The ancient high culture of the Etruscans had long been a mystery to archaeologists: it had dominated large parts of northern Italy from the heartland in today's Tuscany for several centuries until the 1st century before the turn of the era, finally rising and falling into the Roman Empire. The society of the Etruscans – the "Rasna" or "Rasenna", as they called themselves – was something very special: the people were bustling traders, knew unique techniques, cultivated different habits and customs than their neighbors and spoke in a language of their own, which had nothing to do with the Greek or Latin of their contemporaries.
The ancient powers of historical science had already noticed, and they tried to answer where the other, mysterious people came from in northern Italy. For example, Herodotus had trusted sources in ancient Greece, according to which the Etruscan ancestors from Asia Minor or the Aegean had reached Italy over the sea, the ancient Greek high culture in their luggage. Different evidence spoke, on the other hand, others seemed to support this ancient hypothesis. And this up to the modern age: In 2007, the investigations of the gene signatures of people who live in Tuscany today showed a striking influence of gene markers, which are also common in anatolia today.
So were the Etruscans Anatolians? The scientists could only be completely sure after analyzing the ancient DNA from the graves of Etruscans from the centuries before the decline of the culture. These investigations have now been completed by an international team of scientists from various disciplines led by Johannes Krause from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena and Cosimo Posth from the University of Tübingen. The result is clear: Herodotus was wrong, and the old theories about the origin of the Etruscans from Anatolia are wrong.
In fact, according to the evaluation of the analysis published in "Science Advances", the otherwise different Etruscans do not differ strikingly from their contemporary neighbors.
The team had examined the inheritance traces of 82 people who had lived between 800 before and 1000 after the turn of the times in the further Etruscan area of influence. As with other tribes of the area, the typical mix of people who populated large parts of Europe after the Neolithic period can be recognized in the Etruscher's genome. The Etruscans also resembled the Latiners further south on the boot - the region in which the city of Rome was later to be built. The addition of gene signatures from the eastern steppe is also typical: it has reached all of Europe in the course of a dynamic wave of immigration from people from the steppe landscapes in the north of the Caspian sea. This wave had gradually replaced the former residents of Europe and produced new cultures such as the cord ceramists.
In addition to the steppe genes, the Etruscans' genes show the mix of Central European, North African and Middle Eastern genes typical of the time and region. The researchers, on the other hand, find no evidence that the Etruscans - as adopted by Herodotus and various theorists - come from anatolia or the Aegean. As with the other tribes of Italy, the genetic material then changed significantly with the advent of the Roman Empire: now many other influences from the east of the empire mix into the local gene pool; Probably a consequence of the greater mobility of people during this time, which brought soldiers or slaves from the eastern Mediterranean to Italy. Finally, in the early Middle Ages you can see another new influence in the genes in Tuscany: genetic material from the north, among other things through the Germanic and Langobards, which accompany the end of the empire.
The strikingly inconspicuous Etruscan genome now presents research with a new puzzle: Why did Etruscans differ culturally since their early days and for centuries so clearly from their otherwise similar neighbors? And why did she speak a language for centuries, the origin of which is still mysterious? Everywhere in Italy and in other parts of Europe, the immigrants coming from the steppe not only circulated the gene pool with steppe genes after the end of the Neolithic period, but also brought their language, probably a tribe of Indo -European.
The Etruscan might have kept because the immigrants have taken over the culture and the language of the early Etruscans, while they have slowly but slowly but in large numbers into society, the researchers of the DNA study speculate. In this case, the process of cultural and genetic fusion was different - which could have made sure that Etruscically remained a living language for centuries, while other, older non -European idioms died out without leaving traces.
Linguists debate whether Etruscan is actually a branch of a very old European language family that was widespread in the Neolithic period and then displaced. The linguist Helmut Rix had proposed the theory of Tyrsenian languages, which includes Etruscan as well as the Rhaetian language of the Alpine region and the Lemnian language, which has been preserved on the Aegean island of Lemnos in characters on a stele. The form and structure of the vocabulary of these extinct languages are similar and, like the language of the Neolithic Basques, they could be relics of hypothetical pre-Indo-European languages.
