being considered a “Roman deity,” but we cannot be certain due to the lack of data. What is certain is that it did not arrive from Central Europe.
Time will tell which is which. The problem with ZZ11> is that they all cluster extremely closely on PCA plots, to the point that Hispanic DF27 and Italic U152 nearly overlap. It becomes very difficult to determine where one begins and the other ends due to the Bell Beaker endogamy system, which causes P312> lineages to repeat over and over again, accumulating recessive endogamy and consolidating many shared autosomal segments.
Bronze Age admixture calculators have a serious problem because an “Italic” mixture does not exist as such—yet it is impossible that it did not exist, given that U152 has been present in that area for more than 4,500 years. Instead, the “Germanic” component is heavily inflated due to the “Steppe theory.” I have also observed that in many Italian samples the “Iberian” component is inflated as well, when in reality it would correspond to something closer to ZZ11.
The “Deities” will be those clades that, over time, demonstrate having consolidated in specific regions and archaeological contexts that gave rise to Greco-Roman mythologies. Archaeogenetics has shown that it was not so much that the Romans copied Greek mythology, but rather that mythologies move and impose themselves due to their functionality in other regions, while they may become extinct in their original cores. Archetypal mythologies represented a very important cultural evolutionary leap by teaching human psychology in a subliminal way.
One of the clades mentioned that fulfills both having had a founder effect in the Bronze Age and being certified in elite royal burials is PF7562; this one would qualify as a “Greek deity” of the Mycenaean elites.
With J2, the problem is that it branched off very early, and many of its lineages appear to have gone extinct. However, J2 has been associated with mathematics since around 2000 BC in Upper Mesopotamia. Pythagoras could have been a direct descendant of those early migrations, transmitting that knowledge in isolation from generation to generation until it became widespread 1,500 years later.
E-V13 is another clade that will likely yield many surprises due to the lack of early samples that have yet to be discovered. Thracians and Dacians could also be descendants of Mycenaean elites.
All clades closely associated with metals and horses have strong chances of having consolidated thanks to those very factors.
Ultimately, the term “Mycenaean” is an anachronism invented by historians and actually refers to something that is still not fully understood, but which includes horses, metals, and stone constructions with a military purpose.
The mixture of southern haplogroups seems to have formed between 2000–1400 BC and to have survived until the present without major changes. Therefore, the same southern populations could have experienced or been familiar with, in this order: Mycenaean mythology (a pantheon with fewer deities than the Greek one) → Phoenician mythology (father–mother–son pantheon) → Greek mythology (the pantheon of the Twelve Olympians) → Roman mythology (a redefined Greek pantheon). Broadly speaking, these are structurally the same, with the names of the protagonists changing.
Melqart in the Phoenician pantheon represents the Aegean conquest of the Levant, somewhat akin to how Alexander the Great conquered Egypt and created the title Zeus-Ammon. This is why Melqart was always considered an equivalent of Heracles in the Greco-Roman world.
What archaeologists traditionally called the “Orientalizing period” is turning out to be more a Central Mediterranean/Aegean phenomenon than one of Levantine origin.
For this reason, everything “Mediterraneanizing,” such as goldsmithing, was indistinguishable and catalogued as “Phoenician,” but metallurgical evidence indicates that it was not something exported from the eastern Levant.
Mythology, for all practical purposes, represents political and moral movements anchored in specific spaces and times.
Southern Italy is a highly coveted geostrategic point; in that entire region there were likely no poor warriors from the Bronze Age onward.
Be that as it may, everything points to the bearded god (Deus Pater, Zeus, Jupiter) independently and in a distorted way referring to M269*. It is the only lineage with tremendously disproportionate descendant numbers: it could easily have 350 million male descendants, 700 million including daughters… and as many as 2 billion people carrying it indirectly through autosomal inheritance.
