What do you think about what they are saying on Anthrogenica that the Romans, the Etruscans and all the Italic populations were quite similar to the Hallstatt Celts, the Celtiberians and some Bell Beakers and that modern Italians were formed thanks to the contribution of Levantine migrants?
I personally do not know whether to believe that it is true or not.
I'd say how the hell could they possibly know or even reasonably "guess" without some more ancient samples?
That bunch have been absolutely sure, insisting for years (Agamemnon, Sikeliot, all the latter's socks, etc.) that the Etruscans were recent transplants from the Aegean, i.e. as in first millennium BC. I mean just look at all those dark Minoan looking people on the wall paintings! And the language! No Indo-European descended group would "ever" adopt a language from another group (ignoring, of course, the Basques). If the hints from the papers about ancient DNA are correct, they were completely and utterly WRONG.
So, why would they necessarily be correct about this?
First of all, we still don't have the ancient Etruscan and Roman samples so we can't compare them to the Hallstatt samples or the ancient Iberian samples or Beaker samples.
Plus, I don't know why any similarity to populations with steppe ancestry has to rely on Hallstatt, or specifically the Beakers for that matter. The Parma Beakers were very heterogeneous. One had steppe ancestry, one or two had almost none. How do we know how deeply that ancestry spread? That was a rhetorical question. We don't.
Then there is Polada to consider, and the Terramare. I'm currently reading a very recently published book called Northern Italy in the Roman World. After the collapse of the Terramare, the area south of the Po in Emilia was de-populated but not empty, and there's also archaeological evidence of movement into the hills of the Apennines. Trade routes through the Apennines with "Etruria" was long standing, so there could have been movement in that direction. As for the areas north of the Po, the author provides evidence that the settlements around the old Polada areas still existed.
Then, of course, we get to Frantesina. The "elite" burial, from the leaks, is someone "different" from the locals (although we don't know what either were really like yet), but we do know that this was a center with good links to the Baltics, and imported and then worked and traded lots of amber. Cremation also entered Italy through the northeast. When we get their samples, we'll know if this was a later migration of more steppe admixed people.
So, we have a lot of possibilities.
We also, by the way, don't really know what all the inhabitants of Northern Italy were like before the days of the Empire. There are the Celtic migrations to consider. One thing I've always emphasized and which this book emphasizes is that there not only is, but was, a lot of substructure in northern Italy, more than in southern Italy. Then there is Toscana, which is not northern, not southern, but not really "center" either.
As for this mass Levantine migration theory, are they really still peddling it? Even after seeing PCAs where people from the Greek Islands plot closer to the east than the Sicilians? If someone ever shows me archaeological and genetic proof of a mass migration from the Levant to Italy rather than the migration of Levant admixed Bronze Age populations, I would be happy to accept it. However, I tend to doubt that would happen. There would have had to have been an even larger "Levantine" mass migration to the Aegean, and the recent paper on Crete, as well as the prior one on the Peloponnese makes that unlikely.
Basically, I like and have always like to work by putting together the facts, all the facts, not just the ones I prefer, and then trying to deduce some logical speculations. It's both the way my mind works and the way I was trained.
Some people aren't very logically minded in the first place, and even if they are, tend to start with the hypothesis they prefer, for whatever personal or ideological reasons, and then selectively choose facts to support it.
It also amazes me how many times people happily say the same things thousands of times. It's like a compulsion.
Just saw the comment about Polako. He was saying precisely that for years. Now, with continued exposure of his agenda, he modifies his words so it's not quite so obvious.
How people can be so naive about him is beyond me given his documented history.