Genetic Origins of Minoans and Mycenaeans

They'll only have to test Grave Circle A/B and we'll know what the very elite of the early Greeks look like. Those would've been the first samples I'd have tested to solve the whole IE question. Not sure why no one bothered thus far.

IMHO the place of origin the male lines in the shaft graves point to LPIE in its entirety likely came from.

Is there any slightest chance of their east asian admixture like cimmerian?
I thought there would be no chance like BB. But Greek bronze and BB have totally different burial type. As I said before, it is the same situation of IE speaking scythian, of which main Hg is now M269, Z93 and Q1a. ( Zeus = indra = chinese Di)
https://anthrogenica.com/showthread.php?16669-ZEUS-and-altai-petroglyph&p=555322#post555322

The Cimmerians (also Kimmerians; Greek: Κιμμέριοι, Kimmérioi) were a nomadic Indo-European people, who appeared about 1000 BC[1] and are mentioned later in 8th century BC in Assyrian records.
 
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I still don't understand what you're getting at...

Why isn't it chance?

If we have about 10(?) Y DNA samples from ancient Greeks and they're all Y DNA J, yet J is only about 20% in South Greece (the same as Z2103) then we'd expect give or take around 2 Y DNA Js not 10. Even if you account for the Slavic lineages decreasing the proportion of Y DNA J, there's still way too much Y DNA J for this to be chance (we do also have that blonde Y DNA R1b ancient Greek from that powerpoint but that isn't in much detail, actually it would be good to see what the Y DNA breakdown from their data was). I'm focussing on R1b as that's what my interest is biased towards, but the lack of E-V13 is statistically even more interesting.
 
Also I never get notifications from quotes by the way, so I'm not ignoring a point that defeats mine or anything I just don't see half of the replies
 
Because that's the whole problem i try to say each time. If you take an I1a individual from modern Scandinavia, he is still an IE language speaker and could show high Steppe ancestry, as far as modern standards. The problem is that R1b DO not have to be dominant necessarily, some places could show the opposite rule of Iberia or British Islands and show a not much admixed people and low R1b, but still being Indoeuropeanized so people are acting like " oh look 10% Steppe and no R1b, it's therefore that Greek didn't come from Steppe " non-sense conclusion.

If we take for exemple sample I9041, i dont know the exact context, but admitting he is from an elite grave. Is J2a1 and X2 lineages are clearly local, Minoan or even earlier. But he was probably an IE speaker and his 10% of Steppe doesn't even matter that much. So from the beginning, if we accept the Steppe hypothesis, this guy should have been rulled out in search of intruder signal. If however we absolutely want to show local continuity, this guy is the perfect exemple, even tho his 10% Steppe.

All this evolved towards sampling bias and nothing else.
 
You know that the DNA samples we found were not randomly selected, right? It was not a double-blind ABX study. We found what we found. Stop trying to draw conclusions as to why R1b is missing. Maybe other samples will be discovered.

As Angela likes to say, we need more Ancient DNA samples :).
 
You know that the DNA samples we found were not randomly selected, right? It was not a double-blind ABX study. We found what we found. Stop trying to draw conclusions as to why R1b is missing. Maybe other samples will be discovered.

As Angela likes to say, we need more Ancient DNA samples :).

Yes but still you must realise that if Y DNA was irrelevant to what social class one was in you’d expect a more even distribution of lineages. Also, please tell me what double-blind trials have to do with anything here when there isn’t and can’t be any controls? It’s irrelevant. We’ll find Z2103 soon enough, it’s just a matter of will it have more Steppe ancestry than the J samples. I think it’s inevitable that it does but I don’t think it’ll be that big a difference, but that it’ll be a surprise to some (the Slavic invasions alone aren’t enough to explain why modern Greeks are more Steppe than these Mycenaeans if we incorrectly assume that all the Slavs were Y DNA I2 and R1a)
 
I still doupt about R1b found in S Greece before 2-2500 BC
meaning Mycenean,
When I first said that, everybody got off his clothes,
Mycaenae is not a steppe culture,

Yet some R1a might be found in the N Greece,
area where proto-Greek were spoken.

R1b and R1a are IE carriers and spread IE
but I doupt, if it is the primary IE DNA.

both in BMAC/Andronovo and Greece/Anatolian/caucasus we see such.
 
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I wasn't aware that anyone claimed the Mycenaeans were 100% "J", although we haven't seen anything else yet. I think probably some "old" R1b or R1a will show up eventually.

I am currently reading Greeks and Pre-Greeks by Margalit Finkelberg and there is a lot of interesting information in there that other classicists either avoid entirely or misrepresent or try to explain away.

Basically, she presents some pretty convincing arguments that the Pre-Greek languages of the Agean were Indo-European that were then absorbed by Greeks.

Secondly, the thing most relevant to this thread, she presents a lot of evidence of Matriarchal phenomena in this pre-greek people that seems to have affected even Myceneans.

