Genetics of the Greek Peleponessus

This LABERIA character is a notorious ***** and shitposter who adds the same panoply of quotes, half-baked and out of context, in every Greek-related topic opened on various forums throughout the internet (one can look at his posting careers on forums like "the apricity" to see how obsessed he is with Greeks) and it's sad to see that he frequenlty does it on topics created even on this forum that's supposed to be somewhat strictly moderated.

We already saw the Albanian inanity concering any Greek topic in the form of other posters but this guy takes the cake.

Are you going to destroy every Greek-related topic created on this forum too, *****?
 
This is total nonsense.

This paper had to pass peer review, unlike the work done by basement dwelling troglodytes who've never taken a pop gen course in their lives, and whose sources are the opposite of transparent. Like any other research group, these authors had to take and maintain detailed biographical information on all their samples, including the birth dates and place of birth of all four grandparents.

See:
"Design of the study and populations studied

The study has been reviewed by the Institutional Review Board of the University of Washington and the ethical committees of several provisional hospitals. We focused on the rural population. We analyzed a total of 241 samples genotyped with the Illumina Infinium Omni 2.5–8 arrays. This is a novel data set collected under the auspices of our study. Subjects were included in the study if all four grandparents originated from the same village or from villages that were <10 kilometers apart. The ages of most participants ranged between 70 and 90 years (the oldest subject was 107 years old); hence their grandparents were born between 1860 and 1880."

You are aware that libel is actionable, aren't you? These authors are named, they are professional scientists, imputations of dishonesty could affect their livelihoods. I think they perhaps should be informed of the statements you're making. If someone wants to find "real" names for a lawsuit, it can be done you know. I would take heed.

Your hysteria is showing, doubtless because that house of cards is collapsing.

What is naive is to ever have believed half-baked theories, clearly agenda driven, based on "samples" which are totally unverifiable, and even if unfalsified, are at best self-selected, non-randomized, and perhaps admixed from numerous areas of Greece and the islands.

I would also point out that the authors are not claiming that the Greeks of the Peloponnese are some "pure" Greek group, whatever that even means. What they're saying is that the German "historian" was completely incorrect in saying that the Greeks of the Peloponnese were completely replaced with Slavs, which anyone with half a brain already knew. They're also saying that the people of the Peloponnese overlap with Sicilians.

That's it. If you think the methodology is wrong and that these conclusions are incorrect, prove it.

Btw, you are also imputing dishonesty to an entire ethnic group. That's another offense for which there are consequences.
Fallmerayer was educated as a Greek lover and admirer of their culture. He turned bitter when he visited Greece since a large parts of the population did not speak the language and Greece he had read in books was not there. Fallmerayer is remembered as antislavic. Many ethnic groups had settled there. Knowing that Sicily has Germanic and Arab layers of populations how the genetic makeup of Peloponnese closely resemble Sicily?
 
On Anthrogenica they wrote that Slavs who invaded the Peloponnesus had most likely already been Balkan-admixed (after mixing with Balkan populations who lived to the north of Greece, in what is now Bulgaria, Serbia and Macedonia):

Gravetto-Danubian said:
Should be an interesting read. Quickly, if they compared putative Slavic admxiture in greece against, say , Poles, it'll be an understimate, as the Slavs which moved in Peloponessus would already be 'Balkan admixed'. I guess without aDNA ; and a pre-determined hypothesis, I'd take this paper with a grain of salt.
eastara said:
Yes, why do they compare them to Russians and Poles and not to other Balkan Slavs. For example Bulgarians, considered a Slavic population, has much more in common with the Greeks than with Russians. At east they admit that Anatolian Greeks are not similar even to Greeks from Peloponnese, let alone Northern Greeks. I am tired of fighting those claiming Greeks are a homogeneous ethnicity. They are also preoccupied with ancient Greeks settling in Italy and forget the long colonisation of Greece by Venetians and other West Europeans living in different Crusader feudal states, which survived long after Ottoman invasion.

Invading Slavs were not "100% Ukrainian-like", so the degree of population replacement could be higher.
 
"The race of the Hellenes has been wiped out of Europe. Physical beauty, intellectual brilliance, innate harmony and simplicity, art, competition, city, village, the splendour of column and temple – indeed, even the name has disappeared from the surface of the Greek continent… for not even a drop of noble and undiluted Hellenic blood flows in the veins of the Christian population of present-day Greece.
Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer


I think that this quote from Fallmerayer can be very helpful for this discussion here.

