Ancient tribe Ligures - Ancestry and origin

The Ligurians are known from ancient written sources and were settled in southern France, northern Italy, and the western Alps. They were probably the pre-Indo–European population of the western Alpine region, especially of the Upper Rhine, western Switzerland, the Rhône valley, the flood plain of the Po River, the French and Italian Riviera and Corsica. They are numbered among the ancient European peoples and are the bearers of the Terramare Culture, a Bronze Age culture from the area around Genoa. Ligurians were also settled in western Spain. There is little known of their language prior to the mixing of the language with Celtic. Correspondingly, all assertions of a genetic or linguistic nature about the relationship of the Ligurians to other peoples are speculative.

From the sixth century B.C. on, the Ligurians were forced out of the above-named homelands to the coastal region known today as Liguria, but intermarried with the Celtic population, most of all in the Rhôn region, and produced a mixed population comparable to the Celto–Iberians. From the year 238 B.C. on, they were under the rule of he Roman Republic, according to which they provided, as they had in times before, auxiliary troops in the Roman Legions.

One major settlement of the Ligurians was the coastal area Albingaunum or Album Ingaunum (today, Albenga) of the Ligurian Ingauni.