That's fair. You are free to your opinion as is everyone. I'm more than willing to accept a solid refutation of the story if evidence exists for it. The same goes for evidence in favor of the idea. As you said it's a beautiful story but I am personally ambivalent as to whether it occurred or not. I don't pretend to know one way or the other.
You talk about the Graecian colonization of Italy, like the British colonization of India, it doesn't mean a huge migration from Greece to Central Italy, this study doesn't talk about Greek ancestry but Iranian-related ancestry, something which is common between Greek and Italic people, as two IE people.
There is more evidence for a West to East migration from Peninsular Italy to the Eastern Mediterranean at the time of the so called sea peoples than the opposite. Subapennine pottery was locally made at Chania in Crete, Tyrins and Midea in mainland Greece, and in many other sites such as at and Tell Kazel and Tell Arqa in Syria and North Lebanon respectively, an area that was was back then known as Amurru, one of the places ravaged by the sea peoples. Italian type razors and weapons also arrived in said places during that time. There is also evidence for a type of pottery similar to the Terramare ceramics of North Italy being produced in the Aegean at this time, suggesting that the collapse of the Terramare might've sparked a domino effect that caused or propelled these migrations.
The difference is that for the Greeks we have tons of pottery and other kind of material evidence. In fact Greek Euboean pottery made it all the way to Iberia already by the 9th century BC. There is no evidence that even a single fragment of Anatolian pottery made its way to the Western Mediterranean during the Bronze Age or Early Iron Age, the era where these supposed Trojan migrations would've taken place.
Please let's not confuse completely different time periods and cultures, that's not how archaeology works. The Iranian N ancestry started entering Italy well before the Late Bronze Age. Rock cut tombs are found everywhere in the world in different cultures and different time periods, those you posted are not even contemporary to Pantalica and have nothing to do with Troy anyway. And for the record, much earlier rock cut tombs are found in the Castelluccio culture of Sicily, dating to the Early Bronze age, and even earlier elaborate rock cut tombs were made in Neolithic Sardinia during the fourth millennium BC, so rock cut tombs in the Western Mediteranean have nothing to do with the arrival of Iran N ancestry.According to Fernandes et al. (The Arrival of Steppe and Iranian Related Ancestry in the Islands of the Western Mediterranean), "In Sicily, Iranian-related ancestry arrived by the mid-second millennium BC, contemporary to its previously documented spread to the Aegean; and there was large-scale population replacement after the Bronze Age."
There are many archaeological evidences about this migration, like rock-cut tombs of Pantalica: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necropolis_of_Pantalica Dating from the 13th to the 7th centuries BC.
Panatlica, Italy:
Marvdasht, Iran:
It means a huge migration from Greece to Southern Italy. This is not a debatable topic and is not something that is even questioned. You're going to have to get over these Iranian mass migration fantasies. Italy's "Iranian-Related" DNA is actually from the Caucasus, just like any other part of Europe, including Greece.
Western Anatolian pottery by the early Iron age was in fact Greek pottery as well. These areas of Anatolia had adopted all aspects of Greek culture, religion, language and material culture. Obviously that does not prove migrations from Troy, but it is a great oversight to assume Greece and W. Anatolia were at all materially disconnected or highly distinct during the iron age.
The migration is supposed to have taken place in the Late Bronze Age, and back then the Western Anatolians produced their typical Anatolian Gray Ware, distinct from Mycenaean pottery, Anatolian Gray Ware is not found in Itay. Now, in Hissarlik they used and produced Mycenaean pottery too, in addition to their Anatolian Gray Ware pottery, but that goes for coastal communities all over the Eastern Mediterranean too, and even for some Italian communities, mostly coastal ones.
Of course. I don't disagree that they were much more distinct in the bronze age. But by the iron age there likely is a significant amount of W. Anatolians migrating to Italy in the Magna Graecian sphere. At this point these peoples simply considered themselves Greek and not very distinct from Greeks of Greece proper (even if we today know there remained a genetic cline).
Something which can be related to Iran dates back to 2200 BC and 4.2-kiloyear event: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4.2-kiloyear_event As you read "This time was one of great upheaval for ecological reasons. Prolonged failure of rains caused acute water shortage in large areas, causing the collapse of sedentary urban cultures in south central Asia, Afghanistan, Iran, and India, and triggering large-scale migrations. Inevitably, the new arrivals came to merge with and dominate the post-urban cultures."
What an incredibly dumb and irrelevant comment, moreover considering the most extreme geographical points of the two countries. Did you know that Como si closer to Copenhagen than to Palermo? What is that supposed to mean in genetics term?
Yes, if by Iron Age you mean the 7th-6th century BC, and not the Early Iron Age then that's right. During the Early Iron Age most of the Aegean merchants in Etruscan soil would've been Euboean, who founded Pithekoussai and Cuma, and Corinthians. Around the 7th and especially during the 6th century BC the inhabitants of the Greek cities of Asia Minor, especially the Ionian ones, started visiting the Western Mediterranean with increased frequency. That's when Phoecea founded powerful colonies like Marseille. That's also when Miletus reached its apex both culturally and economically, before getting conquered by Persia. The inhabitants of these colonies would've very probably been mixed with the Anatolians to some extent, and there probably were also full fledged Anatolians with them. In the busy coastal emporium of Gravisca, the port of Tarquinia, one of the dedicatory cups found there, dated to c. 540 BC, is inscribed with the Lydian name Paktyes.
Recent genetic and linguistic studies show that a region in the northwest of Iran and east of Anatolia was the homeland of Indo-Europeans, for example look at Heggarty et al. 2023, I meant a migration from this region to Italy is not a strange thing.
