Makes you wonder how much research in archeogenetics has been fabricated or tainted. After I saw the new depiction of Ötzi (courtesy of Johannes Krause and pals), it became clear to me that these aren't scientists but people with college degrees who can be hired for any agenda. We now have "experts" talking about black Vikings and Anglo-Saxons.
Fabricated or bogus studies have always existed in every discipline: history, archaeology, linguistics... The study of ancient history has always been the object of interests and agendas that have nothing to do with a love for the truth. Even today, for example, studies in Indo-European linguistics, particularly the linguistic ones, are steeped in 19th-century propaganda.
These are all topics that touch on identity, and they are used in both directions—both for right-wing propaganda and left-wing propaganda. Archaeogenetics studies have undoubtedly improved the level of genetic studies when it comes to ancient history. For decades, genetic studies were published that did not rely on ancient DNA but still claimed to reconstruct migratory movements that occurred thousands of years ago without providing any proof. These studies were a disaster because they were often based on circular arguments and sought to find in modern samples exactly what the geneticists wanted to prove. A famous case was that of the Lebanese biologist who claimed, without any proof, that every J2 found in Europe was a signal of Phoenician migratory movements, because J2 was a typically Phoenician marker. From ancient DNA analysis, we now know that's not the case. The analysis of ancient DNA has no doubt improved the accuracy of the studies. Obviously, this does not mean they have become infallible or that there is no propaganda even among archaeogeneticists.
In the specific case of Ötzi, I assume you're talking about the study by Ke Wang et al. (2023). That study's conclusions about Ötzi state that phenotypic analysis showed that Ötzi probably had darker skin than people living in Europe today and carried risk alleles linked to male-pattern baldness, type 2 diabetes, and obesity-related metabolic syndrome. But if you look closely at the study, these conclusions are based on statistical probability calculations; there's no real certainty that it's definitely true. The study provides few explanations in the supplementary information on how it arrived at these conclusions. And then there's the problem that these conclusions contradict all previous studies, according to which the Neolithic/Chalcolithic population of Europe had lighter pigmentation than that of the Mesolithic. So if Ötzi had dark skin like those of the Mesolithic, he was probably an outlier, not the average.
The problem becomes bigger when this study is picked up by newspapers, websites, and so on, and the findings are presented as if they were definite facts rather than just probability estimates. So, the conditional tense should be used, since there's no solid proof. It's essentially an overinterpretation of the genetic data, likely not just for political reasons but also because genetic studies often get wrapped up in sensationalism. It's a mix of politics and marketing that tries to convince people the study made groundbreaking discoveries.
I wish to reemphasise the distinction between a neolithic Anatolian origin and what is understood as Eastern Mediterranean in a much later, recorded history. We obviously agree that the Etruscans were not "late" migrants who arrived around 1000 BCE. Both the Etruscans and Rhaetians settled too far in the north to be newcomers from the Eastern Mediterranean. Geographically, the argument can be certainly made that they were closer to the Rhaetians linguistically than to the Lemnians but all three languages are considered to be part of the hypothetical Tyrsenian language family. In any case, they are Paleo-European languages and have been present in Europe for much longer than 1000 BCE.
The main problem here is that even today, many researchers still fail to clearly distinguish between a Neolithic migration from Anatolia and a later migration from the Aegean-Anatolian area, which occurred at the end of the Bronze Age and the beginning of the Iron Age. Greek accounts of the Etruscans’ origins only begin to appear around 400 BCE: before that date, there is not a single Greek text mentioning an allochthonous origin of the Etruscans. These accounts describe a migration precisely in that period, the end of the Bronze Age and the beginning of the Iron Age, and they have no connection whatsoever with the Neolithic movements, of which the Greeks were unlikely to have any knowledge. Among specialists of Etruscan civilization, there is broad consensus that these Greek stories were invented traditions, created ad hoc in that period. They reflect the Greek mentality of the time, rooted in the classical myth of foundation, and are based on the intense cultural exchanges of the age rather than on actual historical facts. In these accounts, two main versions emerge: one locating the Etruscans’ origin in Lydia, and another in Thessaly (though, for reasons that remain unclear, only the first version achieved lasting popularity).
We know that this was a time of intense contact between the Etruscan world, the Greek-Aegean world, and the Anatolian sphere, which by then was largely Hellenized. In Etruria, especially in the southern area (corresponding roughly to northern Latium), many Greek-Ionian artists and merchants were active, most of them originally from Anatolian Ionia, with possible experience in Lydia, Lycia, and other Anatolian regions. At the same time, some Etruscan groups maintained a thesauros (treasury) at Delphi in Greece. It is therefore by no means implausible, and this hypothesis is supported by several foreign archaeologists, that alongside the movements from the Aegean toward Italy (such as the well-known Greek colonization of southern Italy), there were also small reverse flows, from Italy toward the Aegean.
