4th Century BC Privileged Social Class Roman Skeletons to undergo DNA Testing

when Rome was founded, not all people in the area were Italic

I should find the data somewhere, but I think Rome in the 4th century BC had already begun its great demographic expansion.

But one thing is the inhabitants of Rome, one thing is the Latins. If we want to know who the Latins really were and came from, we should analyze bones from the Iron Age. But the majority of proto-Latins during the Iron age practiced, I believe, the cremation (although there are interesting exceptions in the Latin world). We have a similar problem with all the protohistoric cultures that settled in Italy and came from the Urnfield culture.


I would like to know if Appenninic culture was already influenced by Central Europe/Steppe mix, so already Italic.

But 3000 BC is still interesting beacuse it could confirm the movements of prospectors from the East (CHG/EEF mix ? J2?). According to Puglisi they were the ancestors of the Italics but i don't know if it's still reliable (1959)

Excellent question, Cato.

Salvatore M. Puglisi was a very good scholar, but his most important scientific production dates back to 50/60 years ago.

The Apennine culture is usually divided into two phases: the proto-Apennine and the sub-Apennine. For most of its life, the most common practice in the Apennine culture is the inhumation/burial. But in the sub-Apennine there is an increasing number of examples of cremation. The arrival of the incineration marks the beginning of the arrival of the first proto-Villanovans or contacts with Terramare? If I remember correctly, these examples of incineration in the sub-Apennine were found between Romagna and Umbria, in what then became the territory of the Umbrians. But there are also examples south of Rome and in other places. Maybe I remember badly, and the incineration in the sub-Apennine phase is spread everywhere, and has nothing to do with the Proto-Villanovans. Cremation in Italy spreads mostly from the north, from the Urnfield culture, as it is testified by the burials of the Proto-Villanovan, but the beginning of its diffusion is earlier: Terramare, Polada ...

At this point the original question is: who are the Italics?

If we follow the linguistic division, there are two distinct Italic linguistic families: on the one hand the Latins, who are usually grouped together with the Faliscans, and sometimes with Veneti and Siculi. The other group is made up of all the Osco-Umbrian languages. Does this division imply that they belong to two distinct migrations? The separation of these two families took place outside or inside Italy?

This is even more complicated, because these languages ​​influenced each other, and of course we have more recent inscriptions and less archaic inscriptions. And so the linguistic division is really accurate and also follows an ethnic division? Or is something accurate and something not?
 
Agree.
And one should also take note that the etruscans expanded far southwards before Rome even had started to expand. They actually expanded further south than Rome is located.
So by the time Rome started its expansion, it was inevitable not to assimilate some etruscans into the latin speaking communities, because etruscan communities would have been present everywhere in the area.

Beside that, when the romanization of etruria proper started, the etruscans were actually pretty good at rising to the top. For example Gaius Maecenas (Augustus closest friend and adviser) was etruscan. And Augustus actually left him in charge of Italy for a while(which shows how prominent Gaius was). I have even read in a book that there is a chance that Augustus mother was etruscan too, althoug its just from the top of my head, i could be thinking of another emperor.

So it seems the etruscan noble famlies actually just changed their language to latin and became noble romans instead. There a tomb which paints the perfect picture about this. I think its the tomb of the anina family(if i remember correctly). They have their inscriptions in etruscan in the beginning, but later on as more family members got buried and at the same time romanization was happening, suddenly the names start to be written in latin, although its still the same family.
This points towards that the family never lost their high status(being able to afford huge tombs and so on), but they just changed their language to latin.

People in Italy has mixed extensively throughout time. So IMO we should not expect big differences between IE and non IE italics when we get ancient DNA. At least not after 1000BC. But probably even earlier too.

Not that it matters to your wider point, but I'm not aware of any putative Etruscan ancestry in Augustus' mother. His mother was Atia, the niece of Julius Caesar (his sister's daughter), and his father was Gaius Octavius, a descendant of an equestrian branch of the gens Octavia. They were a very wealthy family, with a military tribune during the Punic Wars, municipal magistrates, etc. but plebian, not patrician, and not senatorial. I don't recall anything about them being of Etruscan descent, or Julius' brother in law, although it's certainly possible.

