Comparing Ancient Greek populations to modern Greeks and Italians

[Angela]

I've been waiting for you to show up. You took your sweet time.

You don't make any more sense this time around than you did before, even if the story has changed. First the Greeks of the Peloponnese were the product of Albanians, Slavs and Arabs.

Now, because some musty document for which there is no objective evidence says so, we're to believe that the people of the Peloponnese have no Slavic in them; instead they're the product of Greeks from all over the diaspora. What on earth to make of those high steppe numbers, then?

Oh, wait, didn't you proudly claim you know nothing of population genetics?

Never mind, as with the tales recounted by Herodotus, I will in the future treat this as "Holy Writ", I assure you.

 

[blevins13]

I've been waiting for you to show up. You took your sweet time.

You don't make any more sense this time around than you did before, even if the story has changed. First the Greeks of the Peloponnese were the product of Albanians, Slavs and Arabs.

Now, because some musty document for which there is no objective evidence says so, we're to believe that the people of the Peloponnese have no Slavic in them; instead they're the product of Greeks from all over the diaspora. What on earth to make of those high steppe numbers, then?

Oh, wait, didn't you proudly claim you know nothing of population genetics?

Never mind, as with the tales recounted by Herodotus, I will in the future treat this as "Holy Writ", I assure you.

Believe what you want, but you can’t change history with PCA. Byzantine sources say that people from the area of village of your husband has been brought back to Morea to replace the Slavs. This discovery should make you proud, but somehow you choose to ignore it.
It is obvious where this new genetic mix of Morea will show in PCA considering also the Albanian additions.

I guess Stamatoyannopoulos failed to exclude their impact even though he claimed continuity. Probably he meant continuity with Greek populations from Sicily and Anatolia, but than why bother excluding the new comers of 1923 at the end they are all Greeks.






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[Francesco]

Generally speaking, I doubt medieval demographic "replacement" should be taken literally as a total annihilation of the previous population. It was pretty common for rulers to use form of "remigration" as a form of political land control or pacification: for example, we know that Sicily was repopulated by Northern Italian colonist by Federico Ii di Svevia, but the genetic impact of this movement, which I assume may even be detectable, surely didn't completely displace the autoctonous population. I assume the same thing could be valid for the Peloponnese too.

Edit: the lombard repopulation was an initiative of the Norman kingdom, not of Federico II

 

[Pax Augusta]

Generally speaking, I doubt medieval demographic "replacement" should be taken literally as a total annihilation of the previous population. It was pretty common for rulers to use form of "remigration" as a form of political land control or pacification: for example, we know that Sicily was repopulated by Northern Italian colonist by Federico Ii di Svevia, but the genetic impact of this movement, which I assume may even be detectable, surely didn't completely displace the autoctonous population. I assume the same thing could be valid for the Peloponnese too.

On the northern Italian colonists in Sicily, who arrived after the Norman conquest of Sicily, a genetic study by some geneticists at the University of Bologna was announced (although not officially) years ago. Nothing has been heard of them since.

 

[Angela]

Believe what you want, but you can’t change history with PCA. Byzantine sources say that people from the area of village of your husband has been brought back to Morea to replace the Slavs. This discovery should make you proud, but somehow you choose to ignore it.
It is obvious where this new genetic mix of Morea will show in PCA considering also the Albanian additions.

I guess Stamatoyannopoulos failed to exclude their impact even though he claimed continuity. Probably he meant continuity with Greek populations from Sicily and Anatolia, but than why bother excluding the new comers of 1923 at the end they are all Greeks.






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For one thing, part of my husband's ancestry is from Napoli (Campania), second of all if you know the name of my husband's paternal villages, by all means list them.

Why, by the way, have you abandoned the Fallermayer "theory"? I thought you loved it.

You've gone from a combination including Slavs to excluding them altogether. Amazing.

However, if the Peloponnese was repopulated with Greeks from Asia, Sicily and Calabria, where on earth did they get all that Northeastern like ancestry? You do know it doesn't exist in Southern Italy, right?

Your comment about the paper is just silly. How could he find people with a direct ancestral line back to the 800s.