Most specifically, she lists many examples of the Royal bloodline/nobility being matrilineal/matrifocal that sexist and racist claccisists either try to present as asiatic non-indo european influence, or
patriarchal phenomena (i.e. this woman had power only becase of her brother, father, etc).

If she is correct then we cannot ignore mtdna as has been ignored until now.

A famous example she lists is that of the ultimate mycenean Agamemnon who was made king by his queen wife:

"Klytaimestra, whose receiving the man of her choice into the bed of Agamemnon (who, accordingto some versions, himself became king of Mycenae upon murderingKlytaimestra’s first husband Tantalos) made a king of Aigisthos, showsclearly enough that it was not merely a shadow of legitimacy but this very legitimacy itself that marriage with the queen was to bestow on the futureking of Ithaca. (22)

(22): The Klytaimestra situation compares well with that in Argos, where the queen Aigialeia and hernew spouse Kometes son of Sthenelos are said to have expelled the former king Diomedes on hisreturn from Troy, and in Crete, whence the former king Idomeneus was expelled in exactly thesame way. See Apollod. Epit. 6. 9–10. On Klytaimestra and Tantalos see Eur. IA 1148–56;Apollod. Epit. 2. 16; Paus. 2.18.2; 2.22.4."

She also has examples of documented matrifocality among Hittites, etc.
 
No amount of sophistry changes that we have Classic to Hellenistic Greek samples with nowhere near the leanings towards Western to Eastern Europe modern Greeks do. That points to:

A. The Greeks in the Iron Age having no genetic caste systems among Greece (the samples in Anatolia are from all evidence high-status).

B. The shift happening past their peak as a civilization.
 
No amount of sophistry changes that we have Classic to Hellenistic Greek samples with nowhere near the leanings towards Western to Eastern Europe modern Greeks do. That points to:

A. The Greeks in the Iron Age having no genetic caste systems among Greece (the samples in Anatolia are from all evidence high-status).

B. The shift happening past their peak as a civilization.

With all due respect I am aware of your biases, and what you have said isn't at all the case. Do you really think that we have a good sample across the board for ancient Greeks if we only have Y DNA J? The ONLY other sample we have is a blonde R1b from this private study, but that's it - we don't really have any information about that sample though so we may as well just have Y DNA J. I don't actually think he would have been blonde by the way, whenever dark blonde is an option I just assume light brown hair as blondness is overrated by genetic calculators - but I emphasised it as it goes against your preferred narrative. Ancient Egyptians were E1b1a Nubians by the way, it's all just a cover-up!

You frame the genetic changes in reference to civilisational achievement, I mean come on can you not hide it any better than this?
 
You know that the DNA samples we found were not randomly selected, right? It was not a double-blind ABX study. We found what we found. Stop trying to draw conclusions as to why R1b is missing. Maybe other samples will be discovered.

As Angela likes to say, we need more Ancient DNA samples :).

Indeed I do. :)

The scientists don't get to choose what they find. Sometimes they're even lucky to get results of any kind from what they do find.

Now, with Britain, they have a good number of samples, and all show basically the same thing, elites and non-elites.

That isn't the case with these samples from Greece. We don't have enough of them from enough contexts to say anything definitively.

Fwiw, to the best of my recollection the male J2a everyone is discussing was not among the "elite". Neither was he in a trash heap so far as I remember. However, the female from the elite grave and the males all had relatively low "steppe". I think it ranged from around 10-19%. It's posted somewhere above.

Now, that might seem low for wholesale language replacement. However, do we yet know if they came directly from the steppe? No, we don't, and it doesn't seem likely to me. If they were already mixed, as was the case with the Central European Beakers who went to Spain, the replacement might have been, what, double that?

We know what we don't know. We just have to wait for the data to determine more precisely what happened.

Why people have to get heated discussing hypotheses like this which can't yet be proven is beyond me. It's not like anyone here has a job and reputation on the line.

That's why I often get a hint of bias from the responses, but hey, you want to argue, argue. It's good for the site. :) Just keep it civil.


I must say, TBONTB, calling out other people for bias is a bit rich when you drag blonde or red haired R1bs and R1as at every opportunity. You even did it in the same thread. Clearly, irony is not your strong suit. :)
 
With all due respect I am aware of your biases, and what you have said isn't at all the case. Do you really think that we have a good sample across the board for ancient Greeks if we only have Y DNA J? The ONLY other sample we have is a blonde R1b from this private study, but that's it - we don't really have any information about that sample though so we may as well just have Y DNA J. I don't actually think he would have been blonde by the way, whenever dark blonde is an option I just assume light brown hair as blondness is overrated by genetic calculators - but I emphasised it as it goes against your preferred narrative. Ancient Egyptians were E1b1a Nubians by the way, it's all just a cover-up!

You frame the genetic changes in reference to civilisational achievement, I mean come on can you not hide it any better than this?

That's a PH155 though, nothing to do with Yamnaya. It separated before the Villabruna HG.
 