P.S. We cannot understand prehistory solely through genetic codes, nor by following the narratives of old-school prehistorians, because they often mixed ethnic and cultural categories. We need several additional layers of analysis for everything to make sense and to better understand the sequence of admixture events
Vallicanus
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Were "elite Rasenna" genetically different from other Rasenna?
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“Rassena” was the term the Etruscans used to refer to themselves; “Etruscan” was the term the Romans used to refer to the Rassena.
Being their self-designation, the term was applied to the whole area for being the “oldest” focal point of the Bell Beaker U152> descendants. By simple order, the Oscans, Umbrians, and Latins would be ethnic derivatives of these groups but spoke Indo-European; there were also the Rasheti somewhat further north in a more Celtic version.
Among the elite Rassena, in addition to these same groups, there was mixing with Mycenaean elites.
When I use terms like “deities” or “elites,” I refer to lineages uninterrupted for thousands of years in the same area thanks to military consolidation.
Anything that crosses the line from genetics into anachronistic spatio-temporal terminology is better addressed by an Italian who has studied prehistory in detail. I operate a bit in reverse: I first study genealogical structures, focusing solely on all Y lineages, and try to give them coherence with contemporary accounts, while discarding any that make no sense genetically.
Languages represent cultural distinctions, not ethnic ones. If you present these same facts to archaeologists, it blows their minds. The Etruscan language is considered non-Indo-European and may be so because they continued using the language from the Cardial period, as happened with Iberian and Basque, since the female lineages had uninterrupted continuity from the Neolithic. These “isolated” languages could in fact be distinct evolutions of a common Neolithic language.
Interestingly, these three groups—Basques, Iberians, and Etruscans—share that more than 50% were P312>ZZ11>, with the Hispanic branch dominated by DF27 and the Italic by U152.
Another possibility is that these “isolated” languages were the result of entirely invented languages following the first uses of the Phoenician alphabet. The whole issue of languages seems tremendously complicated to resolve.
The Indo-European language most likely spread more gradually than academically proposed. That is, people continued speaking Neolithic base languages, and it was only among those controlling maritime routes that Indo-European spread, through reciting the nonsense of the time. Over time, this system imposed itself on the rest because it was better suited to power accumulation and the cult of replicating what had worked before.
In this sense, all P312> lineages are related to the Indo-European language, as their origin and expansion derive from Indo-European itself (elites obsessed with leaving more than 30 founder branches) (ZZ12, L2, Z39589) (more than 100 branches immortalized by themselves alone) (these individuals DID speak Indo-European, 300% guaranteed) (Z198, Z36, Z56, PF6558…?) (Neolithic isolated languages?). If you chose to be a herder and stopped navigating, raiding, and trading long distances, you lost Indo-European—or created a third language to differentiate yourself from other Indo-Europeans.
A Rassena U152 with G2 cousins devoted to sheep and goat herding would have spoken “Neolithic isolated” languages, while a Rassena with PF7562 cousins living in the Aegean would have spoken Indo-European.
It may have been more common than it appears at first glance for many groups to be bilingual.
Over generations, those who spoke Indo-European and focused on having 10 children to form raiding/military elites outcompeted those who could only afford three children, since reproductive limits depended on the amount of accumulated livestock to inherit—you won’t have 10 children if you only have 20 goats to leave them.
But if you managed to kill in trial by combat a man who owned 100 cows, you could afford to have 20 children, and over time and genetic drift, your SNP 200 years later could have 10 immediate branches (the other 10 would not have consolidated and would have gone extinct).
This is how founder effects arise.
The problem with archaeogenetics is that half of the things we speculate tend to be nonsense six months later.
Archaeologists have always tried to justify cultural changes with massive migrations, when in reality there are very few massive migrations; founder effects are a completely different phenomenon.
Pax Augusta
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This is the usual fairy tale.
Vallicanus
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Do you have any G25 co-ordinates available to support your views?
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I don’t like G25; I’ve seen many anachronisms in its estimates.
The interactive PCA created by Jovialis helps to visually illustrate what I’m referring to.
