Genetics of the Greek Peleponessus

"The Maniots differ from all other Peloponneseans by PCA (Figure 1b) and ADMIXTURE (Figure 1e) analysis. They also differ from mainland, island and Asia Minor Greek populations (data not shown) and from all the other populations of Supplementary Figure 4, which have been compared by PCA analysis, but they partially overlap with the Sicilians and the Italians.


Is this saying that the Maniots are so different from all populations studied, so isolated, and the ONLY people they overlap with are Sicilians? Not even other Greeks? I want to make sure I am interpreting this correctly.
 
This is the supplementary figure 4, the partially overlap is with Sicilians and East/West Tayetos. I've seen Mani group isolated but a couple of them overlap with the Sicilian group (in green).

free image upload
 
This is the supplementary figure 4, the partially overlap is with Sicilians and East/West Tayetos. I've seen Mani group isolated but a couple of them overlap with the Sicilian group (in green).

free image upload

Deep Mani was apparently even more isolated that the other populations.

It's also very important not to overinterpret PCAs. If you drill down deep enough you can get a cline in your own family.
 
What I mean is, if the only populations overlapping with "Deep Mani" were the other people in the far south Peloponnese and Sicilians, but not Anatolian Greeks, islanders, Cypriots, etc. then it means on a chart with all of these, the Maniots would not cluster with anyone else really.
 
I start to think that gedmatch calculators were made for diaspora Jews and New Worlders, because more professional studies using more populations with accurate sources tend to display different population distances, on gedmatch most calculators can't differentiate a Jewish from a Greek or Cypriot yet these populations have no historical connections nor genetic overlap.
 
What I mean is, if the only populations overlapping with "Deep Mani" were the other people in the far south Peloponnese and Sicilians, but not Anatolian Greeks, lslanders, Cypriots, etc. then it means on a chart with all of these, the Maniots would not cluster with anyone else really.

I don't understand what you're trying to get at.

If you're referring to the quote I posted from the paper, you're distorting it. What it says is the following:

"The Maniots differ from all other Peloponneseans by PCA (Figure 1b) and ADMIXTURE (Figure 1e) analysis. They also differ from mainland, island and Asia Minor Greek populations (data not shown) and from all the other populations of Supplementary Figure 4, which have been compared by PCA analysis, but they partially overlap with the Sicilians and the Italians."

This is a sometimes confusingly worded paper, but I don't see anything there that says the overlap is only with Sicilians and Southern Italians. It says "Sicilians and Italians". Yet, the PCA includes Italians and I don't see any overlap, so they may be referring to other things they see in the results in Admixture or that weren't published. It also doesn't separate out Southern Italians.

As to the PCA, Deep Mani is very isolated geographically from other areas in the Peloponnesus, so these people are going to have a good amount of drift, which you can see because there's a cluster of them to the right. The only overlap of Sicilians with Deep Mani is with two outlier samples. The overlap is with East Tayetos, who are also Maniotes, but less isolated, from my understanding. If that's wrong I hope some of our Greek members will correct the record.

Also, where do you get that the people of Deep Mani overlap with people of the "far south Peloponnesus"? I assume that by the latter you mean the SE Laconia sample already used in Paschou et al. This paper, to which Paschou is a contributor, specifically states that the Laconian samples are actually closer to the rest of the Peloponnesus samples.

Please read the appropriate posts upthread.

The people of the Peloponnesus as a whole are very similar to Italians, and particularly to Sicilians. That's something I've been telling you for years, for all the good it did me.

You also really have to stop overinterpreting PCA results. They are only one tool, and not the best. Also, check which samples are being used, and try to look at it as objectively as you can, and not always with an eye to saving your pet theories.
 
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My point was those isolated Maniots are not similar to Aegean islanders or Anatolian Greeks, which means they aren't isolated due to inflated West Asian affinity or anything. They must be isolated for another reason, such as inbreeding or lack of outside influence which caused genetic drift away from every other population.
 
