Question Paternal Continuity of Modern Greeks From Ancient Greeks

Granzon · Sep 8, 2025

Hello. I had come across a tweet and the comments of the tweet on social media in which the compilation of Y-DNA of modern Greeks from a FTDNA database is shown. The comments seem to indicate that modern Greeks do not have Y-DNA continuity from ancient Greeks like Mycenaean and that modern Greeks largely decend from Anatolians and Middle Easterners whom are unrelated to ancient Greeks. I wanted to ask a question regarding this.

First and foremost, is this actually true? I find this hard to believe as I believe modern Greeks' autosomal DNA is largely related to Mycenaean/Minoan, why would their Y-DNA abruptly change? If so, what exactly happened to the ancient Greeks that their Y-DNA did not continue? I tried to look up a potential cause online but most of the answers seem to point to depopulations via plauges (which I don't think would be gender-specific).

Does anyone happen to know if the statement regarding the discontinuity of anceint Greek Y-DNA to modern Greek Y-DNA is true? If so, what exactly caused this to occur? Just to note, I don't mean to cause any offense to Greek people with this question, I just wanted to ask on this forum as people here are more of an expert on this stuff than myself.

The tweet is below for reference.

Thucydides enjoyer · Sep 10, 2025

if we take into account the haplogroups of the ancient ones present in the modern ones(such as J2a,J2b,R1b,G,T),even if these haplogroups are 100% ancient greek derived(which of course is not true),the mycenaean Y-DNA continuity cannot exceed 42%.I suggest a probable 15-20% of an Y-DNA continuity with mycenaeans,although i will soon check the detailed ftdna subclades,to check how much probable-mycenaean could modern greeks derive.Although even the autosomal DNA doesnt suggest a lot of continuity.

Granzon · Sep 12, 2025

Thucydides enjoyer said:
if we take into account the haplogroups of the ancient ones present in the modern ones(such as J2a,J2b,R1b,G,T),even if these haplogroups are 100% ancient greek derived(which of course is not true),the mycenaean Y-DNA continuity cannot exceed 42%.I suggest a probable 15-20% of an Y-DNA continuity with mycenaeans,although i will soon check the detailed ftdna subclades,to check how much probable-mycenaean could modern greeks derive.Although even the autosomal DNA doesnt suggest a lot of continuity.

What exactly is the autosomal DNA of contemporary Greeks and the Y-DNA of modern Greeks? Autosomally speaking, exactly how ancient Greek DNA do modern Greeks have? Is it enough for them to consider continuity? I do know that modern Greeks, as well as ethnic groups like Albanians have some Slavic admixture. From reading the thread on X, it's claimed that contemporary Greeks are decedents of post-Roman Levantines/Anatolians but I get the sense that this claim is meant to insult Greeks (shitpost) but from some posts, there are some surprised as to see how much of modern Greek Y-DNA is not of Greek origin but from the middle east. I am wondering what event occured historically that lead to this outcome.

Juan.delajara · Sep 12, 2025

Granzon said:
What exactly is the autosomal DNA of contemporary Greeks and the Y-DNA of modern Greeks? Autosomally speaking, exactly how ancient Greek DNA do modern Greeks have? Is it enough for them to consider continuity? I do know that modern Greeks, as well as ethnic groups like Albanians have some Slavic admixture. From reading the thread on X, it's claimed that contemporary Greeks are decedents of post-Roman Levantines/Anatolians but I get the sense that this claim is meant to insult Greeks (shitpost) but from some posts, there are some surprised as to see how much of modern Greek Y-DNA is not of Greek origin but from the middle east. I am wondering what event occured historically that lead to this outcome.

We need classic greeks Ydna, and more Myceaneans and Bonze age greek samples to have further answers. The claims on X probably aimed to insult greeks.

Ralphie Boy · Sep 12, 2025

Any idea modern Greeks have notable Middle Eastern input that was brought by haplogroup J2a is very much unsupported by not only published autosomal studies but also thousands of commercial DNA results available. For example, the Ancestry DNA region called South Greece, which is mostly Peloponnese and has many samples, has the following main ethnicity inputs: mainland Greece, Albania, Balkans, East and Central Europe, South Italy and other Greece, meaning Aegean, Crete, Turkey, Cyprus, etc. Slavic is very present at low levels, making it a main aspect. There are many other minor inputs after centuries of existence and admixture. Levant and Middle East hardly show up.

