"The Etruscans seem to be quite different in many ways from other ancient Italians, and archaeological evidence indicates that they spoke a non-Indo-European language," Mountain said. "Because of the cultural and linguistic shifts, scholars see the Etruscans as an enigma."
The Etruscans are the only preclassical European population to date that has been genetically analyzed, Mountain said. Two years ago, Italian geneticists extracted maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA from the bones of 27 people called Etruscans found in six different necropolises (burial sites) in Tuscany. The female lineage was investigated because, unlike the male Y chromosome, many copies of mitochondrial DNA are found in each cell and thus are easier to extract, Mountain explained. The data represent one of the best collections of ancient human DNA in existence. "If you get DNA out of one bone, you can try to say something about the past," Mountain said. "But they managed to get DNA out of quite a few bones." The DNA of 49 people living in the region today was also sampled. Although data from the two groups revealed several differences, Mountain said, the researchers could not interpret if these were meaningful or significant. "What we did was address the question: Do the present-day people look like they could be descendents of the Etruscan population?"
Now this is interesing. The article mentions how archaeologists and others often assume that the people living in an area today are the decendents of any ancient populations hat were around, at least back a few hundred/couple thousand years. Ferinstance, a while back Oxford researchers compared the genetics of an ancient skeleton -- Cheddar man -- with modern people living in the area and found at least one person who shared a direct ancestor. That was 9,000 years and in a way comparable to the problem of Kennewick Man who is from around the same time; but no genetic links have been established in his case with any modern inhabitants.
They raise the possibility that "The Etruscans" were not a large population, but perhaps a small elite subset that we only see archaeologically because of their tombs and temples which of course is simply another problem of relying on a certain class of artifact -- elite goods -- for information on an entire society.