Genetic Origins of Minoans and Mycenaeans

There is something I don't understand in the admixture analysis from the paper. Modern Greeks from Thessaloniki are shown as having 20% of red EHG, 20% of pink CHG, 59% of blue ENF and 1% of dark green Natufian, but they completely lack the purple admixture that makes up 35-100% of Neolithic Greeks, 15-30% of Minoans and 25-45% of Mycenaeans. It's also missing from other modern Greeks and Cypriots.
I also disagree with Lazaridis and al. when they say that "Modern Greeks resemble the Mycenaeans, but with some additional dilution of the Early Neolithic ancestry". Mycenaeans are much closer to the Minoans than to Modern Greeks. Modern Greeks have 3x more EHG (about 20%) than Mycenaeans (7%), but they also have WHG (3% according to D-stat). This suggests that numerous waves of European invaders (Dorians, Celts, Romans, Goths, Slavs) contributed to a large share of modern Greek DNA. Since obviously no invader to Greece were pure EHG, and none had more than 50% of EHG in average (30-35% might be more realistic as the Romans had comparatively low EHG), to increase from 7% to 20% of EHG, the percentage of post-Mycenaean DNA from European invaders must be comprised between 25% and 40%. Most of it will be blue ENF and pink CHG that won't be identifiable using these relatively simple admixtures. What we see is only the clear increase in EHG, which is only one third to half of the new invaders' DNA.
In other words modern Greeks are nothing like Mycenaean Greeks, and even less Minoan Greeks. Modern Greeks have much more European ancestry. Y-DNA alone suggests 40 to 45% of European lineages (as opposed to Near Eastern), and over 60% if we included E-V13 (E1b1b came from the Near East but E-V13 clearly emerged in Europe). Greeks possess lineages that are clearly Germanic (3.5% of I1, so about 10% of Germanic overall with I2a2-L801, R1b-U106 and R1a-L664), Slavic (11% of R1a, which is overwhelmingly M458 and CTS1211) and Italo-Celtic (about 7% of R1b-U152 and 1% of G2a-L497).

Not all modern Greeks are from Thessaloniki though. Modern Greeks from Thessaloniki are nowadays 22% of the Greek population. In 1913 in Greek Macedonia 42.6% of the people were Greek, less than half of the population of the Greek Macedonia.

Greek Macedonia 1913

Greeks 42.6% (513,000)
Bulgarians 9.9% (119,000)
Muslism 39.4% (475,000)
Others 8.1% (98,000)
Total 1,205,000

Greek Macedonia 1926 League of nations data after the population exchange between Greece and Turkey

Greeks 88.8% (1,341,000)
Bulgarians 5.1% (77,000)
Muslims 0.1% (2,000)
Others 6.0% (91,000)
Total 1,511,000

Greek Macedonia 1928 Census data Language

Greek language 82.52% (1,165,553)
Slavic dialects 5.72% (80,789)
Turkish 5.09% (71,960)
Ladino (Judaeo-Spanish) 4.19 (59,146)
Aromanian 0.95% (13,475)
Armenian 0.84% (11,859)
Other 0.69% (9,695)
Total 1,412,477

So not all the modern Greeks are like the sample from Thessaloniki and have 20% EHG. Central Greeks and Peloponnesians are 50% of the modern Greek population. Lazaridis says that "Modern Greeks resemble the Mycenaeans, but with some additional dilution of the Early Neolithic ancestry" because he is aware that Greeks from Thessaloniki can't be used as a proxy for the whole population of Greece.

2001 Greek Census

Macedonia 22% (2,424,765)
Thessaly 6,8% (753,888)
Thrace 3.30% (362,038)
Epirus 3.21% (353,822)
Central Greece 42% (4,591,568)
Peloponnese 10.5% (1,155,019)
Aegean Islands 4.63% (508,807)
Crete 5.48% (601,131)
Ionian Islands 1.93% ( 212,984)
______

Greece mainland total 87.9% (9,641,098)
Greece (islands) total 12.1% (1,322,922)
_____
Greece total 100% (10,964,020)
 
nature23310-sf8.jpg
 
It is what it is: whatever yDna the new group that moved into Greece carried, the impact was slight. The analysis in the Supplement is more than excellent, including a new statistical tool that hasn't even been formally released yet, but will soon make its way into Admixtools, I'm sure. The data was analyzed in every possible way. It has to be read carefully. The "steppe" impact was 4-16% or 13-18% depending on the method used. That makes sense because wherever the origin, there would have been dilution all along the way.