The Juli were among the most ancient of the patrician gens, and of Alban origin, coming to Rome after the destruction of Alba Longa during the 7th century. Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome, supposedly also came from Alba Longa.

Perhaps you were thinking of the Claudians? One scholar, back in 1988 speculated that the patrician Claudi were originally of Etruscan origin. I don't remember that being based on any actual data, and it seemed to me he believed it largely because of Claudius' obsession with and extensive knowledge of the Etruscans. He was probably the last person who could still read and write it, I think. Anyway, it is true that his first wife, whom he detested, by the way, Urgulania, was of noble Etruscan descent.


The gens Claudia itself, however, one of the most celebrated, and perhaps the haughtiest and most arrogant of the highest level of patrician gens in Rome, was actually of Sabine origin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claudia_(gens)

As you said, the Etruscans seem to have been rather seamlessly incorporated into Roman society, and some reverence was sometimes paid to their culture, particularly, perhaps, in the area of religion. At least one reputable scholar believes that although he was a philhellene, building Rome to a basically Greek model, when it came time to choose his final resting place, his mausoleum. Augustus modeled it after Etruscan tumuli.

This is an excerpt of a speech the scholar gave:
https://www.coursera.org/learn/roma...scan-antecedents-of-the-mausoleum-of-augustus

However, although the Etruscans were one of the three streams of ancestry which went into creating the "Romans", along with the Latins and the Sabines, some scholars believe there was always some "ethnic" disparagement of them, with popular opinion holding that they were too decadent, too effeminate (like the Greeks), too wealthy, villainous, not like the simple, virtuous, Romans. :) So, supposedly, "[FONT=&quot]Relatively few securely Etruscan families made their way into the senate before the close of the third century, with a few additional families joining the [/FONT]domi nobiles before the Social War.".
http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2008/2008-04-25.htmlIt depends on which scholar you follow ultimately. If you follow these scholars, it might go some way toward explaining why the Etruscans, from ruling over the Romans, and being a force in the Mediterranean World, gave up their language and specific "ethnic" identity. Perhaps they wanted to back the winning horse. On the other hand, Claudius and Augustus certainly held them in high regard, and for good reason. Whether they wanted to acknowledge it or not, Latin Rome owed much of what it was to the Etruscans.
 
I should find the data somewhere, but I think Rome in the 4th century BC had already begun its great demographic expansion.

But one thing is the inhabitants of Rome, one thing is the Latins. If we want to know who the Latins really were and came from, we should analyze bones from the Iron Age. But the majority of proto-Latins during the Iron age practiced, I believe, the cremation (although there are interesting exceptions in the Latin world). We have a similar problem with all the protohistoric cultures that settled in Italy and came from the Urnfield culture.




Excellent question, Cato.

Salvatore M. Puglisi was a very good scholar, but his most important scientific production dates back to 50/60 years ago.

The Apennine culture is usually divided into two phases: the proto-Apennine and the sub-Apennine. For most of its life, the most common practice in the Apennine culture is the inhumation/burial. But in the sub-Apennine there is an increasing number of examples of cremation. The arrival of the incineration marks the beginning of the arrival of the first proto-Villanovans or contacts with Terramare? If I remember correctly, these examples of incineration in the sub-Apennine were found between Romagna and Umbria, in what then became the territory of the Umbrians. But there are also examples south of Rome and in other places. Maybe I remember badly, and the incineration in the sub-Apennine phase is spread everywhere, and has nothing to do with the Proto-Villanovans. Cremation in Italy spreads mostly from the north, from the Urnfield culture, as it is testified by the burials of the Proto-Villanovan, but the beginning of its diffusion is earlier: Terramare, Polada ...

At this point the original question is: who are the Italics?

If we follow the linguistic division, there are two distinct Italic linguistic families: on the one hand the Latins, who are usually grouped together with the Faliscans, and sometimes with Veneti and Siculi. The other group is made up of all the Osco-Umbrian languages. Does this division imply that they belong to two distinct migrations? The separation of these two families took place outside or inside Italy?

