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I told you so:

www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2019/april/neolithic-britain-where-did-the-first-farmers-come-from.html

The southern route

The intrigue doesn't stop there. When the original Neolithic farmers left the Aegean and began spreading out across Europe, the population very quickly split into two rough groups that developed slightly different cultures.

One of these went north along the Danube and mixed with the hunter-gatherer populations of Central Europe, while the other took a more southerly route along the Mediterranean before reaching Iberia.

While we know that the hunter-gatherers of Britain share close ties with those from Scandinavia, the Neolithic culture shows a mix of both these Central European and Mediterranean traditions. It is difficult to fully understand where the Neolithic farmers came from.

While it might make more sense for them to have crossed over from Central Europe group, the genetics show that the new influx of Neolithic farmers came instead from the Iberian contingent that travelled first along the Mediterranean and then up the Atlantic coast.

'To some extent, this is quite surprising,' says Tom. 'Culturally the Neolithic Britons looks like a mix, but genetically they are very much more Iberian and Mediterranean then they are central European.

It is not surprising. There was no location corresponding to Britain in the Aesir myths. The Brutus expedition is what accounts for Britain, which followed exactly the route described above.

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www.nationalgeographic.com/history/magazine/2020/05-06/face-7500-year-old-woman-reveals-gibraltar-earliest-humans/

The skull’s age remained a mystery for many years. In 2019 the results of a landmark study proved through DNA analysis that it belonged to a woman who lived 7,500 years ago, making it the oldest remnant of a modern female woman found in Gibraltar to date.

Analysis also revealed that the skull’s genetic ancestry lay far east of the Iberian Peninsula. The presence of genes from across the Mediterranean gave archaeologists new clues about how ancient humans traveled when agriculture was spreading through Europe.
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The results told the researchers a great deal: The skull belonged to a woman who lived around 5400 B.C.—many millennia after the Neanderthals of Gibraltar had become extinct. She was slightly built, light-skinned, with dark hair and eyes. She was also lactose intolerant (a common trait for that period).

Dated to 7,500 years ago, Calpeia’s life corresponds to the later Neolithic period. She lived at a time when agriculture and raising livestock were spreading across the Iberian Peninsula, displacing the old hunter-gatherer model. Her lactose intolerance indicates that dairy farming was most likely not part of her culture.
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Researchers were most excited about what DNA revealed about Calpeia’s ancestry. Only 10 percent of Calpeia’s genome comes from the population found in the Iberian Peninsula, while the remaining 90 percent has its origin in Anatolia, modern-day Turkey.

I told you so:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/an-ancient-monument-associated-with-King-Arthur-is-Older-than-Stonehenge-180978541/

Arthur’s Stone dates to around 3700 B.C.E., making it a millennium older than Stonehenge, which was constructed around 2500 B.C.E.
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The number of Neolithic features present in the landscape surrounding Arthur’s Stone indicate “that this was a place that people came to for gatherings, meetings [and] feasting … and a place that retained its significance for centuries,” as Thomas tells Live Science’s Tom Metcalfe.
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Researchers identified two distinct phases in Arthur’s Stone’s construction. Initially, reports Current Archaeology, the hilltop tomb consisted of a long mound of stacked turf that pointed southwest, toward Dorstone Hill. It was surrounded by a palisade of wooden posts that eventually decayed, leading the mound to collapse.

After the first mound fell, Neolithic people rebuilt it with a larger avenue of post pillars, two rock chambers and an upright stone. These later posts faced the southeast rather than the southwest.

Back when almost everyone else was saying Camelot was after the fall of Rome, I was saying it was from the Neolithic era, because Giants were among Arthur's opponents:

Another origin story claims that Arthur killed a giant, whose elbows left impressions in the soil as he fell, at the site.

(And yes, I still believe Arthur and Grendel are the same person.)

See also:

https://trueleft.createaforum.com/mythical-world/stonehenge-and-the-neolithic/

Early farmers from across Europe directly descended from Neolithic Aegeans

Significance

One of the most enduring and widely debated questions in prehistoric archaeology concerns the origins of Europe’s earliest farmers: Were they the descendants of local hunter-gatherers, or did they migrate from southwestern Asia, where farming began? We recover genome-wide DNA sequences from early farmers on both the European and Asian sides of the Aegean to reveal an unbroken chain of ancestry leading from central and southwestern Europe back to Greece and northwestern Anatolia. Our study provides the coup de grâce to the notion that farming spread into and across Europe via the dissemination of ideas but without, or with only a limited, migration of people.

Abstract

Farming and sedentism first appeared in southwestern Asia during the early Holocene and later spread to neighboring regions, including Europe, along multiple dispersal routes. Conspicuous uncertainties remain about the relative roles of migration, cultural diffusion, and admixture with local foragers in the early Neolithization of Europe. Here we present paleogenomic data for five Neolithic individuals from northern Greece and northwestern Turkey spanning the time and region of the earliest spread of farming into Europe. We use a novel approach to recalibrate raw reads and call genotypes from ancient DNA and observe striking genetic similarity both among Aegean early farmers and with those from across Europe. Our study demonstrates a direct genetic link between Mediterranean and Central European early farmers and those of Greece and Anatolia, extending the European Neolithic migratory chain all the way back to southwestern Asia.