I'll try to leave you with a bit of caution in interpreting decrees, chronicles etc. from the past. My Celt-Ligurian ancestors fought the Romans ferociously. It was one of the last areas on the Italic peninsula to become part of Rome. The Romans issued a decree in which they stated that to end the problem once and for all, they'd exterminate all the could, and they'd send the rest to live in what is now Campania. You know what, a few centuries later there is still evidence they were there. They were still worshipping their stelae in 500 AD and later.

Far too often rulers had their court scribes write what they wanted people to think, what would add to their glory, not what actually happened. Or, they just wrote tales heard. I'll bet you anything you were convinced Herodotus was right about the Etruscans, weren't you?

Might some Slavs have been expelled? Possibly, given there is less Slavic in the Peloponnese than in more northern areas of Greece, although it could also be the case that the migration just petered out, as perhaps happened with the Italics in southern Italy. Could some diaspora Greeks have been brought back? Possibly.

However, for the umpteenth time: changes in the local ancestry are only caused by "FOLK MIGRATIONS" of a significant size.

If you're going to post on population genetics threads, for God's sakes learn something about the field, and take your own personal biases OUT of consideration, or you'll only be taken seriously by other dilettantes with some sort of strange personal agenda.

 

[Angela]

Generally speaking, I doubt medieval demographic "replacement" should be taken literally as a total annihilation of the previous population. It was pretty common for rulers to use form of "remigration" as a form of political land control or pacification: for example, we know that Sicily was repopulated by Northern Italian colonist by Federico Ii di Svevia, but the genetic impact of this movement, which I assume may even be detectable, surely didn't completely displace the autoctonous population. I assume the same thing could be valid for the Peloponnese too.

Completely agree.

Even to calculate the impact, one would need reliable numbers for the local, pre-migration population, and similarly reliable numbers for the incomers.

Best of all, one would like to have ancient dna from both before the migration and after it, and accounting for any regional differences.

We do, of course, know the names of the "Lombard" towns. I can see how it occurred to geneticists to plan a study comparing the inhabitants of such towns with those of people from other towns not only perhaps as to autosomal analysis, but perhaps based on yDna. However, according to Pax nothing has been heard of the study which was discussed.

I can well imagine it would be very difficult to do given that the myriad historical events affecting the different regions of Sicily would make it difficult to disentangle the various factors affecting ancestry. Still would be interesting to see a study like that.

 

[matadworf]

I’ve read 2 books on medieval Greece and the historical consensus was that the Slavs settled in the Peloponnese uneventfully particularly in the Western half. I’m no expert but I’ve never read anything about a plan for the eradication of Slavs and/or any sort of population replacement from Anatolia or Italy. That’s not to say there weren’t settlers from those regions to the Peloponnese but I would guess in fairly small numbers (coastal towns like Monemvasia)? I’m sure there was a flow of Byzantine scholars to Mistra or Monemvasia but in both Eastern and Western Morea Slavs seemed to have mixed fairly fluidly with the native population which is pretty clear when you look at modern Greek pop genetics.

 

[bigsnake49]

I'll reply to the best of my ability,

1) When I make historical points and references is because I come from such a background, it boggles my mind how some can jump over nearly 1800+ years of Byzantine/Ottoman recorded history and go straight to the Bronze/Iron Age when they want to explain population backgrounds. Ethnographically, with the exception of Tsakonia, Peloponnesians show no unique ethnographic/linguistic evolution of 'ancient times' compared to their other peers.

2) The PCAs obviously show a distorted sense of reality, that's why formal stats are usually preferred in academic papers. If you head to my other thread, you can see that FST distances are better for Albanians than for Greeks in relation to the Mycenean samples (Reich dataset that Lazaridis et al (2017) used).

3) I am not a nordicist or any other -icist. I treasure my nation's ancient/Byzantine/Ottoman past, its history and ethnography equally and I only post historical (or other) references that I can back with sources or that are easy to cross reference. I think that a jump of 2k+ years of historical and ethnographic evolution is not very academic to say the least. Why shouldn't Moreans/Peloponnesians treasure their Albanian, Slavic, Italian, Saracen and Greek roots equally? Aren't they an amalgamation of all these things, just like the historians tell us? Is one past more important and more 'pure' than the others?

4) For disclosure purposes, I am half Arvanite from Thrace from my dad, and half Pontic Anatolian from my mom. Shall I discount my Balkan and South Caucasian genetics, culture and ancestral tradition, just so I can pretend that I am Cretan, like the PCAs say, and henceforth also close to ancient Greeks by proxy? Will I score more internet points if I do that?