Ancient Greeks and Italics overlap in the area corresponding to what was historically Magna Grecia.
All of these populations (in the present day) have shifted northward on the plot due to genetic drift.
The blue circle represents a hypothetical reconstruction of an “Italic elite,” while the red one represents a “Mycenaean elite.”
Refine it a bit more—saying that is almost the same as saying that Magna Graecia never existed.
The Mycenaeans were highly admixed, which is why they occupy such a large space in PCAs.
I’m interested in the opinion of an Italian: when and how did U152 arrive in Italy?
Pax Augusta
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It is not my personal opinion; it is the consensus among prehistoric and protohistoric archaeologists and Etruscologists that there is no trace or evidence of a Mycenaean elite arriving in Etruria. The same applies to other ethnic groups sometimes proposed as having arrived in Etruria and contributed to the ethnogenesis of the Etruscans. Despite this scholarly agreement, the notion of an external elite migration continues to be revived periodically outside specialist circles, typically by Indo-Europeanists and Orientalists, as well as by pseudo-scholars.
The so-called "Oriental theory" is worth recalling here: it originated around 400 BC, many centuries after the earliest attestations of the Etruscans. It emerged as a consequence of Archaic-period contacts (around 500 BC) between the Etruscans and the Ionian Greeks settled in Anatolia, along with certain Anatolian populations.
It seems clear to me that some Greeks, and even some from Magna Graecia, were present in Etruria during certain periods. However, this presence does not imply that they played any significant role in the ethnogenesis of the Etruscans. On the contrary, the legendary account of Tarquinius Priscus illustrates quite the opposite. According to Roman tradition, he had a Greek father (Demaratus of Corinth) and an Etruscan mother, yet he was barred from holding public office in Tarquinia, Etruria, precisely because of his foreign paternal heritage. Frustrated by this exclusion, he relocated to Rome, where he eventually became king. This story underscores a broader point: the Etruscans appear to have restricted foreigners from accessing high political positions, even when individuals were wealthy, well-connected, or partially integrated through marriage.
On the other hand, the archaeogenetic data speaks for itself.
The overwhelming majority of individuals (80.33%) belong to the core Italy_Etruscan cluster, representing the local Etruscan genetic profile in Bologna, Tuscany, and Lazio. Among the non-local / non-core-Etruscan samples (the remaining ~19.67%), the Celtic-related group (Etruria_Ceu_Celt) stands out clearly as the largest foreign-related component, accounting for 15 samples (12.30% of the total dataset — and over 60% of all non-local individuals).
I don't have a strong opinion on this, but I think that U152 didn't "arrive" via a single event but through gradual Bronze Age expansions from the Alpine/Central European zone starting ~2200–1800 BCE, associated with Bell Beaker folk and steppe ancestry. It then became embedded in the gene pool of northern/central Italic peoples (including precursors to Etruscans and Romans), with later Celtic movements (e.g., Golasecca/La Tène in the north) reinforcing it.
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Nice summary, i would like to add that bell beaker presence is earlier than you stated: 2500/2400 BC per Alissa Mittnik, Claudio Cavazzuti et alii: Investigating the 4th-2nd millennium BCE transition in ItalyIt is not my personal opinion; it is the consensus among prehistoric and protohistoric archaeologists and Etruscologists that there is no trace or evidence of a Mycenaean elite arriving in Etruria. The same applies to other ethnic groups sometimes proposed as having arrived in Etruria and contributed to the ethnogenesis of the Etruscans. Despite this scholarly agreement, the notion of an external elite migration continues to be revived periodically outside specialist circles, typically by Indo-Europeanists and Orientalists, as well as by pseudo-scholars.
The so-called "Oriental theory" is worth recalling here: it originated around 400 BC, many centuries after the earliest attestations of the Etruscans. It emerged as a consequence of Archaic-period contacts (around 500 BC) between the Etruscans and the Ionian Greeks settled in Anatolia, along with certain Anatolian populations.
