Re: Ancient Etruscans, and their cattle, were immigrants from Anatolia,


"Jack Linthicum" <jacklinthicum@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
news:1182194231.136772.88710@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
On Jun 18, 11:07 am, "Uwe Müller" <uwemuel...@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"Jack Linthicum" <jacklinthi...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> schrieb im
Newsbeitragnews:1182123532.988436.75870@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

snip >

Ancient Etruscans were immigrants from Anatolia, or what is now Turkey
Geneticists find the final piece in the puzzle
snip >
"We think that our research provides convincing proof that Herodotus
was right", says Professor Piazza, "and that the Etruscans did indeed
arrive from ancient Lydia.

snip >

Lets say they provided evidence for the anatolian origin theory. What
they
lack is a precise dating of the movement of the people, which can't be
done
with modern DNA. So they prooved an immigration, but they can't know if
it
happened in the Iron Age, during the Greek colonisation, in Roman times
or
during the times of direct Byzantine envolvement in the area (or even
later).

And if extracting of prehistoric or historic DNA works with bones from
Neanderthals or chickens, for bronce age burials or medieval graves it
should work with Etruscan bones too.

So, to be 100% certain they'd need to look at Etruscan bones not at
modern
day Tuscans.

have fun

Uwe Mueller

If you were this group, working on a problem of considerable
dimensions, would you unload all of your findings in one release?
Of course not, they get a grant, they fulfill the grant or part of it
and move on.

The subsidized studies I have worked on are clearly defined on what is to be
done, who is to do it and where the results are to be published. There is no
money for idly playing around with pet theories, quite the contrary,
limitations on time and money are harsh. So you publish all of your results.
It is the only way to increase your chances for another grant, or for a full
time job, for those, who have done the research.

The saying is publish or perish. To hold back results can only harm
yourself, someone else may publish something similar before you do.

Piazza is giving a paper at a meeting not writing a book.
It would also seem that the study of Etruscan bones from the 7th to
the 3rd centuries BC has been done by some of the same team.

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1181945

snip >

On the basis of data from the
remaining 30 individuals, the Etruscans appeared as genetically
variable as modern populations.

So, after 2 millenia of genetic mixing, hiring foreign mercenaries,
migrations of tribes and whole populations into and out of Etruria, after
the invention of modern mass transport, resettlement programms for south
Italians etc. , the genetic mixtures are still comparable in their
variability. Does that not imply, that the Etruscan gene pool was the result
of a similar mixing up of genetic influences?

snip >

All
mitochondrial lineages observed among the Etruscans appear typically
European or West Asian, but only a few haplotypes were found to have
an exact match in a modern mitochondrial database, raising new
questions about the Etruscans' fate after their assimilation into the
Roman state.

The etruscan gene pool showed little out of the ordinary among the people
involved in close contacts since the bronze age.

snip >

By themselves, DNA sequences cannot tell us who the Etruscans were and
where they came from, ...

Not at least, with only 27 individuals tested , and those only from the
ruling elite of the Etruscans. Conventional data has long proposed close
ties between ruling elites since the late Bronze age, nat science data has
proposed, this may have been true already in the early bronce age, remember
the avebury archer.

snip >

Exclusion of the 2V sequence brought the final sample size to 27
individuals with 22 different sequences.

snip >

Internal genetic diversity within the Etruscans (gene diversity 0.98 ±
0.01; mean number of pairwise sequence differences 3.90 ± 2.02) is
close to the average in the database (0.97 and 4.68, respectively).
AMOVA showed no heterogeneity among Etruscan sites (1.11% of the total
[NS]), whereas differences are significant among contemporary Italian
populations (1.72% of the total, P<.0001); in addition, we could not
demonstrate any significant differences among time periods (7th-6th
centuries vs. 5th-4th vs. 3rd-2nd). None of these tests suggests that
the Etruscans are more of a cultural assemblage than a biological
population.

For me that translates to: there is no feasible connection between modern
day populations and the old Etruscan ruling class.
And there is no marked differentiation between the genetic mix up of the
ruling class for something like 600 years.

I'd see two possible scenarios for that, either the elite was a closed
circle, only marrying among themselves, never marrying outside, or the
genetic mix up came from a pan-european elite, that had interbred for
centuries, thus forming a gene pool separated from that of the normal
population.

snip >

... showing that the genetic resemblance between the
Etruscans and their modern counterparts is much less than observed
between random European populations with no special evolutionary ties.
Allele sharing is higher not only with the Turks (four haplotypes in
common) but also with other, presumably unrelated, populations, such
as the Cornish or the Germans (five and seven haplotypes in common,
respectively).

What a surprise, connections between the samples and modern Tuscan people
were less close, than those to the rest of the modern European popualtion.
Genetic connections show close ties to Cornwall, (southern?) Germany and
Western Asia. (As the Turks only appeared in that region in the medieval, I
am curious about the basis for the connection with them).

I miss infos on the connection with north african punic settlements, which
were quite close with the Etruscans for some time. They have been adressed
in a more general way at the start, but seem to have been moved out of the
focus of research afterwards.

