Genetics of the Greek Peleponessus

ngc598 said:

Pfft! Who's this squint-eyed hunk anyway?

Achilles was blond - Ilias I, 197-199



... and Menelaos as well - Odys. III, 324-326



... and I don't want to plough through the whole epos to show more of them among the Greeks.
To all people in denial ... Greek tribes introduced the Blondie to old Hellas.:bigsmile:

Click to expand...

The sources say xanthos, not 'blonde'. People with yellow hair are rare in Europe.

From an old article by Dienekes:

We must also dispel the notion that xanthos always refers to yellow hair, or that purros refers to purely red hair. For the former, we note that Aristophanes used xanthizein to describe roasting meat, which of course does not turn yellow. Additionally, Strabo uses xanthotrichein and leukotrichein (making hair xanthon and making hair “white”) indicating that xanthon was a darker shade than extremely fair hair. George Cedrenus uses it to describe the eyes of the Virgin (xanthommaton); eyes are rarely yellow, unless jaundiced, which seems unlikely in this case. In modern Greek it may be used to describe any color short of black [22]. In ancient Greek, according to Barbara Fowler [28] was any color short of black or dark brown, while Wace [22] believes that it may have been at most auburn. Color terms are notoriously relative; xanthos may only be taken to mean the fair end of the Greek hair continuum, not blond. This impression is enhanced by the descriptions of northern European hair as polios (gray, usually of old people) or leukon (white) to be found in Greek literature (Diodorus Siculus, Adamantius Judaeus).

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general answer; (I think posters who joined some facts I ignored);
if Slavs in Greece were not of slavic blood (or DNA) how to measure their demic input? -
if the first waves of Slavs had distinctive traits inherited from their cradle, some visible % of their input would be seen even if they were not pure when reaching Greece - I'm tempted to think the Slaves which got down to Greece did it rather through central Balkans, the rivers net, and they did not pass across Dalmatia/W-Balkans; so they would have had some DNA visible input even in their journey end -
the recent Greeks show/shew physically regional differences marked enough (more concerning bones than pigmentation as a whole) and these differences seem deeply rooted in past, so even if there have been displaced pops, they did not erase at all the ancient differences in pops making -
I'm sure Greeks had Slav "blood" (at diverse levels according to regions), and as an average this is visible on PCA's (I know PCA's are not the best tools but...) -
I find some reactions on fora lack of distance to History and are inadapted to serious cool discussion.

I guess the problem isn't the existence of blondes among the ancient Greeks or even their arrival with the IE language (an idea that I find doubtful considering that there were strongly depigmented individuals in Neolithic Hungary already), but the juxtaposition of dark Pelasgians and blond Dorians. The Homeric heroes would have been either Pelasgians themselves or their immediate neighbours, but definitely pre-Dorian.

Regarding the relationship of looks, genes and language in the ancient Mediterranean there is another pertinent example: the Tyrrhenian Etruscans who were related to the Lemnian 'Pelasgians' look like Iberians (i. e. the autosomally northernmost Mediterraneans) with a Finnish pull in a PCA. In light of their genetic background and their Urnfield material culture it is perhaps noteworthy that Etruscan Frescoes often feature very blond individuals.

The takeaway is that the association of depigmentation, Indo-European languages and northern invasions in the Mediterranean doesn't really hold, even with the paucity of samples from southern Europe.

ngc598 said:

Pfft! Who's this squint-eyed hunk anyway?

Achilles was blond - Ilias I, 197-199



... and Menelaos as well - Odys. III, 324-326



... and I don't want to plough through the whole epos to show more of them among the Greeks.
To all people in denial ... Greek tribes introduced the Blondie to old Hellas.:bigsmile:

Click to expand...

what colour is this?




what is this?





AND WHAT IS THIS?