The famous Lemnos stele, discovered in 1885, long influenced the debate on Etruscan origins, initially appearing as the definitive proof of an Aegean origin. Italian archaeologists began excavations on the island in 1923, now over a century ago, specifically in search of evidence confirming this supposed eastern origin. Yet after a hundred years of research, nothing has been found on Lemnos to archaeologically connect the island with Etruria, nor in Etruria anything that links it to Lemnos. The language attested there is called “Lemnian,” after the island’s name, not after an ethnic group: there was no “people of the Lemnians,” and these inscriptions are not tied to any distinctive material culture.
Over time, the eastern hypothesis has steadily weakened. How could an Aegean population, large enough to impose a foreign language on two distinct populations living in a huge area stretching from the Alps to central Italy, have migrated to Italy without leaving any archaeological and genetic traces? Etruscologists have debated this for over eighty years; it is not as if they embraced Etruscan autochthony over a couple of aperitifs. Since the 1980s, Italian archaeologists specializing in Prehistory and Protohistory have also engaged with the issue, and after decades of excavation they have concluded that there is no archaeological evidence of an Aegean migration to Etruria of the kind described by ancient Greek authors. And since 2019, we know that archaeogenetic data also supports these conclusions.
It is also worth recalling that no known Anatolian language shows any clear relation to Etruscan, nor is there any archaeological evidence in Anatolia of a specific archeological link with Etruria that might suggest direct migrations. Meanwhile, among linguists, a consensus has grown: Etruscan is not only related to the language of the Lemnos inscriptions, but also to Rhaetic, spoken in the Alps by an archaeologically documented population, mentioned in ancient sources and bearing a known ethnonym. The Rhaetic culture is pre-urban and indicates neither a derivation of the Rhaetians from the Etruscans nor the reverse. Any possible connection between the two populations, if it existed, must date back long before the end of the Bronze Age. It is also worth noting that no archaeological evidence of Aegean contact has ever been found at Rhaetic sites so far.
Those who have resisted the hypothesis of Etruscan autochthony have mainly been scholars who were not specialists in Etruscan civilization (that is, Etruria was not their primary field of research). Excluding amateurs and hobbyists, they typically come from two disciplines: Indo-European studies and Oriental studies. The most prominent among them is Robert Beekes, a Dutch linguist and expert in Indo-European studies, who devoted considerable attention to the pre-Greek substrate and later to the question of Etruscan origins. Beekes harshly attacked archaeologists, accusing them of nationalist bias, an unfounded charge, since anyone familiar with the roots of Italian nationalism knows that it is grounded in Roman, not Etruscan, civilization. Nevertheless, this accusation proved useful for poisoning the debate, discrediting archaeologists (especially Italian ones), and spreading among the general public the idea of a conspiracy orchestrated by an Italian archaeological “mafia” to conceal the truth.
To support the Herodotean narrative of an eastern origin, Beekes produced a series of papers that resemble fantasy more than rigorous scholarship. His students and colleagues at Dutch universities have periodically recycled his thesis, occasionally modifying minor details. None of these works has ever gained real credibility outside their academic bubble, yet their viral diffusion on the internet has sustained the illusion that the debate on Etruscan origins remains open and heated. Indeed, even today, social media abounds with absurd theories: that the Etruscans were Sardinians, Albanians, Romanians, Russians, Turks, Hungarians, Serbs, and so on.
In this debate emerges Bernard Sergent, who had already argued for an Eastern origin of the Etruscans in a book from the 1990s devoted, quite tellingly, to the Indo-Europeans. The paradoxical irony lies in the fact that the Indo-European Anatolian world is used to “prove” the Eastern/Oriental and exotic nature of the Etruscans, while Indo-European studies themselves were one of the main ideological engines behind the very concept of the “West.”
Today, thanks to archaeogenetic analyses, we know that such ideas are overly simplistic, relics of an outdated Indo-Europeanist framework. From a scholarly and methodological standpoint, Sergent’s book is rather weak, gives credibility to essays and books that lack any scholarly consensus, and much more could be said about it. It is enough to note that the book opens with a quotation from the French geographer and historian Vincent Capdepuy:
“Les migrations, c’est toute l’histoire humaine.” (“Migrations are the whole of human history.”)
The quote comes from a critique of “fixist” history curricula, published in
Le Monde on October 30, 2018, under the title “Programmes d’histoire, une misère intellectuelle.” Sergent thus seems to project onto the question of Etruscan origins what are, in fact, broader cultural and political reflections on French educational programs.
Once again, the question of the Etruscans’ origins is used as an ideological tool, a pretext for other purposes.