I have another interesting and helpful quote:

While Nordic elements, combining sometimeswith Mediterranean stock, built the great civilisationsof ancient Greece and Rome, it was racial decay thatresulted in the collapse of both these great nations,and their consequent destruction by a new wave ofNordic peoples from northern Emope. It was the Nordicpeoples, combined partly with Mediterranean cousins,who created the great art and culture of thet-.Iiddle Ages, and again the same Nordic Europeanstock who brought about the Renaissance in NordicLombardy, together with the Reformation movement. lways culture centred, throughout Europe, amongstthe Nordic aristocracy who for a thousand years ormore after the Gothic period succeeded in retainingtheir racial identity, even in Spain and Portugal, wheretheir numbers were always relatively few. But steadily,the influence of Nordic, and even true-Mediterraneanblood, has been running slowly out, until today _littletrue Nordic or Mediterranean blood is to be foundin southern· and central Europe.Steady immigration into Europe from Africa hasdone much to destroy the old Mediterranean stock inthe so-called 'Latin' countries, while in central EuropeAlpine influences are spreading widely, and todaydominate the bulk of the continental area between theTeutoburger Wald and the Mediterranean Sea. At thesame time constant internecine warfare has destroyedthe Nordic element, always attracted· to the scene ofmilitary activities more than any other race, whilesocial revolution has uprooted or annihiliated the Nordicaristocracy in most non-Nordic lands for Communismwas never an ally of ruling racial castes. Eyidenceof the vast racial changes which have taken place inEurope, and are even now taking place with ever increasingrapidity, is to be found in any graveyard, theexcavation of which reveals the knowledge that themodern inhabitants of central and southern Europe,whom we see walking the streets today, are in the mainfar removed from the old European stock.
 
Fallmerayer was educated as a Greek lover and admirer of their culture. He turned bitter when he visited Greece since a large parts of the population did not speak the language and Greece he had read in books was not there. Fallmerayer is remembered as antislavic. Many ethnic groups had settled there. Knowing that Sicily has Germanic and Arab layers of populations how the genetic makeup of Peloponnese closely resemble Sicily?

It's obvious that there is an Euro-East-Mediterranean cluster that includes South Italy, the Aegean, Siciliy, some Albanians and a few other populations. You'll either have to come up with a very complex explanation for the formation of such a cluster from the movements of Slavs, Vikings, Goths and Arabs, or simply accept that perhaps present day Greeks might have some similarity to the people who lived there before and spoke the same language.
 
Fallmerayer was educated as a Greek lover and admirer of their culture. He turned bitter when he visited Greece since a large parts of the population did not speak the language and Greece he had read in books was not there. Fallmerayer is remembered as antislavic. Many ethnic groups had settled there. Knowing that Sicily has Germanic and Arab layers of populations how the genetic makeup of Peloponnese closely resemble Sicily?
Arabs to say Berbers were expelled from Sicily, if we have Arab admixture (not confirmed by any genetic study who have calculated Berber admixture as very negligible), Peloponneseans have Turkish admixture. ;)

Repetita iuvant

At this respect, the distribution of Y-chromosome haplogroup E-M81 is widely associated in literature with recent gene flows from North-Africa [49]. Besides the low frequency (1.5%) of E-M81 lineages in general observed in our SSI dataset, the typical Maghrebin core haplotype 13-14-30-24-9-11-13 [8] has been found in only two out of the five E-M81 individuals. These results, along with the negligible contribution from North-African populations revealed by the admixture-like plot analysis, suggest only a marginal impact of trans-Mediterranean gene flows on the current SSI genetic pool.

However, the estimated age for Sicilian and Southern-Italian J1 haplotypes refers to the end of the Bronze Age (3261?1345 YBP), thus suggesting more ancient contributions from the East.

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0096074
 
REPORT ON THE ALBANIANS OF GREECE
by the Commission of the European Community​
.... In Greece, there are only Greeks.”

Would be interested in a link to the Report cited above. Would like to see its conclusions.

As to the quote of 'only Greeks' in Greece, that is national policy. The Turks have the same view. So, it should not be surprising that knowledge of Greek is what the schools and official entities would emphasize. What people do in their homes is their own business.
 