A major difference between mainland Greece and the rest of the inputs that shift it north is widespread marriage with Greeks who are less northern shifted and often have high amounts of South Italy. Those would be from Mani and other places where Greeks, Sicilians and South Italians have more DNA sharing. This is lacking in the other inputs, and it helps shift Greeks more south than its Balkan neighbors.

There has been a lot of Greek intramarriage, Greeks from different regions marrying each other. That is evident in the commercially available family trees and DNA results.

As far as Anatolian input, there have been attempts to Fallmerayer Anatolian Greeks, Aegean Islanders, Cretans and western Turks, saying they have no ancient mainland Greece input (for which the uniparental record is very incomplete post-Mycenaeans). Their ancestors completely avoided admixture with the original Greek colonists, but they adopted their language. Lazaridis himself issued a refutation of this on X like two years ago and if memory serves it was posted here.

Vitruvius · Sep 13, 2025

Granzon said:
Hello. I had come across a tweet and the comments of the tweet on social media in which the compilation of Y-DNA of modern Greeks from a FTDNA database is shown. The comments seem to indicate that modern Greeks do not have Y-DNA continuity from ancient Greeks like Mycenaean and that modern Greeks largely decend from Anatolians and Middle Easterners whom are unrelated to ancient Greeks.

Of the samples we have which are entirely from southern Greece, LBA and Hellenistic era Greeks were already vastly majority descended from western Anatolians and overlapped modern Greek islanders. Roman Era Greeks of Tenea by contrast appeared to be fully descended from Anatolians. The fact that modern Greek islanders and maniots still retain this profile is proof alone of continuity. There is no data for ancient northern Greece, but it is unlikely it will be identical to southern Greece and will probably instead be shifted in a northerly direction with more steppe related ancestry comparatively.

Showing overwhelming genetic ties with Anatolia is in of itself our proof of continuity between modern and ancient Greek populations.

Archetype0ne · Sep 13, 2025

Anatolia in BA/IA had a number of different peoples inhabiting it. When it comes to ancient Greeks, one needs to first define what they mean by this. From what we can tell J-Y13128 was within these early Greek populations, but what haplogroup is responsible for the IE aspect of the Greek language is still an open question. Overall, both Greece and Anatolia are not well sampled geographically or temporally, especially Anatolia when one considers how large it was and how many different tribes it harbored in the period. An absolute minority in West Anatolia would have fit the Greek label.

Even in the above visualization of polities during the Homeric War, peoples like the Troyans would not have been Greek.

The issue with continuity, is the nationalistic by design Balkan discourse.

Genetically speaking... the academic definition of continuity is not well defined, what constitutes continuity? Is there some threshold like a line in the sand?

Overall Greece has had cultural continuity through evolution, with two major shifts, one during Christianization/Romanization, and the other during the founding of the modern state, under the same pressures that happened to other entities nation state building.

These two points aside, genetic turnover in Greece should not be discounted, just because of the nature of Balkans discourse on social media is nationalistic.

Vitruvius · Sep 13, 2025

Archetype0ne said:
Anatolia in BA/IA had a number of different peoples inhabiting it. When it comes to ancient Greeks, one needs to first define what they mean by this. From what we can tell J-Y13128 was within these early Greek populations, but what haplogroup is responsible for the IE aspect of the Greek language is still an open question. Overall, both Greece and Anatolia are not well sampled geographically or temporally, especially Anatolia when one considers how large it was and how many different tribes it harbored in the period. An absolute minority in West Anatolia would have fit the Greek label.

Even in the above visualization of polities during the Homeric War, peoples like the Troyans would not have been Greek.

The issue with continuity, is the nationalistic by design Balkan discourse.

Genetically speaking... the academic definition of continuity is not well defined, what constitutes continuity? Is there some threshold like a line in the sand?