I think you have misunderstood me, with all due respect, my background is anthropology and ethnography and so I am very keen on these middle/late Medieval details some people want to leave out.

Eupater, I agree with you on some things as in we should celebrate all of the cultures that made us. BTW, I lived in a 90% Arvanite village in Thrace during my formative years. I don't agree with you on the reliance on ancient and even Byzantine authors. The term historians as we understand it now cannot be applied to ancient Roman and Byzantine authors. If available, I would rely more on Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman tax rolls. It is well known that Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman emperors moved populations around to account for population losses due to national disasters, war, epidemics. So depending solely on historiographers without backup sources is dangerous. My favorite example is the battle of Thermopylae. Herodotus says that there were 1M Persians and allies arrayed against the Greeks. First of all there is absolutely no archaeological evidence of anywhere near that number of people being there. Second, the logistics of feeding and moving 1M people would have been a challenge in our current age much less back then. My second favorite example is the Trojan war. There is no archaeological evidence of a 10 year war. Was there a raid by the Sea People in the 12th century BC? Possibly, 10 year war, improbable.

 

[blevins13]

Your comment about the paper is just silly. How could he find people with a direct ancestral line back to the 800s.


Definitely silly it comes from an Albanian.
Just to clarify my comment states a deficiency in research methodology. If he is excluding recent transfer populations from Turkey, than previous transfer should be excluded as well or you will have a methodology deficiency that makes the conclusion doubtful.

There is a reasonable doubt that majority of the current male lines do not come from Mycenaean Greeks, and not even from Classical Greeks. Does this count for a population replacement? Or since the PCA is what it is it does not matter who is the father?



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[bigsnake49]

I cannot wait for additional sample that can help us understand the genetic history of the Greek peninsula after the Minoans and the Mycenaeans. People forget that there were 4 major Greek tribes and about 230 minor ones. Just because Achaeans were relatively low in steppe it does not mean that later arrivals did not have higher steppe admix. So I am waiting for baited breath for the newest papers. They should keep us busy.

 

[blevins13]

Eupater, I agree with you on some things as in we should celebrate all of the cultures that made us. BTW, I lived in a 90% Arvanite village in Thrace during my formative years. I don't agree with you on the reliance on ancient and even Byzantine authors. The term historians as we understand it now cannot be applied to ancient Roman and Byzantine authors. If available, I would rely more on Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman tax rolls. It is well known that Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman emperors moved populations around to account for population losses due to national disasters, war, epidemics. So depending solely on historiographers without backup sources is dangerous. My favorite example is the battle of Thermopylae. Herodotus says that there were 1M Persians and allies arrayed against the Greeks. First of all there is absolutely no archaeological evidence of anywhere near that number of people being there. Second, the logistics of feeding and moving 1M people would have been a challenge in our current age much less back then. My second favorite example is the Trojan war. There is no archaeological evidence of a 10 year war. Was there a raid by the Sea People in the 12th century BC? Possibly, 10 year war, improbable.

Do not go that back in time, Ottomans had population registers, they register population every 20 years. These were organized empires taxed based on land (pronaia) we still use the same name in Albanian or timar later under Ottomans. It is not that difficult to figure this out.


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[blevins13]

I cannot wait for additional sample that can help us understand the genetic history of the Greek peninsula after the Minoans and the Mycenaeans. People forget that there were 4 major Greek tribes and about 230 minor ones. Just because Achaeans were relatively low in steppe it does not mean that later arrivals did not have higher steppe admix. So I am waiting for baited breath for the newest papers. They should keep us busy.

Assuming that they came from steppe, what if they did not?


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[Angela]

Do not go that back in time, Ottomans had population registers, they register population every 20 years. These were organized empires taxed based on land (pronaia) we still use the same name in Albanian or timar later under Ottomans. It is not that difficult to figure this out.


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Good. Then let's see the census figures broken out for each ethnicity for the periods before and after the exile of all the Slavs and the importation of all these Italians and Anatolian Greeks.

I would also want some foundation evidence as to how many census takers there were to cover the country, the methods used etc.

If you're going to claim a mass replacement of the entire Peloponnese you're going to have to do better than you've done so far.

