You would think that where you have a civilization – seemingly living in an area for millennia – that DNA tests would show that them to be descended from ancient burials in the area. It seems this doesn’t hold true in central Italy.
“For the first time, Stanford researchers have used novel statistical computer modeling to simulate demographic processes affecting the population of Tuscany over a 2,500-year time span. Rigorous tests used by the researchers have ruled out a genetic link between ancient Etruscans, the early inhabitants of central Italy, and the region’s modern day residents.
“The findings suggest that something either suddenly wiped out the Etruscans or the group represented a social elite that had little in common with the people who became the true ancestors of Tuscans, said Joanna Mountain, assistant professor of anthropological science…
“The Etruscans are the only preclassical European population to date that has been genetically analyzed… Two years ago, Italian geneticists extracted maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA from the bones of 27 people called Etruscans found in six different necropolises (burial sites) in Tuscany. The female lineage was investigated because, unlike the male Y chromosome, many copies of mitochondrial DNA are found in each cell and thus are easier to extract… The data represent one of the best collections of ancient human DNA in existence. If you get DNA out of one bone, you can try to say something about the past… But they managed to get DNA out of quite a few bones. The DNA of 49 people living in the region today was also sampled. Although data from the two groups revealed several differences…, the researchers could not interpret if these were meaningful or significant…”
Read the full article in the May 17 edition of the Stanford University website. http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2006/may17/mountain-051706.html