Overall Greece has had cultural continuity through evolution, with two major shifts, one during Christianization/Romanization, and the other during the founding of the modern state, under the same pressures that happened to other entities nation state building.

These two points aside, genetic turnover in Greece should not be discounted, just because of the nature of Balkans discourse on social media is nationalistic.

Most social media discourse is typically aimed instead at multiculturalism/antinationalism, not the inverse and it would be an enormous lie to pretend that multiculturalism is anything but the dominant political narrative of the 21st century.

Rather than politicizing the question or answer, it's more pertinent to give an answer based off the existing genetic data. I will speak less on Y chromosome continuity since the Y chromosome constitutes a mere 0.5% of coded genes in any given human, but autosomally it's quite obvious that there have been very few changes concerning at least Greek islanders/Maniot from present to the ancient Greeks of the Roman, Hellenistic and classical eras.

The genetic data so far is pretty clear at this point in that Southern Greece between the LBA and Roman era falls on an autosomal cline which rather homogeneously occupied the genetic norms of modern Southern Italy, modern Greek Dodecanese and Ancient Anatolia. The bronze age map you posted predates the actual conquest and integration of most western anatolian polities and populations into the Greek world which took place only following the conquest of Troy during the Greek Dark Ages. This was a process lost to the historic record but one we know with certainty did occur due to the ethnographic and political landscape which was well documented during the iron and classical ages. By the time of the classical age emergence of the Greek historic tradition, the Greek world as we know it had already long comprised of both sides of the Aegean, and new centers of colonization were instead found in southern italy, southern france and iberia.

AncientGreekDialects_(Woodard)_en.svg.png

Ancient DNA reveals admixture history and endogamy in the prehistoric A_ - .png

Archetype0ne · Sep 13, 2025

We more or less agree. Hence why my first sentence was "When it comes to ancient Greeks, one needs to first define what they mean by this.".

If we mean Minoans or Myceneans continuity, that is on the lower end as the region was central to many empires and we know the population movements are a historical fact. Plotting autosomal ancestry does not capture the level of change, as four left turns leave you at the starting point.

If by ancient Greek we mean something else, then the more progressively in the timeline we move the more continuity we find to the modern day. Already in Classical Greece the continuity would have been diluted to a large extend, but mostly post Alexander an overwhelmingly larger part of people who self identify with the dominant Greek culture would be outside this Mycenean nucleus than within.

But then again retroactively speaking, the way historiography denotes Greek looking back has evolved. Key example, during the Roman Empire and Eastern Roman Empire the dominant Greek culture with a heterogeneous population already shifted to identify with the Romioi. It took more than 1500 years to get to the revival of the earlier identity.

I am not a Greek speaker, but from what I gather the whole timeline can be easily noted for the cultural evolution of the Greek identity looking at a couple of linguistic stages: Homeric -> Koine -> Neo-Hellenic -> Dimotiki/Katharevousa. So my guess would be that these stages are the points where most of the genetic turnover took place. Although it is just an intuition.

Either way, my interest in this matter is mainly at the IE stage of Greek, and for that purpose I think Y-DNA is crucial, along with more ancient samples. Just thought I would chime in.

Ralphie Boy · Sep 14, 2025

This study argues for high affinity between Peloponnese and south Italy, and especially beween southeast Peloponnese and parts of Sicily and south Italy relevant to ancient Greek colonization. The PC has what appears to be a cline, with Myceneans and one end, followed by Deep Mani, Sicily and south Italy, then Laconia and finally the rest of the Peloponnese.

Assessing temporal and geographic contacts across the Adriatic Sea through the analysis of genome-wide data from Southern Italy

Southern Italy was characterised by a complex prehistory that started with different Palaeolithic cultures, later followed by the Neolithization and t…

www.sciencedirect.com

Ancestry DNA has much of the Peloponnese sharing ancestors at least since 1800. It does not mean there were not areas of isolation, but a general sharing that intensified as time went on, according to the timeline. It does not mean there were no foreign elements. There were, and they shifted a big part the population northward, as was inferred from other studies and history. The substantial intramarriage of Greeks in and out of the Peloponnese is confirmed in family trees, DNA results, surname searches etc. A large number has high affinity with Sicily and south Italy in the matches. If this group had no connection to a Greek genetic past, neither would the south Italians and Sicilians, which is not what the studies and other info indicate.