That's a PH155 though, nothing to do with Yamnaya. It separated before the Villabruna HG.

Yeah ik, that always struck me as weird though - still, it's irrelevant without autosomes. Also, I really wouldn't be surprised and actually would bet that they got it wrong and it was a more common form of R1b (not necessarily Z2103) - there's a pattern of these studies making really terrible Y DNA calls.
 
I don't understand how the researchers could be biased...as it's been pointed out before, these were all the samples they could get and they happened to be J's and other so called "southern" y dnas (which are most frequent in "southern" locales so of course it would be more likely for them to carry these Y's). I also don't see them refusing to report a sample with r1b out of fear of giving random anthro forum dwellers something to celebrate
 
So we know that they were people there in Mycenea before the Greeks invaded. They imparted 60% of their autosomal DNA to the Greeks of classic antiquity. That's what happens when there is not wholesale replacement of the locals by the invaders. The percentage may vary up or down but they admix. That's what happened here. It was not a slash and burn operation.
 
I am currently reading Greeks and Pre-Greeks by Margalit Finkelberg and there is a lot of interesting information in there that other classicists either avoid entirely or misrepresent or try to explain away.

Basically, she presents some pretty convincing arguments that the Pre-Greek languages of the Agean were Indo-European that were then absorbed by Greeks.


Secondly, the thing most relevant to this thread, she presents a lot of evidence of Matriarchal phenomena in this pre-greek people that seems to have affected even Myceneans.

Most specifically, she lists many examples of the Royal bloodline/nobility being matrilineal/matrifocal that sexist and racist claccisists either try to present as asiatic non-indo european influence, or
patriarchal phenomena (i.e. this woman had power only becase of her brother, father, etc).

If she is correct then we cannot ignore mtdna as has been ignored until now.

A famous example she lists is that of the ultimate mycenean Agamemnon who was made king by his queen wife:

"Klytaimestra, whose receiving the man of her choice into the bed of Agamemnon (who, accordingto some versions, himself became king of Mycenae upon murderingKlytaimestra’s first husband Tantalos) made a king of Aigisthos, showsclearly enough that it was not merely a shadow of legitimacy but this very legitimacy itself that marriage with the queen was to bestow on the futureking of Ithaca. (22)

(22): The Klytaimestra situation compares well with that in Argos, where the queen Aigialeia and hernew spouse Kometes son of Sthenelos are said to have expelled the former king Diomedes on hisreturn from Troy, and in Crete, whence the former king Idomeneus was expelled in exactly thesame way. See Apollod. Epit. 6. 9–10. On Klytaimestra and Tantalos see Eur. IA 1148–56;Apollod. Epit. 2. 16; Paus. 2.18.2; 2.22.4."

She also has examples of documented matrifocality among Hittites, etc.

Couple of observations:
1. Both the Iliad and the Odyssey are epic poems, not historical documents. We also don't know which epoch's biases they reflect. The 9th century biases of Homer or the 13th century biases of when the events supposedly happened? Since supposedly the epic poems were the result of many centuries worth of oral traditions, maybe the biases of even earlier? Do we even know whether the Trojan war even happen?
2. Being a epic, dramatic work it would be very boring if there were not a few murders by jealous wives or a few oedipal complexes. They make for a good story line. Sometimes people overanalyze things.
3. Maybe the author has a feminist agenda?
 
Couple of observations:
1. Both the Iliad and the Odyssey are epic poems, not historical documents. We also don't know which epoch's biases they reflect. The 9th century biases of Homer, the 13th century biases of when they supposedly happened?
2. Being a epic, dramatic work it would be very boring if there were not a few murders by jealous wives or a few oedipal complexes. They make for a good story line. Sometimes people overanalyze things.
3. Maybe the author has a feminist agenda?

I agree, and I'd opt for door number 3. :)
 
So we know that they were people there in Mycenea before the Greeks invaded. They imparted 60% of their autosomal DNA to the Greeks of classic antiquity. That's what happens when there is not wholesale replacement of the locals by the invaders. The percentage may vary up or down but they admix. That's what happened here. It was not a slash and burn operation.

I don't think we have any pre-Mycenean Peloponnese samples yet except for that one early Neolithic farmer. So everything's open with regard to replacement or lack thereof.
 
I don't think we have any pre-Mycenean Peloponnese samples yet except for that one early Neolithic farmer. So everything's open with regard to replacement or lack thereof.

There was continuity in that the same Y haplos that were expected by even some people in this forum were found. The same haplos that are found in the Anatolian mainland. There was not a wholesale replacement by R1b.
 
It doesn't seem that strange that most of the results are J2a since it seems E-V13 didnt spread that early from Central Europe and that could have been the case for Z2103.

A big portion of the modern distribution of E-V13 and Z2103 could come from Northern Greece (Epirus, Makedonia, Thessaly, Thrace) after the barbarian invasions and the R1a, I2a, and I1 filled the vacuum created in Northern Greece.
 

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