Posted on 05/16/2006 11:30:01 AM PDT by blam
Tuscany's Etruscan claim knocked
Modern Tuscans not descendants of ancient people, DNA says
(ANSA) - Rome, May 16 - The Tuscans' proud claim to be the descendants of the ancient Etruscans has taken a knock .
A DNA comparison of Etruscan skeletons and a sample of living Tuscans has thrown up only "tenuous genetic similarities", said lead researcher Guido Barbujani of Ferrara University .
"If the Tuscans were the direct descendants of the Etruscans the DNA should be the same," said Barbujani, a genetecist who coordinated the study with Stanford University in the United States .
The study, which appears in the current edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, concludes that most modern Tuscans are descended from a non-Etruscan people .
However, it leaves a ray of hope for the Tuscans, who often boast about the heritage that makes them different from other Italians .
"It could be that the skeletons from which we extracted the DNA belonged to an elite group that did not spread demographically," Barbujani said .
The Etruscans are believed to have formed the first advanced civilisation in Italy, based in an area called Etruria, corresponding mainly to present-day Tuscany and northern Lazio .
At the height of their power at around 500 BC - when Rome itself was subjugated - they spread to the foothills of the Alps and southward close to Naples .
Modern knowledge of their civilisation is based largely on archaeological finds, as much of their language has yet to be deciphered .
For many people the Etruscans have a romantic, mysterious aura and there is a raft of web sites devoted to them .
They are a particular favourite among New Age fans .
GGG Ping.
Well we're all related to each other as 16th cousins.
 |
Genetic Genealogy  |
| Send FReepmail if you want on/off GGP list Marty = Paternal Haplogroup O(2?)(M175) Maternal Haplogroup H |
|
| GG LINKS: African Ancestry DNAPrint Genomics FamilyTree DNA mitosearch Nat'l Geographic Genographic Project Oxford Ancestors RelativeGenetics Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Foundation Trace Genetics ybase ysearch |
|
| The List of Ping Lists | |
Friggin' Tuscan raiders.
Boycott The Olive Garden.
Bean munching racists.
I visited an Etruscan necropolis near Assisi on our visit a few years back.
Pretty interesting stuff. Supposedly the tombs had been discovered back in 1905, but not considered important enough to develop as a tourist attraction until some 70 years later.
The funeral casks and tunnel decor all sported mostly Greek symbols, like Medusa. Many of the casks had dragons on them. Sorry, no unicorns.
Boy, wait'll the Tuscan Chamber of Commerce hears about this!
Not really ~ many families kept it, so to speak, in the family. The French royals, for example, adhered to a standard where no one "bred" within 4 degrees of consaqnguinity, but they didn't "breed" beyond that either. This kept the royal family at 500 or so members for about 500 years.
Please FREEPMAIL me if you want on or off the
"Gods, Graves, Glyphs" PING list or GGG weekly digest
-- Archaeology/Anthropology/Ancient Cultures/Artifacts/Antiquities, etc.
Gods, Graves, Glyphs (alpha order)
Fathers can be influential tooBiologists have warned for some years that paternal mitochondria do penetrate the human egg and survive for several hours... Erika Hagelberg from the University of Cambridge, UK, and colleagues... were carrying out a study of mitochondrial DNAs from hundreds of people from Papua-New Guinea and the Melanesian islands in order to study the history of human migration into this region of the western Pacific... People from all three mitochondrial groups live on Nguna. And, in all three groups, Hagelberg's group found the same mutation, a mutation previously seen only in an individual from northern Europe, and nowhere else in Melanesia, or for that matter anywhere else in the world... Adam Eyre-Walker, Noel Smith and John Maynard Smith from the University of Sussex, Brighton, UK confirm this view with a mathematical analysis of the occurrence of the so-called 'homoplasies' that appear in human mitochondrial DNA... reanalysis of a selection of European and African mitochondrial DNA sequences by the Sussex researchers suggests that recombination is a far more likely cause of the homoplasies, as they find no evidence that these sites are particularly variable over all lineages.
by Eleanor LawrenceIs Eve older than we thought?"Two studies prove that the estimation of both when and where humanity first arose could be seriously flawed... The ruler scientists have been using is based on genetic changes in mitochondria, simple bacteria that live inside us and control the energy requirements of our cells. Mitochondria are passed from mother to daughter and their genes mutate at a set rate which can be estimated - so many mutations per 1,000 years... However, these calculations are based upon a major assumption which, according to Prof John Maynard Smith, from Sussex University, is 'simply wrong'. The idea that underpins this dating technique is that mitochondria, like some kinds of bacteria, do not have sex... Two groups of researchers, Prof Maynard Smith and colleagues Adam Eyre-Walker and Noel Smith, also from Sussex, and Dr Erika Hagelberg and colleagues from the University of Otago, New Zealand, have found that mitochondria do indeed have sex - which means that genes from both males and females is mixed and the DNA in their offspring is very different... Prof Maynard Smith and his colleagues stumbled over mitochondria having sex in the process of tracking the spread of bacterial resistance to meningitis... For the 'out-of-Africa' theory to hold water, the first population would have to have been very small. Sexually rampant mitochondria may put paid to this idea. Maynard Smith thinks that the origin of humanity is much older - may be twice as old - which, according to Eyre-Walker, means we are likely to have evolved in many different areas of the world and did not descend from Eve in Africa."
by Sanjida O'Connell 15th April 1999
Ditto to that !!
(Ahem) Consanquinity.
I've been waiting for someone to start point to the various French royal family "batard", but they haven't.
Actually, a lot of those guys were off in other lines that didn't stand in line for the throne for any number of reasons. Until the formal establishment of the Royal Mistress (with a formerly Protestant King), the main line folks look to have been pretty well supervised by the various ladies in waiting, gentlemen of the guard, and so forth who actually watched everything these people did all their lives.
The King of France, sad to say, was watched in his toilet. I cannot imagine living a live with no privacy at all.
I don't know about all french kings, but at least one went to the toilet surrounded by his 'fanclub'çause he was so proud of owning a toilet that he wanted to show off. At least according to Discovery channel.
Paternal mitochondria survive for a few hours? And they exchange DNA with maternal mitochondria?!
It makes sense, but I had no idea! Shame on me.
On the other hand, he might well have gotten a new one, and that fact, not the toilet, might have been worth noting.
DNA Boosts Herodotus’ Account of Etruscans as Migrants to Italy
NY Times | April 3, 2007 | NICHOLAS WADE
Posted on 04/03/2007 9:27:29 PM PDT by neverdem
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1811652/posts
|
|
|||
Gods |
Just updating the GGG info, not sending a general distribution. |
||
|
· Mirabilis · Texas AM Anthropology News · Yahoo Anthro & Archaeo · · History or Science & Nature Podcasts · Excerpt, or Link only? · cgk's list of ping lists · |
|||
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