It seems clear to me that some Greeks, and even some from Magna Graecia, were present in Etruria during certain periods. However, this presence does not imply that they played any significant role in the ethnogenesis of the Etruscans. On the contrary, the legendary account of Tarquinius Priscus illustrates quite the opposite. According to Roman tradition, he had a Greek father (Demaratus of Corinth) and an Etruscan mother, yet he was barred from holding public office in Tarquinia, Etruria, precisely because of his foreign paternal heritage. Frustrated by this exclusion, he relocated to Rome, where he eventually became king. This story underscores a broader point: the Etruscans appear to have restricted foreigners from accessing high political positions, even when individuals were wealthy, well-connected, or partially integrated through marriage.
On the other hand, the archaeogenetic data speaks for itself.
The overwhelming majority of individuals (80.33%) belong to the core Italy_Etruscan cluster, representing the local Etruscan genetic profile in Bologna, Tuscany, and Lazio. Among the non-local / non-core-Etruscan samples (the remaining ~19.67%), the Celtic-related group (Etruria_Ceu_Celt) stands out clearly as the largest foreign-related component, accounting for 15 samples (12.30% of the total dataset — and over 60% of all non-local individuals).
I don't have a strong opinion on this, but I think that U152 didn't "arrive" via a single event but through gradual Bronze Age expansions from the Alpine/Central European zone starting ~2200–1800 BCE, associated with Bell Beaker folk and steppe ancestry. It then became embedded in the gene pool of northern/central Italic peoples (including precursors to Etruscans and Romans), with later Celtic movements (e.g., Golasecca/La Tène in the north) reinforcing it.
Among Italy_Etruscans (98) or perhaps mislabeled as Celts there is another overlooked group composed of Illyrian/Balkan/Adriatic profiles.
The most obvious example are the outliers from Tarquinia, with peculiar inhumations in the sacred area. (the two males ITTQ19 and ITTQ10 belong to the clearly illyrian haplogroup J-Z1296 https://discover.familytreedna.com/y-dna/J-Z1296/ancient?connection=ITTQ10
There are others but are probably mixed with actual Etruscans.
Italy_Tarquinia_Etruscan.SG:ITTQ19.SG__BC_856__Cov_86.09%,0.120652,0.152329,0.029415,-0.019703,0.033545,-0.007809,-0.00141,0.000231,0.012476,0.033349,0.001461,0.010191,-0.009663,-0.008808,-0.019272,0.009944,0.016168,0.000253,0.006913,0.002626,-0.002496,0.00779,-0.002465,0.003976,-0.009221
Italy_Tarquinia_Etruscan.SG:ITTQ10.SG__BC_796__Cov_64.76%,0.127482,0.140143,0.035826,0.002261,0.037545,0.004741,0.00094,-0.001615,0.011453,0.022962,0.003085,0.016186,-0.016799,-0.011285,-0.011265,0.005304,0.021774,-0.004814,0.001383,-0.001626,-0.003993,0.006554,-0.005176,0.004458,-0.002874
Italy_Tarquinia_Etruscan.SG:ITTQ14.SG__BC_980__Cov_87.23%,0.12862,0.145221,0.02489,-0.008721,0.040931,-0.016455,-0.00047,-0.001154,0.013499,0.032256,0.00065,0.007194,-0.01115,-0.001239,-0.007193,0.006364,0.017602,0.004687,0.007416,0.006753,0.000749,0.001484,0.006655,-0.000602,-0.000958
Pax Augusta
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We've already discussed this on Eupedia. If we're talking about J2b, which I believe are all under J2b-L283, all of these fall within or closer to the Etruscan cluster rather to the the Celtic/CEU one. At least that's how I recall it.