This is even more complicated, because these languages ​​influenced each other, and of course we have more recent inscriptions and less archaic inscriptions. And so the linguistic division is really accurate and also follows an ethnic division? Or is something accurate and something not?
It seems that cremation spread in Central Italy and in Southern Italy (isolate cases) after the collapse of the terramare, part of the population left the Po Valley and settled south. According to Puglisi however they weren't dominators but simple immigrants (farmers), the shepherds of the Appenninic culture mantained their leadership even after their arrival.

The Sub Appenninic facies succeded the Classic Appenninic in the recent bronze age (after 1300 BC) and it's spread was a North to South movement (we know that Sub Appenninic warriors invaded South Italy, see that video about the Sea Peoples and Italy), if i remember correctly cremation is absent or rare but it show already some influences from North Italy in ceramics and metallurgy

"Con il Bronzo Recente (XIII e parte del XII sec.; rappresenta, nell'ambito dello sviluppo della civiltà a., il momento a un tempo di massima espansione geografica, e di massima unitarietà culturale), alla facies appenninica propriamente detta segue la facies subappenninica, caratterizzata, per quanto riguarda la ceramica - ora quasi costantemente inornata - dalla molteplice e spesso fantasiosa elaborazione plastica delle anse (cornute, cilindrorette, ornitomorfe, ecc.), e, per ciò che concerne la metallurgia (ma anche parecchie altre attività produttive, come la lavorazione di oggetti in osso e corno), da una koinè che la accomuna per un verso con le facies padane e transalpine, per l'altro, in qualche misura, con la stessa civiltà micenea".

After a while we have the Protovillanovan facies, it's spread was again a North->South movement.

Cremation in North east Italy is older than most Central Europe, it appeared in the Middle Bronze Age (from Hungary?), ex. Olmo di Nogara. In Apulia there are rare examples of cremation burials of the Appenninic culture (Canosa? i don't remember).

My guess is that Italic branch entered the peninsula in the 2500-1500 BC time frame. Central Italy received immigration from the North with Bell Beaker and later Polada influences. Appenninic started in 1800 BC circa and i'm starting to believe that it was Italic already. Later Terramare waves introduced innovation and maybe Latin-Faliscan? Cremation among Osco Umbrians is rare and short lived.

Regarding Urnfields the idea that small tribes from Germany or Austria invaded and conquered all the peninsula like Gimbutas wrote in 1965 is, as Mallory said in 1989 (in search of the Indoeuropeans), not convincing. Real Urnfields are those of Scamozzina-Canegrate.

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Sub Appenninic warriors, are they responsible for U152 s28 in the South?
 
when Rome was founded, not all people in the area were Italic
How long does a people need to be in an area to be classified as part of that area , etruscans where already more than 300 years in italy..........when the Veneti arrived and mixed with the indigenous Euganei , archeolology states the year was circa 1150BC
https://journals.openedition.org/mefra/2503
...............the ligurians where in NW italy and southern frnace up to the rhone river in the bronze age...........the sabines, sabellic where in south central italy at the same time as the etruscans
Rome did not make the italic people
 
So between a paper on these new remains, a paper on the Neolithic remains, and de Angelis' paper on Imperial Rome, when you have combined them with older papers we should know know enough Italy's population history from Rome onward.
 
Sub Appenninic warriors, are they responsible for U152 s28 in the South?
My guess, them and/or the Protovillanovans.

They came from Romagna/Marche according to: https://youtu.be/skRuzlCA8Yo (14:40)

They sieged and burned Roca Vecchia in Apulia, marched toward Calabria and founded a new village in Lipari (Ausonio I)..fascinating. Their material culture is already clearly influenced by that of the Terramare and distinct from Classic Appenninic.

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So between a paper on these new remains, a paper on the Neolithic remains, and de Angelis' paper on Imperial Rome, when you have combined them with older papers we should know know enough Italy's population history from Rome onward.

Why would you think that? What about southern Italy as just one example? What were the Neolithic like people there like? How did it change in the Bronze Age after migration from both the north and the the east, probably also by way of Greece, or perhaps the Aegean islands? How were the southern Italians of that time different pre and post Greek migration of the first millennium BC, pre and post the Byzantine Era, or the Moorish invasions for Sicily?

Turning to the North, how much change did the people from the Central Europe make, after all, we only have two or is it three Bell Beakers samples, and only from Parma if I remember correctly. How about the Celtic migrations of the first millennium BC?