If they really want to prove the Greekness of the Peloponnesians, why don't they just study the biggest linguistic minority in the region, the Arvanites. And it's surprising how out of every nationality used for comparison they forget the Albanians.
They didn't only leave out Albanians, but everyone south of Ukraine. There are no comparisons with South Slavs either. (Serbs and Macedonians are listed in the populations used but appear nowhere in the results as far as I can see). Their conclusions seem to be based on ADMIXTURE and PCA without nearby reference populations, and IBD analysis is only applied to internal relationships of the Peleponnese populations. It is an interesting investigation of the local structure but they really are not trying very hard to find relationships with other populations in the Balkans.

Not that I believe the native Greeks magically evaporated in the Ottoman period, and Kushniarevish found rather low IBD sharing between Slavs and Greek, but still.
 
I am only going to be saying this once, people: Cut it out.

This thread is not, repeat, not, going to be ruined and turned into the setting for another Balkan War.

This thread is not about the treatment of Albanians or Albanian speakers in Greece, or even the genetic similarities between Greeks and Albanians, which obviously exist.

For those who don't see the point of the paper, just look at how that fossil Falmerayer still gets thrown out there.

@Marko,
I hope that quote was posted in a spirit of irony.

@Nik,
Obviously, the genetic links between Greece and Italy are multiple, reaching back into the Neolithic and the Bronze Age. That doesn't mean that the Greek settlement of Magna Graecia had no impact. Nor does it mean that there wasn't gene flow in the other direction as well.

As to the "Slavs", I don't know how "mixed" the group was that actually entered Greece. I see this comment often, but I don't see any proof provided. Were there long periods of hiatus along the way, where they mixed with locals, before moving onto Greece? Do you have actual documentary evidence for it? We certainly have no ancient dna, which would actually answer a lot of these questions.

I also wish there had been comparisons with other Balkan populations, as well as with other areas of Greece and Italy (and something besides PCA and ADMIXTURE). However, would similarities between northern Balkan peoples and Greeks mean that the incoming "Slavs" to Greece were mixed?

Is it really news to anyone that "South Slavs", while they may speak Slavic languages, aren't actually "Slavs" genetically? The paper is addressing the question of how much non-Balkan actual Slavic genetics is in the people of the Peloponnese.

I actually think Poles are a good choice for seeing overall historic "Slav" similarity. Look at the IBD sharing analysis from Ralph and Coop.
https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-NsM0V5DA...AAEFs/7YaNtLRu0-w/s350/Ralph_Coop_2_small.png

Oh, for new members to the forum, I know how provocative some of this stuff can be, but stay civil, and no cursing.
 
Your post is appreciated but this particular user does this in every forum he participates in (and he's participated in plenty under different names). He skirts with getting banned until the forum owners finally get tired of his bringing his Balkan Wars into every topic that concerns his various "enemies". Just letting you know since he's notorious and I can see he's done similar in this forum in the past as well.

Anyway, take care.
 
@Angela
Obviously every Greek settlement in Magna Graecia had an impact, but could not be held responsible for the genetic similarities between Greece and Italy. Like u said urself, the connection reaches back into the Neolithic and even farther, and we see a similar trend of population movements going on for centuries. It seems to be always the case that people from northern Balkans move south and from there to Italy. Even the ancient Greek and Roman mythology always claimed that several tribes descended from Greece or Asia Minor, then we have the famous colonies of Magna Graecia, then we have the expulsion of Greeks by the Byzantine Empire forming the Griko minority, then the Turks influenced the same trend, followed even by the Albanians known as Arbereshe who had also settled in Greece for 3-4 centuries already, and so on.

With regards to the Slavic settlements in Peloponnese, even if they were pure Polish-like with no admixture whatsoever, they could never be enough to drastically change the genetic makeup, especially after the massive waves of Albanians coming from the North and bringing even more almost identical genetic makeup to the region. That is why I brought them up, as they would have easily outnumbered any Slavic migration, knowning that in the entire Balkans the number of Slavs was 100,000.
 
@Angela
Obviously every Greek settlement in Magna Graecia had an impact, but could not be held responsible for the genetic similarities between Greece and Italy. Like u said urself, the connection reaches back into the Neolithic and even farther, and we see a similar trend of population movements going on for centuries. It seems to be always the case that people from northern Balkans move south and from there to Italy. Even the ancient Greek and Roman mythology always claimed that several tribes descended from Greece or Asia Minor, then we have the famous colonies of Magna Graecia, then we have the expulsion of Greeks by the Byzantine Empire forming the Griko minority, then the Turks influenced the same trend, followed even by the Albanians known as Arbereshe who had also settled in Greece for 3-4 centuries already, and so on.

