norbert
Regular Member
I expected the identity-obsessed Albanian extremist to be triggered but let's clarify a couple of things: I'm not a Serb nor do I wish to be one. I also do not support any Slavic autochtonous ideas, whatever the heck that might be. And I certainly never claimed that the South Slavs look like Illyrians. What I said, however, is that you can find that typically Dinaric phenotype among South Slavs, most notably in areas like Dalmatia and Herzegovina. The Western Balkans wasn't only inhabitated by the Illyrians. They were assimilated by the incoming Slavs, so it is hard to reconstruct their exact phenotype from the looks of present-day South Slavs. But to claim that the Albanians are representative of the Illyrians or even a meta-phenotype of Paleo-Balkanians borders on arrogance and stupidity. It is equally ignorant to assign certain haplogroups to Albanians exclusively. The Albanians are nothing but left-overs that eluded full romanisation and later slavicisation south of the Danube in the Serbian-Bulgarian-Romanian border region. A people that did not live in the areas identified with Illyrians proper. We don't even know who the Illyrians were. Just because some graves were find on the territory of the Roman province of Illyria, doesn't mean the people buried in them were ethnic Illyrians. We don't know anything about the self-identification of the people buried in those graves or what language(s) they spoke.
To sum it all up, when you ask what Paleo-Balkanic people looked like, you have to first ask where in the Balkans. In the Western Balkans you would have found a more "Bell Beaker-shifted" people or peoples that certainly looked different from those in the South Balkans, the area where the Albanians belong. The Albanians are definitely more Paleo-Balkanic than South Slavs but to claim that they are the archetypical Paleo-Balkanians is simply insupportable.
To sum it all up, when you ask what Paleo-Balkanic people looked like, you have to first ask where in the Balkans. In the Western Balkans you would have found a more "Bell Beaker-shifted" people or peoples that certainly looked different from those in the South Balkans, the area where the Albanians belong. The Albanians are definitely more Paleo-Balkanic than South Slavs but to claim that they are the archetypical Paleo-Balkanians is simply insupportable.