The modern Greeks have steppe ancestry of about 20%, and that's in more northern areas. What huge impact did the Slavs have? How does this invalidate the argument for continuity?

Surely we don't have to go over again how yDna is not a reliable predictor of total ancestry? Nor should we have to keep saying again and again that without ancient dna it's all just speculation.

As I elaborated upon above, the impact of the steppe people is going to be very different when encountering a densely populated, culturally advanced area than when reaching large un-or-depopulated areas.

Most modern day Greeks have the majority of their ancestry from people who have been in Greece since the Neolithic. If you extend that to the Bronze Age, it's the vast majority of their ancestry.

Oh, I had forgotten to point to this part of the supporting information.

Symmetry testing of Mycenaeans with Modern Greek populations. He does analyze some samples from Thessaloniki. Take a look.


See:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/fig_tab/nature23310_SF8.html

Ed.
@Pax, I see we cross-posted. Thanks for posting the actual graphic.

People should really take a look at the map of the areas we're talking about, which I posted upthread. Most of northern Greece was "colonized" by the Greeks, often not until the period of classical Greece. I have in the past posted papers documenting that. It's easily checked.

David Reich, Nick Patterson, and Wolfgang Haak, Krause, etc. are not Greeks of any variety. Claiming ethnic bias is really not going to work in this case.
 

Where is this Anatolian sample from? And what can we say about him autosomally by comparing him with the Minoans? Close? Identical?

He looks like my forefather (J1a2-z1828), Ι am Anatolian Greek (Cappadocian).

BTW, how close to the modern Greek Islanders, Cretans and Anatolian Greeks (people that lack mostly the historical era northern admixtures) are plotting these BA samples? Or the Sicilians are the closest call?
 
First nordicists were like:

giphy.gif


Now they're like:

11477d1391787343-achilles-brad-pitt-body-armor-troy8.jpg
 
Angela, I'd say that very local continuity (except in some cases) is non-existent in the Balkans anyway (and many other places) since you had plenty of local depopulations, migrations all over and inter-mixing. We aren't going to get a detailed history of general autosomal change, let alone a local one, of the Balkans with these preliminary results of course but they show that certain 'eastern' changes some people were already expecting for this period based on archaeology and linguistics did happen (and others were associating *solely* with all sorts of later events due to certain biases that we all have ;)). And going by current samples (and always being open to revision), it seems like post-Bronze Age 'northern' ancestry had more impact in Greece than did 'eastern/southern' one and actually drew later Greeks closer to 'mainstream Europe'.

And yes, a very good chunk of contemporary northern Greece might not have been particularly 'Greek' at all until archaic times when the Argeads settled in lower Macedonia, ousted/assimilated the Thracian-Paeonian-Phrygian locals and started expanding (that is, if we consider the Macedonians-proper to have been Greek-speaking which my biased self does). The question of course is to what extent we can trace those likely relatively small populations before they definitively appear in history and how separate we expect them to be compared to their neighbors who were Indo-European-speaking Balkanites too.

Now I'm wondering whether South and Central Italy were already CHG-shifted in this period and the supposition of the ss/nth substratum expanding all the way to Italy from Anatolia based on some Italian place-names was for real (but they might just be unrelated even if the change happened by the Bronze Age). The extra-steppe Armenoi sample seems to be particularly close to Tuscans and mainland Greeks on PCA anyway.
 
YEAH! Finally.

See: Lazaridis et al
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature23310.html?foxtrotcallback=true



"The origins of the Bronze Age Minoan and Mycenaean cultures have puzzled archaeologists for more than a century. We have assembled genome-wide data from 19 ancient individuals, including Minoans from Crete, Mycenaeans from mainland Greece, and their eastern neighbours from southwestern Anatolia. Here we show that Minoans and Mycenaeans were genetically similar, having at least three-quarters of their ancestry from the first Neolithic farmers of western Anatolia and the Aegean1, 2, and most of the remainder from ancient populations related to those of the Caucasus3 and Iran4, 5. However, the Mycenaeans differed from Minoans in deriving additional ancestry from an ultimate source related to the hunter–gatherers of eastern Europe and Siberia6, 7, 8, introduced via a proximal source related to the inhabitants of either the Eurasian steppe1, 6, 9 or Armenia4, 9. Modern Greeks resemble the Mycenaeans, but with some additional dilution of the Early Neolithic ancestry. Our results support the idea of continuity but not isolation in the history of populations of the Aegean, before and after the time of its earliest civilizations."