ΞΑΝΘΟΣ XANTHOS DOES NOT MEAN BLOND,

MAKEDONIANS HAD A MONTH CALLED XANTHOS

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Macedonian_calendar
COULD A MONTH BE BLOND? NO

then ?
Xanthos according Makedonian is the colour of weapons (iron, after removal of rust) after the removal of rust

the word also exist in ancient Iranian meaning Black iron
ΑKSEINOS PONTOS = black sea,

the removal or rust on steel leaves a light brown colour,
at begining March Makedonians repair their weapons
about today 23 february to spring equinox,
also Xanthos was the extra month every 19 years
Xanthos embolimos


All studies about Greek Dna from palaiolithic till known show that blond was a very small % considering the major brown and secondary black (κυανουν =Blue black)


these are colours of Xanthos





Later by Christians as Xanthos become the april

Blondism is relatively a recent trait among Europeans and some study suggested sexual based growth as this mutation appeared among a few individuals and those women with blonde hair were viewed as sexually appealing so this had lead to a good chance for blonde hair DNA carriers to remain.

In ancient Greece dark hair and skin was viewed as a masculine characteristic because darker skinned individuals likely have higher testosterone, while femininity is often associated with light features (consider the whole Asian region which has a culture of skin lightening among women) Men with fair skin likely have less testosterone or just depigmented.
Men are naturally a bit darker pigmented than women.

In 1438-1439 Byzantine traveller - Lascaris Cananus - visited the area of Lübeck (Λούπηκ) and wrote that the area near Lübeck was called Slavonia (Σθλαβουνία) and that its inhabitants - Wends - spoke a very similar language as Zygiotai (Ζυγιῶται), also known as Melingoi, who lived near the Taygetos Mountains. That language was of course Slavic.

So even in 1438-1439 (!) Slavic was still spoken in some parts of the Peloponnesus.

Taygetos Mountains: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taygetus

It was in the late 1400s or 1500s when the last Peloponnesian Slavs were Hellenized.

==============

Comments from Eurogenes: http://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2017/03/greek-confirmation-bias.html

"The Slavs in Greece" thread: http://www.theapricity.com/forum/showthread.php?131244-The-Slavs-in-Greece

Interesting read, "The plague pandemic and Slavic expansion in the 6th-8th centuries":

http://www.antropologia.uw.edu.pl/AS/as-005.pdf

@ngc598,
It's rarely a good idea to make comments about the "tone" of certain discussions when you've only been around for two months, unless, of course, you're one of our "cloaked" members.

Some of us who have been here for six years and more have had a belly full of nordicist claptrap about the holiness of the blonde, blue-eyed phenotype, how all the accomplishments of the classical Greek and Roman civilizations were the output of Swedes and Germans in disguise and on and on. One dope on dna-forums claimed the Sumerians, the Egyptian pharoahs, you name it, were all Nordics.

That ideology is the bread and butter of the white nationalist groups of eastern Europe, ironically enough.

We still have a "White God" with his own blog who some people still take seriously. A White Nationalist, anti-Semite hosts a big blog on genetics, and you think that getting annoyed with manifestations of it is over the top or a subject for humor? We'll have to agree to disagree.

Oh, it was a year long: one semester Homer, second semester Greek drama and comedy, but unfortunately not in ancient Greek. I wasn't the Classics scholar; that was my husband.

@Moesan,
Very true, and very diplomatically said.

@Yetos,
A lot of the physical descriptions of ancient people are problematic. The Russians were all supposedly "red-haired", my Ligures were all "red-haired". Where did they all go? They obviously meant something different by these terms than the way they are translated.

What, for example, is a wine-dark sea?

Is this it?
https://www.azamaraclubcruises.com/sites/default/files/heros/chania-souda-greece.jpg


Why does Homer describe honey and a nightingale as "chloros"?

Why is Hector's hair kyanos?

Euripides describes blood and tears as chloros too.

This isn't all just poetic license. The words had other meanings. Color meant more to them than something on the color scale. What they meant sometimes was something related to color, but not color itself or color by itself.

It's very hard to make sense of it. That's why we need ancient dna. It's immaterial to me how it comes out. However, as I said above, if the Greek speakers brought fair hair and eyes to Greece they didn't get it from Yamnaya or Catacomb culture.

@ Tomenable

I already about them at post #22
the last Slavic that spoken at peloponese possibly was at Nezera village,
and even with accuracy certain areas that they devastate are known.