ITTQ19, ITTQ10, and ITTQ14 are from Bagnasco et al. 2024, and Bagnasco herself is an archaeologist. Archaeologists are fully aware of the point you're making. Archaeology explains them as movements of 'warriors' within the Urnfield networks, from the Pannonian-Carpathian plain and the western Balkans toward Italy, crossing the border between Friuli-Venezia Giulia and present-day Slovenia, and eventually integrating into proto-Etruscan communities (it's possible they'll also turn up among the ancient Veneti). But these are movements that contribute to Etruscan ethnogenesis, since they occurred shortly before the Iron Age or in the very early Iron Age. They aren't Illyrians but, at most, ancestors of those later known as the Illyrians (if you read the archaeological literature on the Illyrians, scholars consider their formation process rather late compared to that of the Etruscans). Some archaeologists, such as Cristiano Iaia and Sabine Pabst, discuss these movements.
This is a quote from a recent Pabst's paper (Sabine Pabst, "Carpathian Influences on the Apennine Peninsula at the Transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age – A Diachronic Survey of the Social and Historical Background", in Maria Bernabò Brea (a cura di), Italia tra Mediterraneo ed Europa: mobilità, interazioni e scambi, collana Rivista di Scienze Preistoriche, LXX S1, Firenze, Istituto Italiano di Preistoria e Protostoria, 2020, pp. 379-387).
These Balkan influences are also present in other pre-Roman populations. They are very strong in the Picentes, so much so that they slightly shift their genetic position (a few points less WHG and more Steppe). They are present in the Etruscans, but I don't think they change their genetic position much, Etruscans likely preserved a more archaic, Bell-Beaker-like profile.
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But that fits perfectly with what I’m speculating: the Etruscans did not mix until some time after the beginning of Rome, 700–400 BC, at which point some of their elites started to intermarry, as in the example I gave.It is not my personal opinion; it is the consensus among prehistoric and protohistoric archaeologists and Etruscologists that there is no trace or evidence of a Mycenaean elite arriving in Etruria. The same applies to other ethnic groups sometimes proposed as having arrived in Etruria and contributed to the ethnogenesis of the Etruscans. Despite this scholarly agreement, the notion of an external elite migration continues to be revived periodically outside specialist circles, typically by Indo-Europeanists and Orientalists, as well as by pseudo-scholars.
The so-called "Oriental theory" is worth recalling here: it originated around 400 BC, many centuries after the earliest attestations of the Etruscans. It emerged as a consequence of Archaic-period contacts (around 500 BC) between the Etruscans and the Ionian Greeks settled in Anatolia, along with certain Anatolian populations.
It seems clear to me that some Greeks, and even some from Magna Graecia, were present in Etruria during certain periods. However, this presence does not imply that they played any significant role in the ethnogenesis of the Etruscans. On the contrary, the legendary account of Tarquinius Priscus illustrates quite the opposite. According to Roman tradition, he had a Greek father (Demaratus of Corinth) and an Etruscan mother, yet he was barred from holding public office in Tarquinia, Etruria, precisely because of his foreign paternal heritage. Frustrated by this exclusion, he relocated to Rome, where he eventually became king. This story underscores a broader point: the Etruscans appear to have restricted foreigners from accessing high political positions, even when individuals were wealthy, well-connected, or partially integrated through marriage.
On the other hand, the archaeogenetic data speaks for itself.
The overwhelming majority of individuals (80.33%) belong to the core Italy_Etruscan cluster, representing the local Etruscan genetic profile in Bologna, Tuscany, and Lazio. Among the non-local / non-core-Etruscan samples (the remaining ~19.67%), the Celtic-related group (Etruria_Ceu_Celt) stands out clearly as the largest foreign-related component, accounting for 15 samples (12.30% of the total dataset — and over 60% of all non-local individuals).
I don't have a strong opinion on this, but I think that U152 didn't "arrive" via a single event but through gradual Bronze Age expansions from the Alpine/Central European zone starting ~2200–1800 BCE, associated with Bell Beaker folk and steppe ancestry. It then became embedded in the gene pool of northern/central Italic peoples (including precursors to Etruscans and Romans), with later Celtic movements (e.g., Golasecca/La Tène in the north) reinforcing it.