Admixture analysis- See:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/fig_tab/nature23310_SF1.html

Y dna from page 52 of the supplement:
View attachment 8992

The Bronze Age Anatolia individual:
"This individual wasancestral for the major subclade3 P58 (J1a2b; previously designated3 J1e) and could thus bedesignated as J1a(xJ1a2b)."

"I0070 (Minoan from Lasithi)This individual was derived for mutation M319:15467785T->A (J2a1d) as well as upstream mutationsL26:22942897T->C (J2a1) and M410:2751678A->G, L212:22711465T->C (J2a). He was not foundto be ancestral for any downstream mutations and could be designated as J2a1d. Haplogroup M319was found4 at a frequency of 8.8% in one sample set of 193 present-day Cretans (95% confidenceinterval from the binomial distribution 5.2-13.7%) and 5.4% in another set5 of 168 Cretans (95% C.I.:2.5-10%), but no examples were found in a combined sample set of 171 Greeks from three locationsnear early Neolithic settlements in mainland Greece (95% C.I: 0-2.1%). A re-analysis4 of large set of523 present-day Anatolian males6 revealed only 2 examples of M319 in this population (95% C.I.: 0-1.4%). Thus, it appears plausible that this represents a Y-chromosome lineage that existed in MinoanCrete but was at a lower (or absent) frequency in neighboring mainland Greece and Anatolia and itsoccurrence in present-day Cretans represents continuity with those of the Bronze Age."

"I0073 (Minoan from Lasithi)This individual was derived for mutation L26:22942897T->C (J2a1) as well as upstream mutationsM410, L559, L152 (J2a). He was ancestral for several downstream haplogroups: M322:15469740C->A (J2a1a), L560:21899860C->T (J2a1b1a), M166:21764694C->T (J2a1b2), M68:21878700A->G(J2a1c), M339:2881367T->G (J2a1e), L24:14286528G->A (J2a1h), L88.2:17595842T->C andL198:17595861A->C (J2a1i). He could thus be designated as J2a1(xJ2a1a, J2a1b1a, J2a1b2, J2a1c,J2a1e, J2a1h, J2a1i)."

"I9130 (Minoan from Moni Odigitria)This individual was derived for mutations CTS946:7100848A->G (G2a2b2a) and upstream mutationsF3088:20813445G->A and M3397:21605685G->C (G2a). He was ancestral for downstreammutations CTS4803:15833180G->A (G2a2b2a1b1a2a) and Z3423:19251438G->T (G2a2b2a1c1a).He could thus be designated as G2a2b2a(xG2a2b2a1b1a2a, G2a2b2a1c1a). G2a2 Y-chromosomeswere common in Neolithic Europe7, western Anatolia8,9, and Neolithic mainland Greece9. We havealso re-analyzed data from a recent study of central Anatolian Neolithic genomes10, determining thatthey were present there during both the Aceramic phase at Boncuklu (2 G2a2b2b samples) and later atTepecik-Çiftlik (1 G2a2a sample). Plausibly, the Minoan from Moni Odigitria who belonged to thislineage was also related to the same group of early Neolithic farmers as those from Europe, mainlandGreece, and Anatolia."

"I9041 (Mycenaean from Galatas Apatheia in the Peloponnese)This individual was derived for mutations L26:22942897T->C and F4326:23021978A->G (J2a1) aswell as upstream mutations M410:2751678A->G, L559:21674327A->G, L152:22243566C->T,L212:22711465T->C (J2a). He was ancestral for M322:15469740C->A (J2a1a), M260:15025506G->A and M92:21904023T->C (J2a1b1), M166:21764694C->T (J2a1b2), L210:16492197A->T(J2a1b3), M68:21878700A->G (J2a1c), M339:2881367T->G (J2a1e), P81:6739856G->A (J2a1g),L207.1:6753448A->G and L24:14286528G->A (J2a1h), L88.2:17595842T->C andL198:17595861A->C (J2a1i). He could thus be designated as J2a1x(J2a1a, J2a1b1, J2a1b2, J2a1c,J2a1e, J2a1g, J2a1h, J2a1i)."