With regards to the Slavic settlements in Peloponnese, even if they were pure Polish-like with no admixture whatsoever, they could never be enough to drastically change the genetic makeup, especially after the massive waves of Albanians coming from the North and bringing even more almost identical genetic makeup to the region. That is why I brought them up, as they would have easily outnumbered any Slavic migration, knowning that in the entire Balkans the number of Slavs was 100,000.

We are basically in agreement, except that we may differ as to the extent of the impact of the Greek colonization of Magna Graecia.

Only ancient dna will really clarify these matters.
 
Angela, thank you for the Griko notes and the pizzica orientation. I understood a few words of the Griko song.

As to the pizzica dance, it is unfamiliar to me. Most Greek dances featuring women are sedate and almost always in 3 or more dancing. (My limited experience.) Even the 'belly dance' tsifteteli while it has a lot of hip swinging, the feet do not move nearly as much as what i saw in the pizzica. And I've never seen such twirling. Having said that, Greek culture is very vast, it is not for me to rule it out.

As for the town square dance, male-female dancing - as pairs - is quite rare in traditional Greek dancing. I saw a dance troop -non Greeks - purport to show a Greek dance featuring paired dancing. However, in the Kalamatianos circle dance, men and women and children can make up the 'chorus line' hand in hand - particularly among family and familiars.

I think it is wonderful that traces - fun traces- of a Greek presence on the Italian mainland exist.
 
We basically in agreement, except that we may differ as to the extent of the impact of the Greek colonization of Magna Graecia.

Only ancient dna will really clarify these matters.
there r simply way too many migrations from different sources to consider the colonization from mainland Greece as the main reason. Even the Albanians r enough to compete in numbers with the ancient colonisation of Magna Graecia. Italy has always been populous enough to not be that genetically influenced by a few cities on its shores.

And with regards to appearance, I'm surprised that people find them that similar. Italians have a very distinct look no matter if they're from North or South. I've visited South Italy and Sicily many times so I have enough knowledge on the appearance topic.

Back to topic, I still think this study was a waste of money. It looks like they did all that to disprove a deceased scientist from 2 centuries ago when the Slavic admixture in Greece is not even a delicate topic nowadays. Even the Catalans could have had a higher impact.
 
That is disappointing Angela, your 'basically in agreement' gives credence to his Albanian massive waves trope, which disappeared by 1821 per Turkish viewpoint at least the 'massive' aspect. As I stated in my earliest post here, would that the authors had included an Albanian comparison! Perhaps a reliable Albanian autosomal DNA test group doesn't exist?

But then it seems that the FYROM crowd would not be satisfied with that comparison if it could be made as (speculating here, but not much) the true Albanian Admixture is simply the Greek admixture, regardless of location.
 
Angela, here ("Even the Albanians r enough..."), Swiss Nik is asserting an Albanian core to your Italy. Glad to see there is no limit to Albanian impact in this nor indeed, any region of the world.
 
Last edited:
I am only going to be saying this once, people: Cut it out.

This thread is not, repeat, not, going to be ruined and turned into the setting for another Balkan War.

This thread is not about the treatment of Albanians or Albanian speakers in Greece, or even the genetic similarities between Greeks and Albanians, which obviously exist.

For those who don't see the point of the paper, just look at how that fossil Falmerayer still gets thrown out there.

@Marko,
I hope that quote was posted in a spirit of irony.

@Nik,
Obviously, the genetic links between Greece and Italy are multiple, reaching back into the Neolithic and the Bronze Age. That doesn't mean that the Greek settlement of Magna Graecia had no impact. Nor does it mean that there wasn't gene flow in the other direction as well.

As to the "Slavs", I don't know how "mixed" the group was that actually entered Greece. I see this comment often, but I don't see any proof provided. Were there long periods of hiatus along the way, where they mixed with locals, before moving onto Greece? Do you have actual documentary evidence for it? We certainly have no ancient dna, which would actually answer a lot of these questions.

I also wish there had been comparisons with other Balkan populations, as well as with other areas of Greece and Italy (and something besides PCA and ADMIXTURE). However, would similarities between northern Balkan peoples and Greeks mean that the incoming "Slavs" to Greece were mixed?

