(CN) — Using DNA from more than 80 individuals spanning 2,000 years, researchers created an archaeogenomic time transect to understand population changes in ancient Italy. The research was published in Science Advances on Friday.
The Etruscan people lived in ancient Italy during the Iron Age, nearly 3,000 years ago, occupying modern Tuscany, Lazio and Umbria. While evidence of their culture and a unique language has survived the centuries, anthropologists have long debated where the people came from — were they Greek settlers or did their roots in Italy date back to the Bronze Age?
To settle this question, an international team of researchers collected and compared genes from the remains of more than 80 individuals occupying Etruria and southern Italy from 800 B.C. to 1000 A.D., including 48 who lived from 800 to 1 B.C., six who lived from 1 to 500 A.D., and 28 who lived from 500 to 1000 A.D.
Researchers extracted DNA from bone and tooth samples, retrieving more than 1 million single-nucleotide polymorphisms from each to compare.
“Contrary to previous suggestions, the Etruscan-related gene pool does not seem to have originated from recent population movements from the Near East. Etruscans carry a local genetic profile shared with other neighboring populations such as the Latins from Rome and its environs despite the cultural and linguistic differences between the two neighboring groups,” researchers explain in the paper.
The findings suggest the Etruscans lived in Italy longer than previously assumed based on their close relation to nearby steppe people. Researchers therefore believe the Indo-European language used by Etruscans dates back to a Bronze Age origin representing a “rare example of language continuity despite extensive genetic discontinuity,” the paper observes.
“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 second millennium B.C.,” explained David Caramelli, an author on the paper and University of Florence professor, in a statement.
While modern man admires the intricate metallurgy of the Etruscans, many researchers are still working to fully understand their elusive language.
In the 800 years following the Bronze Age, the research indicates the Etruscan gene pool remained homogenous, with only occasional additions from people of Near Eastern, northern Africa or central European descent.
The most significant change in genetic diversity found came during the Roman period, when the isolated Etruscan gene pool became flooded with “genetic input” from the eastern Mediterranean. Then Northern European genes came during the early Middle Ages, as Germanic Tribes settled across the Italian peninsula following the 5th century A.D. collapse of the Western Roman Empire.
“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 Johannes Krause, director at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in a statement.
The shifts of the Roman era and the Middle Ages appear to represent the most dramatic changes in the population, which thereafter remained relatively unchanged over the last millennia to present day.
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