BelarusiansRussiansPolishUkrainiansFrenchItaliansBasqueAndalusians
Deep Mani0.7 (0.1)1.6 (0.7)0.9 (0.4)1.0 (0.3)6.4 (3.5)25.3 (21.7)0.3 (0.2)7.6 (5.1)
West Tayetos4.9 (5.1)8.6 (6.9)6.8 (5.4)6.5 (5.7)16.4 (12.7)41.5 (32.5)0.6 (0.5)15.2 (11.1)
East Tayetos5.7 (3.4)10.9 (4.0)7.9 (3.7)8.0 (3.7)27.7 (4.8)58.0 (20.7)2.0 (1.4)27.0 (4.3)
North Tsakonia3.9 (1.7)8.2 (2.1)5.0 (2.2)6.0 (2.2)26.7 (3.5)51.2 (4.6)1.5 (1.1)26.9 (3.5)
South Tsakonia0.2 (0.0)0.9 (0.4)0.4 (0.1)0.6 (0.2)4.1 (2.9)14.2 (11.0)0.2 (0.1)5.3 (3.8)
a The first number for each pair of populations indicates the average shared ancestry for values of K between 4 and 8, while the number in parenthesis indicates the s.d.



BelarusiansRussiansPolishUkrainiansFrenchItaliansBasqueAndalusians
Argolis5.4 (1.5)12.2 (1.2)5.8 (0.8)6.8 (1.1)39.1 (19.2)94.7 (4.8)2.8 (1.4)60.5 (5.9)
Corinthia5.9 (1.7)13.0 (1.3)6.3 (1)7.5 (1.3)41.2 (18.5)94.9 (4.0)3.1 (1.7)62.0 (5.9)
Achaea6.5 (1.7)13.8 (1.1)7.0 (0.8)8.1 (1.1)41.4 (18.4)94.8 (4.0)2.7 (1.4)61.3 (5.8)
Arcadia5.3 (1.8)10.9 (2.4)5.2 (1.2)6.2 (1.5)39.1 (18.2)85.4 (14.6)2.4 (1.4)53.8 (9.1)
Elis6.1 (1.3)13.1 (1.2)6.5 (0.8)7.6 (1.1)41.4 (18.3)95.0 (3.3)3.3 (1.7)61.6 (5.6)
Messenia6.7 (1.7)14.4 (1.2)7.3 (0.9)8.5 (1.2)42.6 (18.4)95.2 (4.0)2.7 (1.3)61.8 (5.7)
Laconia4.8 (1.2)11.4 (1.5)5.2 (0.9)6.4 (1.1)41.1 (14.6)96.1 (2.3)2.3 (1.4)59.8 (5.6)


Population
N
Proportion of Pairs with IBD2
Mean (SD) Length (cM)3
Mean Pairwise IBD (cM)4
IBD Shared With Deep Mani (n=22)1
Achaea
21
44.2%
3.0 (1.1)
1.8
Arcadia
13
57.3%
3.0 (1.1)
2.6
Argolis
16
38.4%
3.1 (1.2)
1.8
Corinthia
16
43.2%
3.0 (1.3)
1.8
East Tayetos
23
94.3%
3.7 (1.9)
35.2
Elis
23
53.0%
3.2 (1.3)
2.7
Laconia
26
73.8%
3.4 (1.5)
11.3
Messenia
21
54.1%
3.2 (1.2)
2.8
Northern Tsakonia
9
65.2%
3.2 (1.3)
3.9
Southern Tsakonia
15
69.1%
3.2 (1.4)
4.2
West Tayetos
24
96.2%
3.6 (1.8)
36.9
IBD Shared With Southern Tsakonia (n=15)1
Achaea
21
60.0%
3.2 (1.3)
3.3
Arcadia
13
78.5%
3.4 (1.5)
5.1
Argolis
16
65.8%
3.4 (1.6)
4.2
Corinthia
16
70.4%
3.1 (1.2)
3.5
Deep Mani
22
69.1%
3.2 (1.4)
4.2
East Tayetos
23
89.0%
3.2 (1.4)
7.0
Elis
23
64.1%
3.2 (1.2)
3.2
Laconia
26
88.0%
3.5 (2.0)
9.7
Messenia
21
64.4%
3.2 (1.3)
3.5
Northern Tsakonia
9
100.0%
4.4 (2.7)
94.1
 
My point was those isolated Maniots are not similar to Aegean islanders or Anatolian Greeks, which means they aren't isolated due to inflated West Asian affinity or anything. They must be isolated for another reason, such as inbreeding or lack of outside influence which caused genetic drift away from every other population.

