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

A 2021 study by the Max Planck Institute, the Universities of Tübingen, Florence, and Harvard, published in the journal Science Advances, analyzed the Y-chromosome, mitochondrial DNA, and autosomal DNA of 82 ancient samples from Etruria (Tuscany and Latium) and southern Italy (Basilicata) spanning from 800 BC to 1000 AD, including 48 Iron Age individuals. The study confirmed that in the samples of Etruscan individuals from Tuscany and Lazio was present the ancestral component Steppe in the same percentages found in the previously analyzed samples of Iron Age Latins, and added that in the DNA of the Etruscans 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 that of their early Iron Age Latin neighbors. Both Etruscans and Latins belonged firmly to the European cluster, 75% of the samples of 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 regarding mitochondrial DNA haplogroups, the most prevalent was largely H, followed by J and T. Uniparental marker data and autosomal DNA data from samples of Iron Age Etruscan individuals suggest that Etruria received migrations rich of the ancestral Steppe component during the 2nd millennium BC, related to the spread of Indo-European languages, starting with the Bell Beaker culture, and that these migrations merged with populations of the oldest pre-Indo-European layer present since at least the Neolithic period, but it was the latter’s language that survived, a situation similar to what happened in the Basque region of northern Spain. The study has also concluded that the samples analyzed show that the Etruscans kept their genetic profile unchanged for almost 1000 years, despite the sparse presence in Etruria of foreigners, and that a demographic change in Etruria occurred only from the Roman imperial period, in which there is the arrival in the local population of ancestral components from the Eastern Mediterranean Sea. Analysis of samples of individuals who lived in the Roman imperial period and those of the Medieval Age also suggest that the gene pool of the present-day inhabitants of central Italy was formed largely around 1000 years ago after the Barbarian invasions, and that the arrival of the Germanic Lombards in Italy contributed to the formation of the gene pool of the modern population of Tuscany and northern Latium.

See also:

The origin and legacy of the Etruscans through a 2000-year archeogenomic time transect