Tuscany had a middle age admixture event?

[moore2moore]

Generally speaking, the world is fascinated by finding exotic admixture in Italians. And Italy is "doomed" by having 2500+ years of written history. Same with the Jews. Every invading king who so much took a bathroom break in the lands with extensive written history is documented. So people now can obsess about it, LOL.

Italians are a diverse people, but their history and one-off matches with other populations is no different from Germany, Poland, or France. Many people passed through many parts of Europe many times. The only lands where this is perhaps less true is: Sardinia, Lappland (extreme N. Finland) and Ireland.

If you want to read a history lecturer's musings on Etruscan theories, FWIW, I suggest:

http://snplogic.blogspot.com/2015/10/toward-new-understanding-of-etruscan.html

http://snplogic.blogspot.com/2014/02/scholars-finally-apply-some-logic-not.html

and if you want to read a critique of some of the often unwitting assumptions built into these discussions, read:

http://snplogic.blogspot.com/2015/10/berkeleys-center-for-study-of-ancient.html

 

[moore2moore]

Anyone's theory on an exotic origin of the Etruscans evaporates when you visit Tuscany.

The old Etruscan cities were the highest points in the land, on impossible to penetrate hills, overlooking incredible plains, the most fertile and beautiful in Italy.

The notion from Herodotus:

-that a weak and starving people from central Anatolia could pass through hostile neighboring territory
-then build the thousands of ships necessary to transport hundreds of thousands of people
-then sail NOT to close-by lands like Greece or Albania, but to faraway Italy,
-passing through Scylla and Charibdis, all these ships
-to land on the opposite end of Italy, and significantly north
-then storm by force the well-established, native Villanovan settlements
-on these incredible hillsides where military science says would take an invading force outnumbering the locals by 8 to 1
-and leave no trace of fire, destruction, etc.

is so fantastical, that I just can't believe anyone holds it anymore.

I don't like questioning people's motives, but I have found that people who might have been exposed to too much Jersey Shore find it hard to believe, subconsciously, that the Italian people could have created as much as the Tuscans have (banking, politics, art, science). Perhaps these unconscious prejudices cause people to look for exotic influences in areas where Italians have been notable.

Any one-off odd haplogroups in Tuscany can likely be explained by the fact that it is a region that is extensively tested, close to a city, Rome, where you had an occasional outlier.

The Foundation Myths of Roman-era Italians uniformly look east: the "upstarts" (Etruscans, Romans, Samnites) had to try to convince the more-established Greeks that they, too, had ties to old civilizations in the East. That's why Julius Caesar and Augustus paid poets to make up the ties with Troy. That's why some told tales trying to link Romans to Greeks, and Etruscans to other civilizations.

I've also wondered if the Etruscans, as a literate society that started in about 1000 B.C., simply bore some memory of the pre-ethnic, pre-historic migrations of Early European Farmers to Europe. In other words, as one of the oldest literate societies, might they have simply preserved better the notion of "we all came from the east at some point?" and this was repeated by the one source, Herodotus (who incidentally conflicts with the other sources)?