@ Angela

Kyanos = Blue
but in hair is the deep black, (blue-black)

@MarkoZ

Did u assume that I'm a Nordicist just because I used the word Pelasgian, actually "Pelasgian"?

I do agree with the idea that the Pre-IE people had many fair features among them already. I always base my conclusions on personal experience and try to find modern parallels. For instance in this case I use North Albanians as an example because it's the group I'm most familiar with, and I noticed that the isolated regions/clans that are almost 100% E-V13 + J2b are also coincidentally the tallest, higher incidence of light eyes (>80% not brown) and of predominantly Dinaric.

And I know it's the same case in the mountainous areas of Greece as I've seen myself Epirus, Acarnania and a bit Aetolia.

Humans were diverse enough to not be that easily influenced in terms of physical traits.

With regards to the Slavs, many Bulgarians were also invited by the Venetians to settle in Peloponnese, and it is statistically known that the Venetians doubled its population within 10 years, except for Mani. Perhaps that's why Mani shows a slightly different admixture as it retained more older "Peloponnesian genes" while the rest was populated by migrants from all over Greece, Crete, Aegean, Bulgaria, and even Asia Minor.

Angela said:

if the Greek speakers brought fair hair and eyes to Greece they didn't get it from Yamnaya or Catacomb culture.

Click to expand...

About 10% of Yamnaya people had blond hair (based on their genetic variants). Ask FireHaired, he compiled this data. Light eyes were also not so rare among them. If later blond hair became more frequent due to selection, then it could start from Yamanaya, because they already had it at low frequencies. Unlike for example Remedello people, who had 0% of blond hair.

MarkoZ said:

I guess the problem isn't the existence of blondes among the ancient Greeks or even their arrival with the IE language (an idea that I find doubtful considering that there were strongly depigmented individuals in Neolithic Hungary already), but the juxtaposition of dark Pelasgians and blond Dorians. The Homeric heroes would have been either Pelasgians themselves or their immediate neighbours, but definitely pre-Dorian.

Regarding the relationship of looks, genes and language in the ancient Mediterranean there is another pertinent example: the Tyrrhenian Etruscans who were related to the Lemnian 'Pelasgians' look like Iberians (i. e. the autosomally northernmost Mediterraneans) with a Finnish pull in a PCA. In light of their genetic background and their Urnfield material culture it is perhaps noteworthy that Etruscan Frescoes often feature very blond individuals.

The takeaway is that the association of depigmentation, Indo-European languages and northern invasions in the Mediterranean doesn't really hold, even with the paucity of samples from southern Europe.

Click to expand...

Today, pigmentation is not my very center of interest if it was before.
But, Markoz, some people have eyes :
Overdepigmentation is unevenly distributed in Europe and in modern times tied for the most to historical moves and osmosis, it’s not a general statement but a region by region, almost a valley by valley precise story, and later modifications are the result of modern life and levelling osmosis in metropoles and industrial regions ; in late history it is not linked to climate, spite surely the selection of the first diverse depigmenting mutation is linked for a big part to climate (but not only, i think). So the 20th Cy overdepigmentation distributions cannot be simplisticly linked to North-South or East-West gradiants. And, no, the most of the blonds people in Southern Europe are not the result of everpresent depigmented individuals, not as a whole, even if someones can be this. Sure Sardinians have received more recent Near-Eastern DNA but as a whole they seem a rather dominantly Neolithical farmers descent and they are very rarely depigmented in the traditional parts of the island. Same for other southern pops were northerners or northeasterners never became dominant.
Some overdepigmentation mutations surely occurred among ‘danubian-mediter’ pop of Anatolian pop (or more and more in some thoughts : a Southeastern-Anatolian pop) or North the Caucasus but the compilation of diverses mutations seems having prospered around South-East Baltic lands, IMO ; here a climatic vector of selection could be imagined. I long to auDNA big samples of ancient pops between Baltic and Ural, to know the exact beginning date of the super-depigmentation increase.