The Maniotes as a whole, including East and West Tayetos, don't have "inflated" West Asian ancestry. They certainly do have "Caucasus" ancestry, and at levels extremely similar to Sicilians, which I've also tried to explain to you for years. High levels of "Caucasus" ancestry runs all through the Balkans as well.

What I find rather amusing about all of this is that the people of the Tayetos, whom Fallermayer was so convinced were Slavs, should be so "Sicilian like". :)
 
Yetos said:
if Ancient Greeks were Blonds or had such genes, do you believe they turn brown and black hair by the etrance of Slavs

Of course not.

Rather due to gene flow from Non-European parts of the Hellenistic world into Greece proper:

http://www.theopavlidis.com/MidEast/part10.htm

Population Peaks and Modern Heritage

Modern Greeks like to emphasize their descent from Greeks of the classical era. A more realistic lineage is from Greeks of the Hellenistic era when the number of people identifying themselves as Greeks reached its peak. The number stayed high till the Arab conquest of the 7th century CE. That event started a series of steep declines, in particular, those that followed the Seljuk and Ottoman Turk conquests with conversions to Islam and adoption of other languages [SV71]. In the west the Greek population decline came as southern Italy and Sicily became part of Italian kingdoms with Greeks adopting both the western version of Christianity and the Italian language (although Greek was spoken in some villages till the 20th century). Therefore descendants of the Hellenistic period Greeks could be found not only in Greece but also in Italy, Turkey, Syria, Egypt, and other parts of the Middle East and Northern Africa. Because of population movements inhabitants of modern Greece descend not only from the Greeks of the classical era but also from Greeks of the largest area of the Hellenistic influence.

We may also ask what happened to the ancient people of Anatolia such as the Hittites, the Phrygians, and the Lydians who all had kingdoms during the 2000BCE to 500BCE period. Croesus (of extraordinary wealth fame) was the last king of Lydia. Gordias (of Gordian knot fame) and Midas (of the golden touch fame) were legendary kings of Phrygia. They all came under Persian rule around 500BCE and under Greek rule two hundred years later. Their descendants almost certainly ended up as Greek speaking subjects of the Hellenistic kingdoms.
 
Try using data, not sheer conjecture to support your own agenda.
From Anthrogenica (not sure which of these two users is closer to the truth) about 23andMe results of Greeks:

http://www.anthrogenica.com/showthr...ists-in-Greece&p=144047&viewfull=1#post144047

Note that 23andMe does not tell us about very deep ancestry, only about ancestry from the Common Era (so if someone gets any Non-European admixtures in 23andMe, it must be due to gene flow into Europe during post-Hellenistic times):

eastara said:
Greeks are not a homogeneous ethnicity, according to 23andMe autosomally they range from 100% European for the Continental Greeks through considerable percent Middle East in West Anatolia and some of the island, to 100% Middle East for Cyprus and Pontic Greeks from South East Black Sea coast.

Of course only Balkan Greeks have potentially Slavic and Albanian admixture and some of it is very recent. Those further East are just Hellenised Anatolians and other non European ethnicities.

However most of the non converted Eastern Greeks were expelled from Anatolia and now a big mix up is going on in Greece, which eventually will homogenise the population to half European, half Anatolian.
sciencediver said:
Nice propaganda right there. Cypriots come out as 50% Near East 50% European. As for Anatolian Greeks, they don't even differ from islanders if you want to go by 23andme. They come out as 75%+ European, with the exception of Pontic/Black Sea Greeks who show up as fully Near Eastern.

The mainlanders have already mixed with the refugees from Asia Minor since 1920, and their Near East score ranges from 0 to 15%.

In any case, it is obvious that Greeks have a lot of recent, post-Hellenistic (dating back to Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman times) Near Eastern admixture. And we still don't know how much of mixing had been taking place in Hellenistic times.

23andMe simply does not go so far back into the past.

The only way to find out is to examine aDNA from Classical Greece and other periods.
 
All those Greek soldiers who married Persian women during Alexander's invasion of Persia.