As for this paper on "Imperial Rome", if it's a lot of remains of slaves or the lowest rung of society in the cities, I'm not convinced those people had a big impact on the total genome. It all depends on the quality of the paper too. I wish one of the big three labs was doing it.
 
De Angelis' work has been solid enough considering the technology he's had access to and attitude towards the subject in EU countries (namely from not overly depending on mtDNA). His paper's current information doesn't look like it won't properly seperate the foreigners from Romans. And there's no reliable evidence that the "lowest rung" who aren't foreigners would be ancestrally different from their patrician rulers in a way that matters overall.
 
Sub Appenninic warriors, are they responsible for U152 s28 in the South?

U152 s28 carriers migrated from Central Europe.

1wBdYm5.jpg
 
Yes but in Southern Italy U152 likely arrived in the MBA-LBA. No significant Beaker settlements there, except in W.Sicily

IMO it became common in N.Italy (and maybe C.Italy) since the Beaker/Polada period, then spread south slowly.

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The tomb was discovered in the Case Rosse area west of the center of Rome by an earthmover working to extend an aqueduct about 6 feet underground. Inside lay the undisturbed remains of four people, including a man in his 30s, a man in his 50s, a man between the age of 35 to 45, and a woman of undetermined age.

...

The discovery also unearthed an assortment of jugs and dishes, a bronze coin, along with dishes of chicken, rabbit and another animal believed to be a lamb or goat, likely offerings to sustain them in the afterlife.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/construction-workers-find-rare-intact-tomb-rome-180969247/

Here's a little more information about the grave goods, and the occupants.
 
Here's a little more information about the grave goods, and the occupants.

Based on some Italian articles, it's east of Rome, outside Rome, near Via Tiburtina, the ancient Roman road leading east-northeast from Rome to Tivoli (Latin Tibur), and then to Pescara (Latin Aternum) in Abruzzo.

This was definitely the start of the territories of ancient Sabines and Aequians.

BeXbwhB.png
 
Based on some Italian articles, it's east of Rome, outside Rome, near Via Tiburtina, the ancient Roman road leading east-northeast from Rome to Tivoli (Latin Tibur), and then to Pescara (Latin Aternum) in Abruzzo.

This was definitely the start of the territories of ancient Sabines and Aequians.

BeXbwhB.png

Well, some Roman patrician gentes were Sabine like the Claudii, Valerii and possibly others like the Fabii.

So we may still learn something about the earliest Romans from these finds.
 
I've stated this before, but whenever I see Roman busts, I don't see any similarity between the large immigrant communities of Italians in places like Canada and USA. I'm not sure why this is, perhaps because those immigrants came largely from the south of Italy.

The bust Angela posted looks more like a modern French male, and to a lesser extent a English male (of the non-Nordic variety).
 
I've stated this before, but whenever I see Roman busts, I don't see any similarity between the large immigrant communities of Italians in places like Canada and USA. I'm not sure why this is, perhaps because those immigrants came largely from the south of Italy.

The bust Angela posted looks more like a modern French male, and to a lesser extent a English male (of the non-Nordic variety).

Excuse me AARON, but your "opinion" has absolutely nothing to do with the article.
 
I've stated this before, but whenever I see Roman busts, I don't see any similarity between the large immigrant communities of Italians in places like Canada and USA. I'm not sure why this is, perhaps because those immigrants came largely from the south of Italy.

The bust Angela posted looks more like a modern French male, and to a lesser extent a English male (of the non-Nordic variety).

Really? For me it's exactly the opposite experience: every time I see a Roman bust, I think My God, these people are exactly the same as the Italian tourists in my city (Italians and Portuguese are the most numerous foreign tourists here) and a lot of Italian-Brazilians! I swear I have seen some Italians who look identical to some of those busts. Maybe that may have something to do with subjective impressions, or maybe with the point of origin of the immigrants (and tourists) we're seeing.

Most immigrants from Italy (and there are a whole 30 million descendants of them now in Brazil) came here, mainly in the period 1870-1930, from the North & Central Italy, not from the South. But since then many of them have mixed extensively with the descendants of Portuguese and Spaniards, so they probably became a bit more "southern-shifted" than unadmixed Northern Italians.
 

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