Blond Dorians ? Surely not ; less rare blonds among them ? More credible.
To people who doubt, look at rather serious pigmentations maps compared to mountainous blocks and rivers nets, look at Spain, Italy (N-S, yes, but pockets with specific history), Normandy, Brittany (in their subregions), France as a whole, ex-Yugoslavia : mountains opposed to great rivers, the Black Sea banks in Romania and Bulgaria, Flanders/Wallonia, Wales/East Anglia and so on everywhere ; historic invasions, colonizations, before recent general tendancy to osmosis in metropolis and industrial regions, and political deportations in East Europe. I can give more than an example.
I speak here of LBA and later pops moves, I've no theory to date concerning PIE people because I have not enough clues to date, no cristal bowl.


To answer other forumers. Please, let's re-read serious papers and ALSO let's put our brains and good sense at work; pigmentation of skin between males and females of SAME groups vary for the most for the visage more than for the body (among Europoids); among some females, it's the fatness of skin which makes it a bit lighter - I'm not sure there is a direct link to testosterone, mybe rather indirect,(I 've to re-read my too here!)-
For me, overdepigmentation increase began before Yamna time (PIE or not) and not so close to Caucasus, I don't believe it can be strictly linked to them; all right, it is not proved today.
Good discussion lads (and ladies!)

ERRATA: Hell, I made a mistake!
in my post I was speaking of Neolithic Anatolians and Southeastern: my aim was to speak of a rather ancient Southeastern-Europe and West-Anatolian ancient common pop, idea which is running on since some time.

Angela said:

@ngc598,
It's rarely a good idea to make comments about the "tone" of certain discussions when you've only been around for two months, unless, of course, you're one of our "cloaked" members.


This isn't all just poetic license. The words had other meanings. Color meant more to them than something on the color scale. What they meant sometimes was something related to color, but not color itself or color by itself.

It's very hard to make sense of it. That's why we need ancient dna. It's immaterial to me how it comes out. However, as I said above, if the Greek speakers brought fair hair and eyes to Greece they didn't get it from Yamnaya or Catacomb culture.

Click to expand...

I cannot resist, sorry:
in french a person "rit jaune" (is laughing yellow), in breton "ema o c'hoarzhin glas" (is laughing 'blue', or 'plant green' or 'pale gree grey blue' = blemish)
= 'to force a laugh'
- breton: 'du gant an naon' (black with hunger) = almost starving -

Tomenable said:

About 10% of Yamnaya people had blond hair (based on their genetic variants). Ask FireHaired, he compiled this data. Light eyes were also not so rare among them. If later blond hair became more frequent due to selection, then it could start from Yamanaya, because they already had it at low frequencies. Unlike for example Remedello people, who had 0% of blond hair.

Click to expand...

I knew you'd show up.

Read:
Iain Mathiesen et al
http://www.nature.com/nature/index.html

Olivia Wlde et al
http://www.pnas.org/content/111/13/4832.full

Believe what you want, as you undoubtedly will, but a few depigmentation snps here and there don't equal people having blonde hair. You need to have a whole panoply of them.

Moesan: I cannot resist, sorry:
in french a person "rit jaune" (is laughing yellow), in breton "ema o c'hoarzhin glas" (is laughing 'blue', or 'plant green' or 'pale gree grey blue' = blemish)
= 'to force a laugh'
- breton: 'du gant an naon' (black with hunger) = almost starving -

Click to expand...

I love it.

Nik said:

@MarkoZ

Did u assume that I'm a Nordicist just because I used the word Pelasgian, actually "Pelasgian"?

I do agree with the idea that the Pre-IE people had many fair features among them already. I always base my conclusions on personal experience and try to find modern parallels. For instance in this case I use North Albanians as an example because it's the group I'm most familiar with, and I noticed that the isolated regions/clans that are almost 100% E-V13 + J2b are also coincidentally the tallest, higher incidence of light eyes (>80% not brown) and of predominantly Dinaric.

And I know it's the same case in the mountainous areas of Greece as I've seen myself Epirus, Acarnania and a bit Aetolia.

Humans were diverse enough to not be that easily influenced in terms of physical traits.

With regards to the Slavs, many Bulgarians were also invited by the Venetians to settle in Peloponnese, and it is statistically known that the Venetians doubled its population within 10 years, except for Mani. Perhaps that's why Mani shows a slightly different admixture as it retained more older "Peloponnesian genes" while the rest was populated by migrants from all over Greece, Crete, Aegean, Bulgaria, and even Asia Minor.