Is it really news to anyone that "South Slavs", while they may speak Slavic languages, aren't actually "Slavs" genetically? The paper is addressing the question of how much non-Balkan actual Slavic genetics is in the people of the Peloponnese.

I actually think Poles are a good choice for seeing overall historic "Slav" similarity. Look at the IBD sharing analysis from Ralph and Coop.
https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-NsM0V5DA...AAEFs/7YaNtLRu0-w/s350/Ralph_Coop_2_small.png

Oh, for new members to the forum, I know how provocative some of this stuff can be, but stay civil, and no cursing.

If there's one thing i can not understand is how exactly can be considered to quote one of the leading experts of the nineteenth century, a person who has personally visited Greece as Fallmerayer, a provocation, and against the rules of this forum. And from the other hand you allow a person as Yetos that in all his posts attacks the Albanians with a vulgar vocabulary, the last in this thread. I can do a whole thread with the offenses of Yetos against my people. The way you operate as a moderator is unheard.
Please, make a black list with the authors that you don't like.
 
Angela, thank you for the Griko notes and the pizzica orientation. I understood a few words of the Griko song.

As to the pizzica dance, it is unfamiliar to me. Most Greek dances featuring women are sedate and almost always in 3 or more dancing. (My limited experience.) Even the 'belly dance' tsifteteli while it has a lot of hip swinging, the feet do not move nearly as much as what i saw in the pizzica. And I've never seen such twirling. Having said that, Greek culture is very vast, it is not for me to rule it out.

As for the town square dance, male-female dancing - as pairs - is quite rare in traditional Greek dancing. I saw a dance troop -non Greeks - purport to show a Greek dance featuring paired dancing. However, in the Kalamatianos circle dance, men and women and children can make up the 'chorus line' hand in hand - particularly among family and familiars.

I think it is wonderful that traces - fun traces- of a Greek presence on the Italian mainland exist.

You're quite welcome. As I said, I have an interest in it because of my husband's background.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oR-cZ6IORIc

These are Griko speakers:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSktx_kr4ww

As to the dance style, my reference was to ancient Greece, the Greece of the Dionysian festivals, not the Greece of the modern era, even loosely defined.

The pizzica is basically the specific Salento version of the tarantella. That is thought to have originated in a dance ritual performed by women who had been bitten by a tarantula, and the dancing was to drive out the poison. As time passed, certain of the movements were incorporated into dances performed by women with women, and men with men, and eventually by women and men. In very recent times it has acquired a more theatrical aspect as it is often performed by professionals.

"Pizzica originated as the music of tarantismo, a cultural phenomenon peculiar to Salento that, according to researcher Giorgio Di Lecce, dates back to the sixth century. Its origins, scholars say, lie in ecstatic Dionysian worship rites.Tarantismo employed music and dance in a symbolic ritual to cure peasants, mainly women, from maladies purportedly caused by the poisonous bite of the tarantula. (Pizzica derives from pizzicare, meaning to bite or sting.) The afflicted would dance, to the point of collapsing, to the frenetic rhythms of the pizzica songs played by a small group that included tamburello (frame drum), violin, chitarra battente (a large four- or five-string guitar indigenous to Southern Italy), and organetto (a type of accordion)."

The older woman in this video is performing a more traditional version of the pizzica.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-UHk-7uoFI

This couple out in the piazza are not professionals. This is the way people dance it today, in what could loosely be called the "courtship" style, I think. (There are other types, including some between men which mimes a sword fight.) It's not the version of their great-grandparents, but it's still descended from it. That's reflected in part by the fact that for all the sexual tension between the man and the woman in this dance, he never touches her. Apparently, in the past, if you touched her you married her. :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsV93f8f-VY

Anyway, I've taken us off topic, so I'll stop here. :) In fact, I may move this discussion to a dedicated thread.
 
Would be interested in a link to the Report cited above. Would like to see its conclusions.

As to the quote of 'only Greeks' in Greece, that is national policy. The Turks have the same view. So, it should not be surprising that knowledge of Greek is what the schools and official entities would emphasize. What people do in their homes is their own business.

I can't link because this can cause to me an another infraction. But you know very well the story of your country.
About the policy followed by your country and Turkey, i agree with you. You are neighbouring countries, stessa faccia, stessa razza.
 

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