For nearly 2,400 years since their civilization first appeared on historical accounts and records, the mystery of the Etruscans has long been a steady one. These mysterious peoples inhabited what is now Italy long before any Romans ever showed up. In fact, it was likely the Etruscans which imparted upon the Romans their skills in metalworking, along with religious rituals and sport like gladiator combat—cultural landmarks seemingly synonymous with Roman civilization today.
Now, new research published in the journal Science Advances attempts to set things in stone, and use the science of genomic sequencing to finally get to the root of the origins of the Etruscans. A team of over 30 researchers collaborated on this undertaking.
Analysis of DNA for this study began with DNA extraction from some 82 specimens which were grouped into three: a) 48 individuals dated from 800 BCE to 1 BCE, which would place it around the beginnings of the Roman Republic; b) 6 individuals dated from 1 CE to 500 CE, smack-dab in the height of the Roman Empire; and c) 28 individuals dated from 500 CE to 1000 CE. From there, the team figured out some general conclusions about the study.
Results reveal that Etruscans carried with them a lot of “steppe-related ancestry,” meaning their ancestors came from around the same area as the birth of the Indo-European language family. This comes as an oddity, as the Etruscans had already been known to use a language that’s not of Indo-European descent. To the team, this is a rare case of language continuity for the Etruscan language, despite the apparent genetic discontinuity.
Second, after the admixture of Bronze-Age Italic speakers into the Etruscan gene pool, the overall pool remained relatively unchanged for about 800 years; it was, however, almost entirely replaced by a predominantly-eastern Mediterranean ancestry during the Roman Imperial period.
“This genetic shift clearly depicts the role of the Roman Empire in the large-scale displacement of people in a time of enhanced upward or downward socioeconomic and geographic mobility,” said Dr. Johannes Krause, senior author and director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
Finally, a third addition to the gene pool came from northern European ancestry, possibly from the entrance of the Germanic tribes into the Italian peninsula. By the end of the first millennium BCE, the genetic makeup of current-day inhabitants of central and southern Italy was mostly already in place.
These results come face-to-face with two known theories about Etruscan origins: either of Anatolian-Aegean descent, as established by ancient Greek writers such as Herodotus; or of autochthonous—or otherwise indigenous—origin, as detailed by accounts of historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus.
According to Dr. Krause: “While the current consensus among archeologists favors the latter [autochthonous] hypothesis, the persistence of a probable non-Indo-European language isolate surrounded by Italic Indo-European-speaking groups is an intriguing and still unexplained phenomenon that requires further archeological, historical linguistic, and genetic investigations.”
In addition to that, fellow senior author Prof. David Caramelli, from the University of Florence, noted: “This linguistic persistence, combined with a genetic turnover, challenges simple assumptions that genes equal languages and suggests a more complex scenario that may have involved the assimilation of early Italic speakers by the Etruscan speech community, possibly during a prolonged period of admixture over the 2nd millennium BCE.”
The team will need more DNA evidence to support their conclusions. However, data from ancestry shifts in areas like Tuscany and Lazio, also in Italy, appear similar to those identified in areas like Rome. This, to the team, is a good sign that events like those from the first millennium CE may have had a lasting impact on the peninsula’s gene pool.
Finally, first author Prof. Cosimo Posth, researcher from the University of Tübingen’s Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment, said: “The Roman Empire appears to have left a long-lasting contribution to the genetic profile of southern Europeans, bridging the gap between European and eastern Mediterranean populations on the genetic map of western Eurasia.”
(For more genetics news, check out a recent exploration of the genetic origins of the Japanese peoples. After that, read on about the genetic origins of Southeast Asia.)
References
- Posth, C., Zaro, V., Spyrou, M. A., Vai, S., Gnecchi-Ruscone, G. A., Modi, A., Peltzer, A., Mötsch, A., Nägele, K., Vågene, Å. J., Nelson, E. A., Radzevičiūtė, R., Freund, C., Bondioli, L. M., Cappuccini, L., Frenzel, H., Pacciani, E., Boschin, F., Capecchi, G., … Krause, J. (n.d.). The origin and legacy of the Etruscans through a 2000-year archeogenomic time transect. Science Advances, 7(39), eabi7673. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abi7673
- Sci-News. (2021, September 27). Ancient DNA Analysis Sheds New Light on Origin of Etruscans. Sci-News. http://www.sci-news.com/archaeology/etruscans-origin-10105.html
- Turner, B. (2021, September 28). Scientists solve the mystery of the Etruscans’ origins. Live Science. https://www.livescience.com/origins-of-etruscans-discovered