Do you think that all of those soldiers stayed in Asia instead of coming back to Greece ???
 
what we see here in my opininon is that maniots and tsakones have a very unique genome because of their isolation.In fact deep mani is more isolated than east and west taygetos maniots.
We also see that laconias share a big part of their genome with both of them, and we also see that (apart from the other laconians) tsakonians and maniots are the closest related between them rather than their neighbouring messenian and arcadian respectively.Even if west taygetos is located in messenia and tsakones are geograpicaly arcadians. Yes tsakonia is in arcadia not laconia but linguisticaly and as we see in the research also geneticaly they are laconians.
So the maniots because of their isolation, probably because of some kind of a founder effect share less dna to the italians than "normal" peloponneseans
The most "italians" amongst the peloponneseans are the laconians but all the peloponneseans share a high percentage of their dna with the italians (probaly higher than the asia minor populations)
 
Not that I care about the 'Europeanness' of assorted populations, but for a population with significant Asian influx modern Greeks are nestled a bit too neatly between the neighbouring Albanians and Western Anatolians. Was there a replacement in Albania as well?

Also what do we make of the fact that the Maniotes of all, in whom historians and anthropologists saw a remnant tribe of the Dorians due to their appearances & alleged warrior ethos, look to be the most Caucasus-Iranian shifted of the tested populations, with the lowest affinity to present North Europeans? The former affinity exists at elevated levels as far north and west as Croatia and perhaps beyond, so it cannot be considered recent.
 
All those Greek soldiers who married Persian women during Alexander's invasion of Persia.

Do you think that all of those soldiers stayed in Asia instead of coming back to Greece ???

Admixture events that happened 2000 years ago likely have little to no effect on modern population. If someone was 1/2 Persian living in Sparta then his descendants will likely be around 1/1024th Persian or so. Greece due to geography was close to Asia Minor so they received some recent Anatolian admixture but not enough to make their genome West Asian and even those populations were related to Hellenes, aka not Turks but Luwinians, Hittites, Pre Indo European Mediterraneans.
 
From Anthrogenica (not sure which of these two users is closer to the truth) about 23andMe results of Greeks:

http://www.anthrogenica.com/showthr...ists-in-Greece&p=144047&viewfull=1#post144047

Note that 23andMe does not tell us about very deep ancestry, only about ancestry from the Common Era (so if someone gets any Non-European admixtures in 23andMe, it must be due to gene flow into Europe during post-Hellenistic times):



In any case, it is obvious that Greeks have a lot of recent, post-Hellenistic (dating back to Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman times) Near Eastern admixture. And we still don't know how much of mixing had been taking place in Hellenistic times.

23andMe simply does not go so far back into the past.

The only way to find out is to examine aDNA from Classical Greece and other periods.

If you really believe the bolded statement, then why is it OBVIOUS that there was this admixture, and it was highly significant? Why are you insisting over and over again on your agenda driven conclusions, and conclusions not even based on academic papers, but on direct to consumer genomics which are highly questionable, and gedmatch calculator results which are even more questionable.

The genetic profile of anyone tested by 23andme or any other genomic testing outfit is the product of thousands and tens of thousands of years of admixture. The claim that it only covers the last 500 years is nonsense. There is no time limit on these admixtures. If that were the case, we would have to believe that the "Middle Eastern" in Southern Italians, which by the definition of 23andme itself means Anatolian, Iranian, and Caucasus, arrived in Southern Italy in the 1500s. That's the Renaissance, for crying out loud. People were obsessively writing, documenting etc. You think they wouldn't have noticed a population transfer from Turkey or Iran massive enough to account for 15-20% of the genome of some Southern Italians?

When you have to turn to 23andme to support your position you're really scraping the bottom of the barrel.

You might to want to read this blog post from Razib Khan about everything that's wrong with public genomic testing in terms of ancestry, and about how Admixture analysis can be skewed by population choice, whether deliberate or not.
http://nofe.me/razib/WordPress/2017...-could/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

Also, and this is the last time I'm going to repeat it: the people tested by these researchers have all four grandparents from the labeled villages back to 1860-1880. All those exchanges with people from the Pontos region, the Islands, and Anatolia discussed by "Eastara" are IRRELEVANT because they took place after the turn of the century. What is so difficult to understand about this concept?