You also haven't answered my question about the steppe percentages in modern people of the Peloponnese. It's more than would be in Sicilian Greeks or certainly than in Anatolian Greeks. Where did the excess come from if all the Slavs were expelled? If you can't satisfactorily answer that question then your hypothesis fails.

Also, what made you turn against Fallermayer? You were one of his biggest supporters. It was all Slavs and Albanians, not an actual Greek in sight.

 

[Angela]

Assuming that they came from steppe, what if they did not?


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It doesn't matter from which direction the Greek speakers came.

We have samples of EBA people from Greece who have no steppe, and then we have later samples that have steppe ancestry.

It didn't drop out of the sky. People carried it into Greece. Period.

 

[bigsnake49]

Assuming that they came from steppe, what if they did not?


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If they did not then they did not.

 

[bigsnake49]

Do not go that back in time, Ottomans had population registers, they register population every 20 years. These were organized empires taxed based on land (pronaia) we still use the same name in Albanian or timar later under Ottomans. It is not that difficult to figure this out.


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Roman and Byzantine empires also had tax rolls. Romans had a census I believe every 10 years and had very elaborate and sophisticated land surveying methods. In the beginning the Romans auctioned off the taxes due like the Greeks but later the tax collectors were provincial officials. Th Byzantine's continued using the Roman taxation system. Just because we don't have extant tax rolls everywhere does not mean they did not exist.

 

[Angela]

I cannot wait for additional sample that can help us understand the genetic history of the Greek peninsula after the Minoans and the Mycenaeans. People forget that there were 4 major Greek tribes and about 230 minor ones. Just because Achaeans were relatively low in steppe it does not mean that later arrivals did not have higher steppe admix. So I am waiting for baited breath for the newest papers. They should keep us busy.

Carrying what yDna do you suspect?

If the leaks are correct, there is R1b-Z2103. What is the percentage of that lineage in Greece?

What other steppe yDna might they have carried? One cannot, of course, count the yDna of the Slavs who came so much later, so what is left do you speculate?

 

[bigsnake49]

Carrying what yDna do you suspect?

If the leaks are correct, there is R1b-Z2103. What is the percentage of that lineage in Greece?

What other steppe yDna might they have carried? One cannot, of course, count the yDna of the Slavs who came so much later, so what is left do you speculate?

R1b-Z2103 would have been the major carrier of steppe ancestry. Right now depending on the area, R1b can be as high as 23% or as low as 11%. What's interesting is that in Macedonia and Thrace R1b is at 13%. Instead R1b percentage in [FONT=Verdana, Arial, Tahoma, Calibri, Geneva, sans-serif]Southern Greeks (Sterea Hellas & Peloponnese) is 20.5% and The Aegean Islands and Ionia is 22.8%. I would have expected the percentages to be reversed.[/FONT]

 

[Angela]

Roman and Byzantine empires also had tax rolls. Romans had a census I believe every 10 years and had very elaborate and sophisticated land surveying methods. In the beginning the Romans auctioned off the taxes due like the Greeks but later the tax collector were provincial officials. Th Byzantine's continued using the Roman taxation system. Just because we don't have extant tax rolls everywhere does not mean they did not exist.

Good grief! No, it doesn't mean that, but what good does it do anyone to know that they once existed if we don't have them and therefore we have no idea what they actually SHOWED. It means there is NO PROOF of what they contained, and therefore no proof of the statements put forth by Blevins that there was a population replacement in the Peloponnese.

People, let's have some logic and common sense, shall we?

It's like Amber Heard constantly blathering about the mountains of evidence she has for her allegations, but the evidence was and is never produced, or if it's produced it's fragmentary, or the context is completely different from the one asserted, or the "evidence" is not an original document and so could have been altered.

You wouldn't even win in traffic court with this kind of reasoning, much less put together a population genetics paper.

 

[Angela]

R1b-Z2103 would have been the major carrier of steppe ancestry. Right now spending on the area, R1b can be as high as 23% or as low as 11%. What's interesting is that in Macedonia and Thrace R1b is at 13%.

It's been very hard for me to find good sources for Greek ydna. Could you provide me with a link to the papers you're using?

Is that just R1b Z2103 or all R1b?

Clearly, if we're trying to estimate the amount of steppe ancestry which arrived in Greece during the relevant centuries, we're not interested in very downstream clades.