From the four general areas of contact we know of, from written sources and
artefact distributions, the east (greek at the time), and the north
(Hallstatt and Latène cultures) are well attested genetically. The south is
lacking. The lack of connections with the west may have come from choosing
the Basque population as representatives. Comparison with Bronce final and
early iron age groups from central France or the Normandy/Bretagne region,
might clarify that situation.

snip >

The Tuscans differ from the Etruscans by 4.65
substitutions-that is, almost exactly the value that would be expected
with a random population from the database.

Which means, that comparisons between Etruscan and Tuscan genetics are
likely to be worthless.

snip >

In the MDS plot (fig. 4), the Etruscans fall
out of an unstructured cluster comprising most European and Caucasus
populations, including the Turks.

That could be the punic influences at last.

snip <

One possible interpretation is that all or
most European populations of that time period were as different from
their modern counterparts as the Etruscans appear to be.

There was an age of migrations, Romans resettled whole population in
different corners of their empires, wars since then have introduced massive
amounts of new genetic material from all over Europe, and bordering regions,
to all of Europe, and bordering regions.

The contrary, a similarity of ancient population as a whole with modern
populations as a whole despite all of these population movements, would have
cast heavy doubts on the underlying theories for me.

This would
imply either extensive gene flow or a high rate of extinction of
mitochondrial haplotypes, both processes causing a drastic change of
the mitochondrial pool in the last 2,500 years. More importantly, a
result of that kind would force us to reconsider the universally held
assumption that patterns in the DNA of modern individuals reflect the
evolutionary processes affecting their prehistoric ancestors (see,
e.g., Piazza et al. 1988; Sokal 1991; von Haeseler et al. 1995;
Richards et al. 2000, 2002; Semino et al. 2000). Alternatively, should
other ancient populations prove similar to comparable modern ones, one
should conclude that the Etruscans' mitochondrial sequences underwent
extinction at a particularly high rate and look for an explanation for
that. Until more ancient DNA data become available, both scenarios
will remain possible, although we favor the latter.

I favour the former. It fits in with archaeologic and historic data. And,
please correct me if I'm wrong, genetics shows sexual exchange, not culture,
or population movements.


Social structure may have affected these results. All skeletons we
typed were found in tombs containing artifacts that could be
attributed with confidence to the Etruscan culture. Those tombs
typically belong the social elites (Barker and Rasmussen 1998), and so
the individuals we studied may represent a specific social group, the
upper classes. We do not know whether that group differed genetically
from the rest of the population, which might be the case when a
foreign elite imposes its rule, and often its language, over a region
(Renfrew 1989).


The old image of the conquering, colonial elite from victorian times.We know
that this situation is one among many possible scenarios, and IMHO not the
most likely one.

If the upper class had indeed somewhat distinct DNAs,
our results could mean that this elite class became largely extinct,

We know that some of that elite was integrated into the Roman circles of
power, and another part was killed or fled the country.

From a genetic point of view, an Etruscan elite social group, interbreeding
with a pan european elite, stopped doing so, and started interbreeding with
a Roman elite. That means, that their separate genepool would have ended,
gone extinct in Italy, without the people belonging going extinct too..

while the rest of the population, whose DNA we do not know, may well
have contributed to the modern gene pool of Tuscany. This would be the
likely effect of a process of assimilation, from which the social
elites were excluded, more or less deliberately.

To summarize, only a few Etruscan sequences find an exact match in the
modern database, but all belong to lineages that are still present in
Europe. Some genetic affinities with modern people from western Europe
reflect the sharing of lineages (5AM, 6AM, and 19M) that are
widespread over the whole continent, and that therefore do not seem to
point to any migrational contact but rather to a common origin of
various European gene pools. On the contrary, the similarity between
the Etruscan and Turkish gene pools may indeed reflect some degree of
gene flow.

Or:
The genetic simmilarities point to close genetic contacts with the rest of
the classic economic sphere. As in the spheres of arts and crafts,
especially close contacts may have existed with the Greek world. If
directly, as proposed, or through the Greeks settling in Italy, is at least
doubtfull. Contacts nearly as close as that are likely with the North and
the West, while the state of genetic contacts with the south remains fuzzy.

snip >

The limited genealogical continuity between the Etruscans (be they
representative of the upper class or of the entire population) and
their modern counterparts of Tuscany calls for an explanation. An
approximate estimate of the Etruscan population size in the 6th
century b.c. is probably somewhere between 150,000 and 250,000 women
(Rasmussen 2004). In the future, we plan to quantify the probability
of extinction of all mitochondrial haplotypes but two in a subdivided
population of that size, by simulating both neutral evolution and a
disadvantage representing ethnic discrimination after the Roman
assimilation. We shall also ask whether reasonable rates of gene flow
for 2,500 years can cause a dramatic replacement of mitochondrial
lineages in a population of that size. But a clearer picture is likely
to emerge only when genetic data on other European populations of the
same age become available for comparison.

snip >

The goal should be, to have samples from all populations and from all times.

For a long time artefacts from far away have been identified by
archaeologists, as a means of cross dating and indicators of long distance
ressource exchange. Genetics may be able to map personal mobility and
exchange

The article has strengthened my doubts about using modern DNA for historic
research. With the limited number of cases, the value of the results is of
course somewhat restricted. But it presents evidence for the Near Asian
emigration theory, even if the amount of that population input can not be
quantified in relation to the indigenous people or immigrants from other
areas.

Thanks for posting it.

have fun

Uwe Mueller
Uwe Mueller




.

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