Click to expand...

No worries, I didn't mean to imply anything about you personally. It's just that such thinking has permeated the discourse for more than a century to the point that much of it has acquired the status of conventional wisdom. Hardly surprising considering that many of the most influential 'scholars' in the field up until very recently have been very unsavoury figures to say the least. The discourse surrounding ancient Greece is especially poisonous due to continuous attempts by rightist Europeans to claim it as theirs, presumably because of embarrassment with their own past.

As for light pigmentation, I find it difficult to see any pattern related to language or Y-DNA except at a regional level. I guess if one dug into the allelic background of the associated variants one would find that the extreme levels of light pigmentation in parts of Europe are the results of recent founder effects with very deep roots in the Neolithic.

Angela said:

but a few depigmentation snps here and there don't equal people having blonde hair

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But in Neolithic Southern Europe the amount of light hair SNPs was actually not even a few, but big fat zero.

If Iberians, Italians or Greeks have some blonde-haired people among them, this is all Post-Neolithic input. Also Indo-Europeans did not come to Southern Europe directly from Yamnaya. They came from Central Europe. So you should not look at Yamnaya pigmentation, but at pigmentation of Bronze Age Central Europeans (who were just 50-70% Yamnaya-derived).

Corded Ware and Central European Bell Beaker Proto-Celtic and Proto-Italic people were lighter than Yamnaya.

MarkoZ said:

I guess if one dug into the allelic background of the associated variants one would find that the extreme levels of light pigmentation in parts of Europe are the results of recent founder effects with very deep roots in the Neolithic.

Click to expand...

Neolithic? Are you still in 2014 when they published Loschbour WHG and declared that all European hunters were dark? In the Current Year we already know that Mesolithic Eastern Europeans from Latvia to Ukraine were depigmented.

Tomenable said:

But in Neolithic Southern Europe the amount of light hair SNPs was actually not even a few, but big fat zero.

If Iberians, Italians or Greeks have some blonde-haired people among them, this is all Post-Neolithic input.

Click to expand...

There's a good possibility that's true. Certainly, the Iberian Neolithic and even MN was darker than even the Anatolian Neolithic. That may be because they had more admixture with the darker WHG than did the people of the early Central European Neolithic, but that's just conjecture.

We have a handful for Greece.

I can't say much of anything about Italy because the only autosomal ancient dna we have is a few samples from Remedello and Otzi, who was fair skinned but brown haired and eyed, probably like me.

However, in the Neolithic in Hungary we do have blonde, blue eyed, fair skinned people. So, did they exist in Southern Europe as well by the MN, or was it Bronze Age or later and brought by people who had traveled down through Central Europe in the Bronze Age? I'd say probably Bronze Age and later, but we'll have to wait and see.

See Gamba et al, 2014 for the first example, although subsequent papers found more. This was by no means an isolated occurrence.
http://www.nature.com/article-asset...comms6257/images_hires/m685/ncomms6257-f3.jpg



We've been digressing from the topic of the paper for quite a while, so perhaps we should end it here. These are questions which ancient dna will answer.

Tomenable said:

But in Neolithic Southern Europe the amount of light hair SNPs was actually not even a few, but big fat zero.

If Iberians, Italians or Greeks have some blonde-haired people among them, this is all Post-Neolithic input. Also Indo-Europeans did not come to Southern Europe directly from Yamnaya. They came from Central Europe. So you should not look at Yamnaya pigmentation, but at pigmentation of Bronze Age Central Europeans (who were just 50-70% Yamnaya-derived).

Corded Ware and Central European Bell Beaker Proto-Celtic and Proto-Italic people were lighter than Yamnaya.

Neolithic? Are you still in 2014 when they published Loschbour WHG and declared that all European hunters were dark? In the Current Year we already know that Mesolithic Eastern Europeans from Latvia to Ukraine were depigmented.

Click to expand...

Though unless I'm greatly underestimating their proficiency at hunting and gathering, these cannot be at the root of modern levels of depigmentation.

The question where depigmentation variants evolved in the first place is another thing altogether.