Entire article: https://www.pnas.org/content/113/25/6886

By ~2500 BC, Turanians arrived in Britain and almost completely replaced Neolithic lineages, giving us a lower bound for when Brutus, Arthur, etc. would have been around (see figure 3):
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323916898_The_Beaker_phenomenon_and_the_genomic_transformation_of_northwest_Europe

Interestingly, around this same time period, Troy was destroyed, corresponding to the major Turanian migrations which were occurring:

The second destruction took place around 2300 BC, as part of a crisis that affected other sites in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troy#Troy_II

Homer's Troy is believed to have existed around 1000 years later, however:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troy#Troy_VI-VII

If we take the story of the Trojan war literally, the timing doesn't make sense for Aeneas, Brutus, or Thor to have left after Homer's Trojan war. But it does make sense if ancient authors had conflated multiple similar stories of wars and migrations over the prior thousands of years.

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As for Aeneas's founding of the Roman lineage, some archaeological evidence suggests the Etruscans could have founded Rome or otherwise heavily influenced it. They even invented the fasces.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etruscan_civilization#Possible_founding_of_Rome

The Etruscans continued to speak a non-Indo-European language into Roman times (and I think it makes sense to imagine it was a language brought over during the Neolithic migrations).

Some genetic studies found Etruscans can trace their genetics back to the Neolithic as well:

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,[13][69] 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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etruscan_civilization#Genetic_research

I don't recall if this was picked up in the Diffusion Series, but the Etruscan word for god is ais/eis (plural aisar/eisar). That may sound very familiar!
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Etruscan_word_list
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aesir

Some linguists have speculated Etruscan can be placed in the "Tyrsenian" language family--which seems like it would clearly be linked to Neolithic dispersal:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyrsenian_languages

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Brutus, Aeneas's descendant, continued migrating to Britain, according to myths.

Neolithic individuals from southern France and Britain are also significantly closer to Iberian Early Neolithic farmers than they are to central European Early Neolithic farmers (Fig. 2b), consistent with a previous analysis of a Neolithic genome from Ireland.
[...]
Our results suggest that a portion of the ancestry of the Neolithic populations of Britain was derived from migrants who spread along the Atlantic coast. Megalithic tombs document substantial interaction along the Atlantic façade of Europe, and our results are consistent with such interactions reflecting south-to-north movements of people.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323916898_The_Beaker_phenomenon_and_the_genomic_transformation_of_northwest_Europe

Above we can also see they found evidence of seperate Danubian Basin and coastal dispersions that were known from archaeology:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Expansion_n%C3%A9olithique.png

By ~4000 BC, they had made it to Britain (according to archaeology):

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chronology_of_arrival_times_of_the_Neolithic_transition_in_Europe.jpg

But not before passing through Aquitaine/Vasconia and northern France (according to mythology and the map above).

Geoffrey of Monmouth's account tells much the same story, but in greater detail.[11]
[...]
After some adventures in north Africa and a close encounter with the Sirens, Brutus discovers another group of exiled Trojans living on the shores of the Tyrrhenian Sea, led by the prodigious warrior Corineus. In Gaul, Corineus provokes a war with Goffarius Pictus, king of Aquitaine, after hunting in the king's forests without permission. Brutus's nephew Turonus dies in the fighting, and the city of Tours is founded where he is buried. The Trojans win most of their battles but are conscious that the Gauls have the advantage of numbers, so go back to their ships and sail for Britain, then called Albion. They land on "Totonesium litus"—"the sea-coast of Totnes". They meet the giant descendants of Albion and defeat them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brutus_of_Troy#Historia_Regum_Britanniae

According to genetics, the giants were defeated indeed:

Unlike other European Neolithic populations, we detect no resurgence of hunter-gatherer ancestry at any time during the Neolithic in Britain. Genetic affinities with Iberian Neolithic individuals indicate that British Neolithic people were mostly descended from Aegean farmers who followed the Mediterranean route of dispersal.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-019-0871-9

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As for southern Spain and Aquitaine/Vasconia, Greek/Roman writer Strabo reported the Tartessian people of Spain traced their history back 6000 years. Any ideas of how this region fits into mythology? (I don't think Tartessos is Atlantis, as some have proposed, since that would be the opposite direction of the Neolithic migrations.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tartessian_language#History

From the discussion here:
https://trueleft.createaforum.com/ancient-world/the-ancient-rolemodels-of-our-enemies/

Racially, we could speculate that Occitania had more Aryan blood than the rest of medieval Christendom in part due to absence of Viking genetic imprint, hence not coincidentally came up with the most Gnostic form of Christianity.

Correspondingly, in Al-Andalus:

The Turdetani of the Roman period are generally considered the heirs of the Tartessian culture. Strabo mentions that: "The Turdetanians are ranked as the wisest of the Iberians; and they make use of an alphabet, and possess records of their ancient history, poems, and laws written in verse that are six thousand years old, as they assert."[14]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tartessian_language#History

Assuming their dating chronology is at least somewhat accurate, this could easily mean the Tartessians traced their mythological origins back to the Neolithic diffusion. (Note how some sites in Occitania are also of similar age):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Chronology_of_arrival_times_of_the_Neolithic_transition_in_Europe.jpg

The Tartessian language is a non-Indo-European language, and I would speculate it's most likely it's a remnant of the languages brought by the Neolithic diffusion.


It has been hypothesized that the Basque language is the last remaining member of the "Vasconic languages". The originator of this theory suggests it is a Paleolithic language, some others have suggested it was a non-Indo-European language related to Turanian migrations, but I think it is just as likely to be Neolithic. This doesn't necessarily mean Basque culture as a whole retains more Aryan qualities than others, just that, being in an isolated backwater, the language was not replaced.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasconic_substrate_hypothesis

However, note that the swastika is a customary symbol of the Basques, and I think I read it was also used by other "Paleohispanic" cultures.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lauburu

Sparse data has prevented the Tartessian language from being grouped under the Vasconic languages, but, again, it was among the non-Indo-European languages spoken in Spain into Roman times.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleohispanic_languages