A U152 with six great-great-grandparents U152 marries a mixed Etruscan-Mycenaean princess (T2, just to use an mtDNA with high frequencies in the area), daughter of a PF7562 of elite Mycenaean ancestry, and she tells her children in some strange language a bunch of nonsense about some guy called Heracles, now renamed Hercules.
There is no migration, just elites refreshing their blood with other elitist lineages.
Is the princess the Mycenaean invasion?
That’s why I specified that to model all the Italics you need 50% “Rassena”, which would represent pure Etruscans, 25% Italics mixed with Greeks, and in the South another 25% Greeks who would also have some native Italic ancestry.
If you add it all up, it gives 80% indigenous and explains the differences between North, Center and South.
(There would also be a missing 5–10% of “Illyrians” and “Celts”, but that’s a minority.)
That 80% native is equivalent to:
50% Anatolia_NF
30% “Yamnaya from outer space”
+ 20% southern hunter-gatherer / EEF (Aegeans – Sicilians), which always shows up in all studies.
Etruscan ethnogenesis could not have started after 2200 BC; the clades indicate they have been there at least since 2600 BC onwards, and Italy has the highest basal diversity of U152*. You don’t need aDNA to certify it: the 30 million Italic males alive today are more than enough.
You cannot find abundant evidence of something that has not yet finished being born.
All the U152>L2 I have seen from Central Europe were already too derived to be the origin of anything, and many samples even had clades that are extinct today.
We know this because U152* clades are not in Central Europe; Central Europe is dominated by L2>Z49, which mixed with the Corded Ware as happened in Únětice and went from 20% to 35% “steppe”.
That before the Bell Beakers there were no “steppe” genes is calculator bias in the papers, because Neolithic–Chalcolithic I2 and G2 already had 10–15% steppe (EHG) between 4000–3000 BC.
So one of the main pillars of the steppe theory is a fallacy the size of a piano.
Z36*, Z56*, L2* and PF6558* have their oldest clades in Italy.
The U152 component of Italy had been isolated for 2000 years when it started mixing with the “Mycenaeans” or “Greeks”.
The problem is that Harvard, and the whole group of northern hobbyists (DF13, U106 and Z49), cousins of R1a and high in EHG, are trying to narrate history when they themselves lived in prehistory until 700–1000 AD.
The southern ZZ11> cluster has a history that completely contradicts the entire steppe narrative.
Northern clades descend from southern ones. If you have 50,000 samples of English, Germans and Americans versus 6,000 samples of Italians, by raw numbers it looks like Central Europe are the fathers of Italians, but the trick is that despite having nine times fewer samples, Italians have more basal branches than them and high frequencies of rare haplogroups like L51*>PF7589 or P312*>DF99.
Therefore the route steppe → Central Europe → Southern Europe is impossible.
The Bell Beaker elites are the result of something that happened in the Atlantic/Mediterranean zone between 3500–2700 BC, not a stampede of steppe people in 2400 BC.
All that consensus was forged with the reasoning of the Knights of the Square Table of Monty Python:
Witches burn → they burn because they’re made of wood → wood floats and ducks also float → if a witch weighs the same as a duck → it is confirmed she is a witch.
The Yamnayas had horses and bronze → the Bell Beakers had horses and bronze → the Bell Beakers descend from the Yamnayas.
By the year 2026 it is clear that:
- 80–90% of the Yamnayas were Z2103> with clades now extinct.
- The Yamnayas took about 500 years to be wiped out by R1a.
- Yamnaya horses (ponies) never left the steppes, as shown by Y-chromosome refinement in horses.
- The Z2103>Z2109 who became Mycenaeans were parallel to the Yamnayas, not descendants of them.
- M269** is more likely to be Caucasian or Balkan than steppe; today the highest basal diversity of M343*, M269*, L23*, L51* and P310* is in the Balkans–Aegean–Central Mediterranean.