Nik said:

@MarkoZ

Did u assume that I'm a Nordicist just because I used the word Pelasgian, actually "Pelasgian"?

I do agree with the idea that the Pre-IE people had many fair features among them already. I always base my conclusions on personal experience and try to find modern parallels. For instance in this case I use North Albanians as an example because it's the group I'm most familiar with, and I noticed that the isolated regions/clans that are almost 100% E-V13 + J2b are also coincidentally the tallest, higher incidence of light eyes (>80% not brown) and of predominantly Dinaric.

And I know it's the same case in the mountainous areas of Greece as I've seen myself Epirus, Acarnania and a bit Aetolia.

Humans were diverse enough to not be that easily influenced in terms of physical traits.

With regards to the Slavs, many Bulgarians were also invited by the Venetians to settle in Peloponnese, and it is statistically known that the Venetians doubled its population within 10 years, except for Mani. Perhaps that's why Mani shows a slightly different admixture as it retained more older "Peloponnesian genes" while the rest was populated by migrants from all over Greece, Crete, Aegean, Bulgaria, and even Asia Minor.

Click to expand...

MaybeBlondandlighteyesenterAlbanian
Damn space bar problem

Maybe Blondism and light eyes enter Albanian tribes from female genes,
If I remember correct Albania shows enough Slavic mtDNA,
and only, Slavic vocabulary is enough in Albanian language,
Ithink 3rd after Romano-Latin and Greek.


@ TO ALL FORUMERS
anyway a blond girl is something exotic for a Med guy,
if Ancient Greeks were Blonds or had such genes, do you believe they turn brown and black hair by the etrance of Slavs and Bulgarians? as you claim?
IF I FOLLOW FALLMAYER THEN MODERN GREEKS SHOULD BE BLOND at LEAST THE % of BLONDISM IN SLAVS CORRECT? ARE THEY?
is n't this an ATOPON

If I remember correct Slavs are more (at an average lvl) blonds than Modern Greeks,
So if population changed as you said, Blondism should be higher in Greece by Slavic entrance, is it?
but still is very low in Greece,

and because I tired with this
it is in Greek by the work of AUTH Pr Triantafilidis
University of CRETE
University of Pavia Italy
Search Center of Moscow
Stanford University
Dr J Stamatoyannopoulos
etc

Με την ανάλυση του μιτοχονδριακού DNA διαπιστώθηκε9 ότι τα εξετασθέντα άτομα διακρίνονται σε 21 ομάδες (απλότυπους) και εκτιμήθηκε ξέχωρα για κάθε μία η ηλικία δημιουργίας της, στην Εγγύς Ανατολή και την Ευρώπη. Με βάση μαθηματικούς υπολογισμούς, εκτιμήθηκε ότι το DNA των Ελλήνων έχει την ακόλουθη προέλευση: 8% τα πρόσφατα χρόνια (περίπου 3.000 χρόνια από σήμερα), 20% κατά τη νεολιθική εποχή (9.000-3.000), 44% κατά την τελευταία άνω παλαιολιθική εποχή (14.500-9.000), 14,5% κατά τη μέση άνω παλαιολιθική εποχή (26.000 – 14.500 χρόνια) και ένα ποσοστό 11% κατά την αρχική άνω παλαιολιθική εποχή (45.500 –26.000).


SO by Mother part Greeks are > 75% same withe ones before 3100 BC
as for male part the search of Stanford if remember correct gives 2/3 epipalaiolithic and previous era and only 1/5 IE era

more
J2a1h-M319 in Crete is the oldest found
The lack of J2b-M12 at Bosporos shows the maritime root entrance of this gene
lack of V-13 and M78 before iron age

By DUTH (Paschou) at a reasearch started at 2014 and the first symposium-congres about palaiolithic neolithic Greece
we know they dedected I1 presence and other genes, in palaiolithic Makedonia,
which keeps the epipaliolithic era till iron age,

So FALLMAYER THEORY
BLACK ATHENA THEORY
etc all collapse


INFACT The IE Theory of horse riders and chariots etc which fits and is tied with IE above Istros to Central North and West Europe
does not fit in case of Greece, here fits more the C Renfrew theory of Neolithic Farmers