Etruscan origins
[3] The third hypothesis was reported by Livy and Pliny the Elder, and puts the Etruscans in the context of the Rhaetian people to the north and other populations living in the Alps.
[21] Some scholars believe the Lemnian language might have arrived in the Aegean Sea from West during the Late Bronze Age, when Mycenaean rulers recruited groups of mercenaries from Sicily, Sardinia and various parts of the Italian peninsula.
[22] Other scholars have concluded that the Lemnian inscriptions might be due to an Etruscan commercial settlement on the island that took place before 700 BC, not related to the Sea Peoples.
P. Mallory compares the Etruscans to other remnant non Indo-European central Mediterranean populations, such as the Basques of the Iberian Peninsula and southern France, who absorbed the art styles and alphabet of their Greek neighbors.
For instance, the historian, Mario Torelli agreed with Dionysius’s claims and believed that the Etruscans inherited elements of their culture from other Italic peoples.
Romulus and Remus, appearing in Roman mythology as the traditional founders of Rome, were of Eastern origin: their grandfather Numitor and his brother Amulius were alleged to be descendants of fugitives from Troy.
They no longer called themselves Lydians, but Tyrrhenians, after the name of the king's son who had led them there.Since ancient times, doubts have been raised about the accuracy of Herodotus' claims.
Briquel demonstrated that "the story of an exodus from Lydia to Italy was a deliberate political fabrication created in the Hellenized milieu of the court at Sardis in the early 6th century BC.
And I do not believe, either, that the Tyrrhenians were a colony of the Lydians; for they do not use the same language as the latter, nor can it be alleged that, though they no longer speak a similar tongue, they still retain some other indications of their mother country.
Larissa Bonfante argues that the traditional concept of origin that classical Greek writers subscribed to "had to be explained as the result of a migration, under the leadership of a mythical founding hero".
Beekes argues that these ancient writers, especially Herodotus, found the famine in Lydia an obvious connection to the migration to Etruria, rather than a debatable area of discussion.
Consequentially Perkins concludes that ancient "standards of historical criticism were not ours" in which "a great deal of it is seen through a veil of interpretation, misunderstanding, and at times, plain invention".
This agenda is problematic when viewing his 'heroic' understanding of Etruscan origins, because Herodotus' stories tend to contribute to the national narrative rather than an intended historical record.
[59] In the 1950s, Professor Pallottino resurrected the initial autochthonous theory and by doing so contended with traditional scholarship that has "remained fixated on the idea that the origins of the Italic people were to be found in the effects of immigration from outside".
Other historical methodologies, such as linguistics, archaeology and DNA research, have attempted to clarify this distinction and highlight the extent of foreign influence in Etruscan culture.
Archaeology has a prominent role in revealing aspects of Etruscan daily life and the social structure of such a sophisticated civilization, thus exposing foreign influences.
The well preserved frescoes of the funerary chambers found in the necropolis of Monterozzi, situated on a ridge southeast of the ancient city of Tarquinia, are vital to the reconstruction of Etruscan culture.
Material evidence for the high social status of Etruscan women can be found on the frescoes in the Tomb of the Leopards, dating to the 5th century BC.
[69] The most marked and radical change that has been archaeologically attested in the area is the adoption, starting in about the 12th century BC, of the funeral rite of incineration in terracotta urns, which is a Continental European practice, derived from the Urnfield culture; there is nothing about it that suggests an ethnic contribution from Asia Minor or the Near East.
[69] One of the most common mistakes for a long time, even among some scholars of the past, has been to associate the later Orientalizing period of Etruscan civilization, due, as has been amply demonstrated by archeologists, to contacts with the Greeks and the Eastern Mediterranean and not mass migrations, with the question of their origins.
This is evidence that the Etruscan civilization, which emerged around 900 BC, was built by people whose ancestors had inhabited that region for at least the previous 200 years,[73] as has also been confirmed by anthropological and genetic studies.
The first of these attested contacts relate to the Greek colonies in Southern Italy and the Nuragics and Sardo-Punics in Sardinia, and the consequent orientalizing period.
[81] In his book A Short History of Humanity published in 2021, German geneticist Johannes Krause, co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Jena, concludes that it is likely that the Etruscan language (as well as Basque, Paleo-Sardinian and Minoan) "developed on the continent in the course of the Neolithic Revolution".
[83] A 2021 study by the Max Planck Institute, the Universities of Tübingen, Florence, and Harvard, published in the journal Science Advances and focused entirely on the question of the origins of the Etruscans, analyzed the Y-chromosome, mitochondrial DNA, and autosomal DNA of 82 ancient samples from Etruria (Tuscany and Latium) and southern Italy (Basilicata) spanning from 800 BC to 1000 AD, including 48 Iron Age individuals.
Regarding mitochondrial DNA haplogroups, the most prevalent was largely H, followed by J and T. Uniparental marker data and autosomal DNA data from samples of Iron Age Etruscan individuals suggest that Etruria received migrations with a large ancestral Steppe component during the 2nd millennium BC, related to the spread of Indo-European languages, starting with the Bell Beaker culture, and that these migrations merged with populations of the oldest pre-Indo-European layer present since at least the Neolithic period, but it was the latter's language that survived, a situation similar to what happened in the Basque region of northern Spain.
[85] Their DNA was a mixture of two-thirds Copper Age ancestry (EEF + WHG; Etruscans ~66–72%, Latins ~62–75%) and one-third Steppe-related ancestry (Etruscans ~27–33%, Latins ~24–37%) (with the EEF component mainly deriving from Neolithic-era migrants to Europe from Anatolia and the WHG being local Western European hunter-gatherers, with both components, along with that from the steppe, being found in virtually all European populations).
The admixture model showed that they were 84-92% Italy Bell Beaker and 8-26% additional Yamnaya Samara (Steppe-related) ancestry, but with one individual being more similar to Iron Age populations from Scandinavia, and north-west Europe.
[88] This study found that the ancient DNA extracted from the Etruscan remains had some affinities with modern European populations including Germans, English people from Cornwall, and Tuscans in Italy.
[91] Achilli et al. (2007) found in a modern sample of 86 individuals from Murlo, a small town in southern Tuscany, an unusually high frequency (17.5%) of supposed Near Eastern mtDNA haplogroups, while other Tuscan populations do not show the same striking feature.
[99] In 2019, in a Stanford study published in Science, two ancient samples from the Neolithic settlement of Ripabianca di Monterado in the province of Ancona, in the Marche region of Italy, were found to be Y-DNA J-L26 and J-M304.