Pax Augusta
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These are just conjectures rooted in the usual fairy tales, which themselves draw on the classic deus ex machina archetype inherited from Greek stories of the later Iron Age. Those tales don't offer a historical or impartial perspective. They simply mirror the Greek mindset of the period. Because the stories exist, people keep trying to read some deeper meaning into them.
By the way, the notion of a Mycenaean elite among the Etruscans isn't something you'll find supported by any serious specialists today. The Orientalizing period has long been explained in other ways (intense Mediterranean trade networks, Greek colonization of southern Italy where Etruscans were active, widespread Phoenician and Punic activities across the central and western Mediterranean all the way to the Iberian Peninsula... not mass migration or elite takeover), and the same goes for how Greek myths spread and were adopted in Etruscan culture.
—BoNe—
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I think you’re still not fully grasping what I’m saying at a deeper level.
Deus is NOT ex machina, it is ZZ11.
ZZ11 is the ultimate reproductive predator in the entire history of the Mediterranean. This is not an opinion — currently, easily more than 180 million men descend from him.
Zeus is ZZ11* (Mycenaean)
Jupiter is ZZ11* (Roman)
Tinia is ZZ11* (Etruscan)
Habis is ZZ11* (Hispanic)
Three centuries later, resurrected Yisus is also ZZ11* (Christian).
What I am asserting is that the “Mycenaean Dorians” were ZZ11*.
Just like the Argeads and the Naqada. (Those samples had no contamination whatsoever.)
The tomb of Vergina is actually the closest thing we have to an elite Doric individual.
Both cases have been personally verified with manual BAM refinement and comparison of specific STRs, performed by multiple people arriving at the same conclusions.
The so-called U152> in those two cases is confusing because of now-extinct ZZ11* clades.
No one can claim direct descent from them.
The Vergina BAM stalls at L151*, and the STRs are incompatible with U106 or L21, only possible with ZZ11>.
Anyone who knows how to refine BAM files can verify this for themselves.
Contamination in the Y chromosome is not possible — only misclassifications caused by the ISSOG trees used. That’s why you need to certify with STRs which current populations are closest to know in which parts of the tree it “sticks.”
It’s also clear you haven’t read the full texts I write, because I’ve already talked about a “Mediterranean factor” rather than an “Eastern factor,” in which ZZ11> had far more influence than the Levant.
Around 20% of the Phoenicians analyzed were also ZZ11> (DF27> and U152>), and the gold craftsmanship of all these individuals is indistinguishable.
The Royal Mycenaeans of the Palace of Nestor had up to 30% Atlantic/Mediterranean ancestry.
If the Mycenaeans were what archaeologists and historians say they were, they shouldn’t have had 30% “Atlantic/Mediterranean,” which translates to “Southern Bell Beaker” (ZZ11).
Elite intermixing between PF7562*, PF7589*, P310*, and ZZ11* happened continuously from 3000 BC in the Mediterranean until the beginning of Rome.
If a U152* and a PF7562* had sat down to talk in 2000 BC, they would both perfectly know who M269* was (Dyeus Phter).
All of this is simply disruptive “darts” to make you understand that the Steppe migration narrative is completely unsustainable in 2026.
Until you get past that point, you cannot know the origin of all P312>*.
If you take the oldest empirically certified P312 sample*, EHUU002 from 2600 BC, and compare it with Samara L51 from 2800 BC* in STR regions, it becomes absolutely clear that these are divergent lineages more than 1000 years prior, not close relatives.
The Etruscans are direct descendants of the Bell Beakers, and they maintained virtually 100% genetic isolation for 2000 years until the beginning of Rome. The details I fill in with “Mycenaean elites” will only be fully understood when more precise refinement of current Y populations in that region is done, and more aDNA samples become available.
The “Mycenaeans” themselves were more a profession than an ethnicity.