Rh Negative Mysteries: The Etruscans

Etruscans, members of an ancient people of Etruria, Italy, between the Tiber and Arno rivers west and south of the Apennines, whose urban civilization reached its height in the 6th century BCE. Many features of Etruscan culture were adopted by the Romans, their successors to power in the peninsula.

The Etruscan civilization of ancient Italy covered a territory, at its greatest extent, of roughly what is now Tuscany, western Umbria, and northern Lazio, as well as parts of what are now the Po Valley, Emilia-Romagna, south-eastern Lombardy, southern Veneto, and small parts of Campania.

So what about genetics?

MtDNA:

A couple of mitochondrial DNA studies, published in 2013 in the journals PLOS One and American Journal of Physical Anthropology, based on Etruscan samples from Tuscany and Latium, concluded that the Etruscans were an indigenous population, showing that Etruscans’ mtDNA appear to fall very close to a Neolithic population from Central Europe (Germany, Austria, Hungary) and to other Tuscan populations, strongly suggesting that the Etruscan civilization developed locally from the Villanovan culture, as already supported by archaeological evidence and anthropological research, and that genetic links between Tuscany and western Anatolia date back to at least 5,000 years ago during the Neolithic and the “most likely separation time between Tuscany and Western Anatolia falls around 7,600 years ago”, at the time of the migrations of Early European Farmers (EEF) from Anatolia to Europe in the early Neolithic. The ancient Etruscan samples had mitochondrial DNA haplogroups (mtDNA) JT (subclades of J and T) and U5, with a minority of mtDNA H1b.

Y-DNA:

A 2021 genetic study, published in the journal Science Advances, analyzed the autosomal DNA of 48 Iron Age individuals from Tuscany and Lazio, spanning from 800 to 1 BC, and confirmed that in the Etruscan individuals was present the ancestral component Steppe in the same percentages found in the previously analyzed Iron Age Latins, and in the Etruscans’ DNA was completely absent a signal of recent admixture with Anatolia or the Eastern Mediterranean, concluding that the Etruscans were autochthonous and they had a genetic profile similar to their Latin neighbors. Both Etruscans and Latins joined firmly the European cluster, west of the modern-day northern Italians, and their DNA was a mixture of WHG, EEF and Steppe ancestry; 75% of the Etruscan male individuals were found to belong to haplogroup R1b, especially R1b-P312 and its derivative R1b-L2 whose direct ancestor is R1b-U152, while the most common mitochondrial DNA haplogroup among the Etruscans was H.

What do we know about their blood type frequencies?

Were the ancient Etruscans an important link to rhesus negatives today?

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Ancient Tribes: The Ligures

See also:

Rh Negative Origins: The 3rd Dynasty of Ur