Here are some gems of generalization from the paper:
"however, almost all the studies agree that there is a proportion of their mtDNA pool that could be traced to somewhere in the Middle East, thus testifying to an ancient connection between both regions."
I have news for these guys: so does the mtDna of 80% of Europeans.
Then they resurrect this old chestnut:
both humans and cattle reached Etruria from the Eastern Mediterranean area by sea. Hence the Eastern origin of Etruscans, first claimed by the classic historians Herodotus and Thucydides, receives strong independent support”
Yes, plants, cattle, sheep, goats, and the knowledge of what to do with them all came from the eastern Mediterranean. That doesn't prove that a specific breed came in 800 BC!
As to ancient Etruscan mtDna see:
Silvia Ghirotto et al 2013
http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0055519
See the discussion at the Dienekes site:
http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2013/02/etruscan-mtdna-origins-ghirotto-et-al.html
As a knowledgeable poster explained, the Etruscan mtDna in this large sample is a mixture of U5 and J. Looks like admixture betwee Neolithic and Mesolithic peoples to me...
Also, these guys should know by now that without resolution of mtDna on a very detailed subclade level, and some agreement on mutation rates, it's impossible to use mtDna to track migration flows precisely.
As for the Armenian connection...
Of course there's more "Caucasus" like ancestry in Tuscans than in northern Italians, but the question is, when did this Caucasus like ancestry arrive in Europe? I'll buy Metal Ages...Oetzi had a little bit already, but this doesn't prove that a specific migration in 800 BC brought it!
Also, there's more in southern Italians yet, and more in Greeks. There's the same amount in Balkan people. Were they all settled in the first millennium BC by people from Anatolia?
Take a look at the "Caucasus" proportion in these groups as per the Dienekes K-12b analysis"
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet...EY4Y3lTUVBaaFp0bC1zZlBDcTZEYlE&hl=en_US#gid=0
Northern Italians: 22.9
Romanians: 28.4
Tuscans: 30.5
Bulgarians: 30.7
Southern Italians/Sicilians: 36.5
Greeks: 37.4
Do I think it's possible that there was a late movement from Anatolia (first millenium BC) into Central Italy? Yes, I do; it's just that neither mtDNA, ancient or modern, is going to prove it, and especially not at the level of resolution which currently exists. A comparision of the full genomes of modern Tuscans to other modern populations doesn't prove it either. Who says this isn't Neolithic era? We need a high quality Etruscan genome and the genome of prior inhabitants from the same area.
I do think that there's generally something to be said for an additional Bronze Age gene flow (and later) into Italy not only from the north, but also from the south east.
I saw a speculation on Anthrogenica this morning about the proto-Indo-Europeans possibly carrying a lot of "Anatolian" like or "Near Eastern" like ancestry. (The mtDna of the Yamnaya people looks totally "Neolithic" from the evidence of that thesis. Perhaps the full genomes will show something different, but then that would mean that they left
all their own women at home, or they didn't like them very much.)
It would certainly be interesting if Dienekes was onto something back in the day when he speculated that the proto-Indo-Europeans had their origin in the Armenian Highlands. Perhaps they remained more "Anatolian" like or Caucasus like in the southern regions, even if in the more northern areas they were different.