You have produced absolutely no data showing large numbers of "Ottomans" in the Peloponnesus, nor that there was any admixture to speak of, which would have been very difficult. You had to marry within your own religion, something that is still the case in Israel, for example. The only option was conversion. Conversion for a Muslim normally meant death so far as I know, so I don't know how Muslims could have been marrying Greeks and being absorbed by the Greek community at this time. Women could be absorbed, but the "Ottomans" were mostly expelled. Could there be some influence? Perhaps, but I highly doubt there is any significance here.

Likewise, you produce no evidence for large numbers of "Byzantines", by which I assume you mean "non-Greek" Byzantines, being settled in the Peloponnesus, or Persian mistresses during the Hellenistic period, for that matter. :) Are you one of those people with a crystal ball, or a secret time machine?

As to the Roman Era, I have no idea what you're talking about. You have some historical document that the dastardly Romans settled Iranians there or something?

Am I claiming I know exactly how all this happened? No, I'm not, but my God, this is worse conjecture than Fallermayer. Even he had more facts than this.

In addition, whatever exchanges took place during the Colonization period, or the Hellenization period, or the Classical Era, the Slav "invasions" took place after that time. They even took place after a good part of the Byzantine Era. So, that would just be more proof that the effect in terms of actual genetic material from the Poles, Russians, etc. was trivial. Get it?

You are also losing track of the fact that this thread is dedicated to a particular paper, which is about the Peloponnesus, and about the amount of Slavic ancestry in the people of that era. Is that clear? Stop going off topic. The genetic relationship between Albanians and Greeks was not addressed in the paper, and is off topic. Everyone but you is staying within those limits. If you continue with this posting of material about Albanians etc., you'll get another infraction.
 
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Not that I care about the 'Europeanness' of assorted populations, but for a population with significant Asian influx modern Greeks are nestled a bit too neatly between the neighbouring Albanians and Western Anatolians. Was there a replacement in Albania as well?

Also what do we make of the fact that the Maniotes of all, in whom historians and anthropologists saw a remnant tribe of the Dorians due to their appearances & alleged warrior ethos, with the lowest affinity to present North Europeans? The former affinity exists at elevated levels as far north and west as Croatia and perhaps beyond, so it cannot be considered recent.

That's another reason why I find all of this very amusing. :) Honestly, you couldn't make up a bigger rebuke to all that Nordicism bunk than these results for the Maniotes.
 
Did you give any thoughts to the fact that the Venetians invited many immigrants from the rest of Greece, Crete, Chios (and other Aegeans), Bulgarians, and Asia Minor Greeks and ended up doubling the population of Peloponnese within 10 years, but these immigrants did not settle in Mani.

Therefore I believe this event contributed to the general Peloponnesians being closer to other Greeks (Northern, islanders and Asia Minor) and Balkan people, while the Maniotes retained more their Dark Age admixture.

Another fact I would like to add is that the area of Messenia with towns such as Koroni and Methoni were vastly settled by Arvanites, some of whom migrated to Italy, some converted to Islam, and some remained Orthodox, which could have further increased the Balkan or so-called Slavic admixture and differentiated them even more from the Maniotes, but not much from Laconia due to it being also settled by Arvanites too.

By the way, I'm not trying to go off topic but simply sharing/contributing with what I know as such recorded movements seem to correspond to what the authors concluded. And I'm simply saying that these movements of Arvanites contributed to the differentiation, not caused it in case someone will go on a rampage against my post.

This is all I know, so hope it helps as doubling the population with non-Peloponnesians definitely is a big event.
 
What I find rather amusing about all of this is that the people of the Tayetos, whom Fallermayer was so convinced were Slavs, should be so "Sicilian like". :)

Well it clearly shows they are not Slavs at all. :) I wonder the basis for any claim otherwise. I don't mean to make this about physical appearance but the very first Greek family I ever met, friends of my mother's, are from the Tayetos region and they all are very dark, with clearly (eastern) Mediterranean features. The mother looks identical to photos of my Sicilian great-grandmother. The suffix on their surname is specific to that region.
 

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