Well, I think you misunderstood my remark. Personally, I don't think that DNA is always specific enough to identify an ethnicity, especially those of Northern Europe. What I meant to say is that they cultural were probably western germanic, because they were surrounded by western germanic cultures when they lived in the lower Elbe region.
In most cases, except this actual historical scenario culminating in massive U-152 presence in "LOMBARDY", i would agree with you. In this case though, we have a known final settlement of this population, and it contains a y-dna anomaly within its settlement boundaries.
Other earlier or later population movements theoretically could be responsible for this U-152 elevated presence, but they are not supported in the historical record, and 'we have what we have', to investigate. Some tooth pulp from a few Lombardic attributable cultural burials in the Po Valley gives the answers.. its not that difficult to substantiate.
The majority of tribal period elbe-germanic lands and virtually all eastern germanic lands are completely repopulated today with Slavic or some other later arriving population, so even if we accept for the moment that references to Irmiones or Hermiones (elbe-ic germanic) by Pliny related to parts of later Lombardic tribal populations (very tenuous), it really does not get anyone any closer to any sort of genetic linkage, because these are all still destroyed, scattered populations surviving portions of which were subsumed into other groups father westward.
The 'Lombards' who eventually break free of the Huns in the east and take over northern italy are not in any accurate sense western germanic because they incorporate settlements of Goths who likely compose some part of their genetic component by the point they are settled in former gothic provinces in North Italy, and they had lived well into eastern europe for at a minimum several generations before migrating west.
In this period, every germanic population is fleeing west from asiatics to the safety of german-controlled lands, so it really takes some explanation as to why the Lombards would move into a area well-known to be plagued by endemic Hunnic violence to which the Lombards themselves fell victim, if they were not already in their home region.
Attempting to connect tenuous tribal affiliations and naming conventions based off of Roman interpretations by Historians who had themselves never even been to any of these places or tribal confederations is.. tenuous at best.
Christiaan said:
By the way you should mention before they moved to the Carpathian Mountains (6th century AD) they lived in the lower Elbe region for some centuries while they left the Carpathians after only 100 years(~3/4 generations) or so. The question is did they change that much in that period culturally? They few remnants of that language do not reflect this shift to an eastern germanic language.
In addition the archaeological evidence in the carpatian mountains show that they were elbgermanic people.
They would have been effectively slaves to a degree during this time, or at best a slave-military force.
We really do not have any Lombardic "language" to dissect, nor any spoken voice.
We have only names.. The fact that some names are spelled by a chronicler "Aribert" instead of "Aripert" is the totality of what we actually have to make the case for Lombardic german being western-germanic as opposed to eastern or nothern germanic.
That would be like asserting that should I name my son Pierre or Juan, that makes them affilated with the entire cultural continuity of a language sub-group from which those names derived.
Naming conventions can be affected by the scribe, who would be one of the very few literate persons at that time, (most people including rulers could not themselves read or write, so the person hired to do this need not himself be of the same Lombardic ancestry) and may come himself from a western germanic background.
Naming conventions and fads can also be adopted from those who now surround you as the more recent tribal immigrants, and adopted in the same way that Vulgar Latin became the lingua franca of the germanic Lombards in short order, since it is more flexible and traditional amongst literate scribes in their settlement areas who cannot write or read in Runic script.
As to the language family assignment all we can say is that no one has made a formal determination for Lombardic germans family group because we do not have a body of writing to dissect except in Latin. The scribe writing Lombardic names in Latin may be a local german from a western tribal population or a local italian, and both of these are likely to have more formally educated scribes than the Lombards coming out of the Carpathians.