DNA boosts Herodotus’ account of Etruscans as migrants to Italy

Dear List,

Due to some mysterious reason, Nicholas Wade's NYT article on
Eruscan origins, whose link I had posted this morning, can now only
be accessed after registering (for free) for NYTimes.com. Yet I had
accessed it directly just a couple hours ago!

For the benefit of those who don't want to get registered to read
the article, I paste here the plain text of the same. Mind, however,
that the NYT online article also includes some interesting genetic
maps that cannot be reproduced here.

**************

April 3, 2007

DNA Boosts Herodotus' Account of Etruscans as Migrants to
Italy
By NICHOLAS WADE

Geneticists have added an edge to a 2,500-year-old debate
over the origin of the Etruscans, a people whose brilliant and
mysterious civilization dominated northwestern Italy for centuries
until the rise of the Roman republic in 510 B.C. Several new
findings support a view held by the ancient Greek historian
Herodotus -- but unpopular among archaeologists -- that the
Etruscans originally migrated to Italy from the Near East.

Though Roman historians played down their debt to the
Etruscans, Etruscan culture permeated Roman art, architecture and
religion. The Etruscans were master metallurgists and skillful
seafarers who for a time dominated much of the Mediterranean. They
enjoyed unusually free social relations, much remarked on by
ancient historians of other cultures.

"Sharing wives is an established Etruscan custom," wrote
the Greek historian Theopompos of Chios in the fourth century B.C.
"Etruscan women take particular care of their bodies and exercise
often. It is not a disgrace for them to be seen naked. Further, they
dine not with their own husbands, but with any men who happen to be
present."

He added that Etruscan women "are also expert drinkers and
are very good looking."

Etruscan culture was very advanced and very different from
other Italian cultures of the time. But most archaeologists have
seen a thorough continuity between a local Italian culture known
as the Villanovan that emerged around 900 B.C. and the Etruscan
culture, which began in 800 B.C.

"The overwhelming proportion of archaeologists would regard
the evidence for eastern origins of the Etruscans as
negligible," said Anthony Tuck, an archaeologist at the University
of Massachusetts Center for Etruscan Studies.

Because Italians take pride in the Roman empire and the
Etruscan state that preceded it, asserting a foreign origin for the
Etruscans has long been politically controversial in Italy.
Massimo Pallottino, the dean of modern Etruscan studies in Italy
who died in 1995, held that because no one questioned that the
French, say, developed in France, the same assumption should be made
about the Etruscans. "Someone who had a different position didn't
get a job in archaeology," said Antonio Torroni, a geneticist at the
University of Pavia.

Even so, a nagging question has remained. Could the
Etruscans have arrived from somewhere else in the Mediterranean
world, bringing their sophisticated culture with them?

One hint of such an origin is that the Etruscan language,
which survives in thousands of inscriptions, appears not to be
Indo-European, the language family that started to sweep
across Europe sometime after 8,500 years ago, developing into
Latin, English and many other tongues. Another hint is the
occurrence of inscriptions in a language apparently related to
Etruscan on Lemnos, a Greek island just off the coast of Turkey. But
whether Lemnian is the parent language of Etruscan, or the other
way around, is not yet clear, said Rex Wallace, an expert on
Etruscan linguistics at the University of Massachusetts.

An even more specific link to the Near East is a short
statement by Herodotus that the Etruscans emigrated from Lydia, a
region on the eastern coast of ancient Turkey. After an 18-year
famine in Lydia, Herodotus reports, the king dispatched half the
population to look for a better life elsewhere. Under the leadership
of his son Tyrrhenus, the emigrating Lydians built ships, loaded all
the stores they needed, and sailed from Smyrna (now the Turkish
port of Izmir) until reaching Umbria in Italy.

Despite the specificity of Herodotus' account, archaeologists have
long been skeptical of it. There are also fanciful elements
in Herodotus' story, like the Lydians' being the inventors of
games like dice because they needed distractions to take their
minds off the famine. And Lydian, unlike Etruscan, is definitely an
Indo-European language. Other ancient historians entered
the debate. Thucydides favored a Near Eastern provenance, but
Dionysius of Halicarnassus declared the Etruscans native to Italy.

What has brought Italian geneticists into the discussion
are new abilities to sequence DNA and trace people's origins. In
2004, a team led by Guido Barbujani at the University of Ferrara
extracted mitochondrial DNA from 30 individuals buried in Etruscan
sites throughout Italy. Their goal was to see whether Etruscans'
DNA was more like that of modern Italians or of people from the
Near East.