Vitruvius · Sep 14, 2025

Archetype0ne said:
We more or less agree. Hence why my first sentence was "When it comes to ancient Greeks, one needs to first define what they mean by this.".

If we mean Minoans or Myceneans continuity, that is on the lower end as the region was central to many empires and we know the population movements are a historical fact. Plotting autosomal ancestry does not capture the level of change, as four left turns leave you at the starting point.

If by ancient Greek we mean something else, then the more progressively in the timeline we move the more continuity we find to the modern day. Already in Classical Greece the continuity would have been diluted to a large extend, but mostly post Alexander an overwhelmingly larger part of people who self identify with the dominant Greek culture would be outside this Mycenean nucleus than within.

But then again retroactively speaking, the way historiography denotes Greek looking back has evolved. Key example, during the Roman Empire and Eastern Roman Empire the dominant Greek culture with a heterogeneous population already shifted to identify with the Romioi. It took more than 1500 years to get to the revival of the earlier identity.

I am not a Greek speaker, but from what I gather the whole timeline can be easily noted for the cultural evolution of the Greek identity looking at a couple of linguistic stages: Homeric -> Koine -> Neo-Hellenic -> Dimotiki/Katharevousa. So my guess would be that these stages are the points where most of the genetic turnover took place. Although it is just an intuition.

Either way, my interest in this matter is mainly at the IE stage of Greek, and for that purpose I think Y-DNA is crucial, along with more ancient samples. Just thought I would chime in.

Minoans, typically are considered to predate Greek civilization as they were not Greek speakers. Mycenaean are considered the earliest iteration of the Greek ethnos and they enter the stage by rapidly absorbing the Minoans. Autosomal ancestry is going to be the definitive call on continuity and genetic makeup as a whole of any population. You can very clearly see ethnic shifts that do or do not occur with a large enough sampling over a broad enough span of time - let's not gloss over that fact. Changes will be seen and shifts from North Africa, the caucasus, Iran, Central/Eastern Europe, etc. will all be quite obvious if they are to occur. We may not be able to seperate per say Trojan influence from Hittite, but we can definitely seperate the broader macro regions from one another genetically.

Roman identity within the Greek world was that of a civic status, not an ethnological one. There was never any period in which the Greeks "lost" the conception of their origins. Even linguistic and cultural elements which were originally Roman were Grecified over time as the ethnic composition of the Byzantine empire began to regress to a Greek majority. I do not see linguistic shifts within Greek as probable cause for genetic shifts. That would more realistically only be supported in the case of a total linguistic turnover (such as what we see with the arrival of the slavic languages in the balkans).

It's all fine and well to track Y DNA but it is only 0.5% of our genes. It makes absolutely no sense to base conceptions of continuity off this specific chromosome which accounts for so little of what we are. Even if we see an extreme turnover in Y-DNA frequencies, it means very little as far as implication of discontinuity. All it takes is certain families with less than common haplogroups having a male heir bias to significantly impact the patrilineal makeup of their locality and there is nothing saying these families have to be foreign. Why focus on specifically the purely male line of descent?

Riverman · Sep 14, 2025

One cannot speak about ethnic and population continuity without uniparental continuity. It is the safest way to detemine regional ethnic/genetic continuity beyond doubt. Because similar ancestral proportions can exist under different scenarios.

For the Greeks, we can say for sure that there was little continuity to moderns from the Bronze Age. However, from the Iron Age we still lack data and even more so from the Roman period, from which we got something more recently, but its still just a glimpse.

Concerning J2a/M410 and ancient Minoan, Mycenaean and pre-Roman Greeks, here are some branches on FTDNA which were found in the ancient Greek DNA record. which could be assigned more downstream:

https://discover.familytreedna.com/y-dna/J-BY759/tree (upstream position of this important branch to get the full context)