But this study quickly came under attack. Working with
ancient DNA is extremely difficult, because most bones from
archaeological sites have been carelessly handled. Extensively
contamination with modern human DNA can swamp the signal of what
little ancient DNA may still survive. Hans-Jürgen Bandelt, a
geneticist at the University of Hamburg in Germany, wrote that the
DNA recovered from the Etruscan bones showed clear signs of such
problems.

With the geneticists in disarray, archaeologists had been
able to dismiss their results. But a new set of genetic studies
being reported seems likely to lend greater credence to
Herodotus' long-disputed account.

Three new and independent sources of genetic data all point
to the conclusion that Etruscan culture was imported to Italy from
somewhere in the Near East.

One study is based on the mitochondrial DNA of residents of
Murlo, a small former Etruscan town in an out-of-the-way place
whose population may not have changed all that much since
Etruscan times.

Mitchondrial DNA holds clues to geographical origins,
because local mutations produced traceable lineages as people spread
from the ancestral homeland of modern humans in northeastern Africa.
Some lineages are found only in Africa, some in Europe and
others in Asia.

The Murlo residents' lineages are quite different from
those of people in other Italian towns. When placed on a chart of
mitochondrial lineages from Europe and the Near East, the
people of Murlo map closest to Palestinians and Syrians, a team led
by Dr. Torroni and Alessandro Achilli reports in the April issue
of The American Journal of Human Genetics.

In Tuscany as a whole, part of the ancient Etruscan region
of Etruria, the Torroni team found 11 minor mitochondrial DNA
lineages that occur nowhere else in Europe and are shared only with
Near Eastern people. These findings, the teams says, "support a
direct and rather recent genetic input from the Near East, a
scenario in agreement with the Lydian origin of the Etruscans."

Dr. Torroni said he had data awaiting publication that are
based on Y chromosomes and point to the same conclusion.

A third source of genetic data on Etruscan origins has been
developed by Marco Pellecchia and Paolo Ajmone-Marsan at
the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Piacenza.
Tuscany has four ancient unusual breeds of cattle, including the
giant Chianina. Analyzing the mitochondrial DNA of these and
seven other breeds of Italian cattle, Dr. Ajmone-Marsan found that
the Tuscan breeds genetically resembled cattle of the Near East,
whereas the other Italian breeds grouped with cattle of northern
Europe.

One explanation could be that people in Etruria had
imported cattle from the Near East at some time. But given Dr.
Torroni's finding that the people, too, have a Near Eastern
signature in heir genes, the best explanation is that "both humans
and cattle reached Etruria from the Eastern Mediterranean by sea,"
Dr. Ajmone-Marsan and his colleagues said in a report published
online in February in The Proceedings of the Royal Society. This
explanation fits with Herodotus' remark that the Etruscans brought
with them everything they needed.

The data from the cattle DNA has also let the researchers
calculate that the time at which the Tuscan and the Near Eastern
cattle were part of the same population was 6,400 to 1,600 years
ago, implying that the Etruscans set sail in this period.

The new findings may prompt specialists to look for an
arrival date compatible with the archaeological and linguistic data,
which essentially means before the proto-Villanovan culture of
1100 to 900 B.C.

"I'm willing to believe that people speaking a prehistoric
form of Etruscan came from the Near East ? who knows where? ? and
settled in Italy at some point in the early Bronze Age," said Dr.
Wallace.

The Bronze Age in Europe began around 1800 B.C. Dr. Tuck,
the archaeologist, said he supposed that "three clear genetic
threads linking a Tuscan population, human or bovine, to groups in
the Near East is pretty compelling evidence."

If the proto-Villanovan culture signifies the Etruscans'
arrival, it is surprising that no similar culture is known from
ancient Turkey, he said.

Maria Bonghi Jovino, an Etruscan expert at the University
of Milan, said the cultural discontinuity seen at the beginning of
the proto-Villanovan culture probably represented the arrival
of small groups of traders or prospectors, not a mass immigration.

As for Herodotus, Ms. Jovino said she believed, liked most
modern historians, "that he does not always report real historical
facts" often referring to oral tradition.

But at least on the matter of Etruscan origins, it seems
that Herodotus may yet enjoy the last laugh.

******************

Regards,
Francesco