"More sampling of ancient populations is needed to establish the presence (and frequency) ofhaplogroup J in the Aegean and neighboring regions). However, (i) the great time depth of itspresence in the Caucasus/Iran, together with (ii) its low frequency/absence in NeolithicGreece/Anatolia, and (iii) its appearance in the samples of our study, lead us to believe that it mayhave accompanied the genetic admixture (Neolithic Iran/Caucasus-hunter-gatherer related) that seemsto have affected all populations in our study (Supplementary Information, section 2). Thus, the Ychromosometurnover that occurred in central Europe during the Bronze Age7,19 may also haveoccurred in the Aegean, with a different set of incoming lineages."

So we've been saying here for a long time. Perhaps it's time to put some of the more exotic explanations to rest.

Very interesting, but I was not able to understand where the indoeuropian language came from??
 
Angela, I'd say that very local continuity (except in some cases) is non-existent in the Balkans anyway (and many other places) since you had plenty of local depopulations, migrations all over and inter-mixing. We aren't going to get a detailed history of general autosomal change, let alone a local one, of the Balkans with these preliminary results of course but they show that certain 'eastern' changes some people were already expecting for this period based on archaeology and linguistics did happen (and others were associating *solely* with all sorts of later events due to certain biases that we all have ;)). And going by current samples (and always being open to revision), it seems like post-Bronze Age 'northern' ancestry had more impact in Greece than did 'eastern/southern' one and actually drew later Greeks closer to 'mainstream Europe'.

And yes, a very good chunk of contemporary northern Greece might not have been particularly 'Greek' at all until archaic times when the Argeads settled in lower Macedonia, ousted/assimilated the Thracian-Paeonian-Phrygian locals and started expanding (that is, if we consider the Macedonians-proper to have been Greek-speaking which my biased self does). The question of course is to what extent we can trace those likely relatively small populations before they definitively appear in history and how separate we expect them to be compared to their neighbors who were Indo-European-speaking Balkanites too.

Now I'm wondering whether South and Central Italy were already CHG-shifted in this period and the supposition of the ss/nth substratum expanding all the way to Italy from Anatolia based on some Italian place-names was for real (but they might just be unrelated even if the change happened by the Bronze Age). The extra-steppe Armenoi sample seems to be particularly close to Tuscans and mainland Greeks on PCA anyway.

This is, in my opinion, the "heart" of the ancient Greek world, maybe reaching a bit more into the western coast of Anatolia:
70d2ddcdb933ebb9b75996b305fa0148.gif

As you acknowledge, "a good chunk of contemporary northern Greece might not have been particularly 'Greek' at all" until later on. Indeed, some of the "colonies" date to the same period when colonies were being sent to southern Italy and Greece. As I said it is well documented, and I've previously pointed to papers which detail the colonizations. The genetics of the people in these more northern areas may bear the mark of that prior population base to this day. That also is what it is..Of course, it's all on a cline.

With regard to your first paragraph, I'm with Fire-Haired on this one, and population geneticists for that matter. Significant genetic change comes from significant folk migrations. Ydna change fluctuates a lot more. Some groups in West Africa are mostly R1b V88. That doesn't stop them from being West Africans indistinguishable from their neighbors on every genetic measure other than yDna, which is about 2% of their ancestry.

Those significant folk migrations are pulses separated by thousands of years. For vast stretches of time people were born, lived and died right where their ancestors did, especially the "peasants", who were always the biggest chunk of the population. If you'll permit a personal digression, my family tree, particularly on my father's side, goes back to an extremely circumscribed area of a few villages for six hundred years. No in, no out. If there were written genealogical records I'm sure the line would go all the way back to 1000 AD or thereabouts when the villages were founded. That's 1000 years. That happened in a lot of places, and especially in places like Italy and a lot of Greece, which are very mountainous and also surrounded by water. Geography has a lot to do with genetics.

Look at England. There was a Neolithic migration. Then there was depopulation, followed by a huge movement of what look to be Bell Beaker like people from Central Europe in the Bronze Age. After that, nothing, although remaining Neolithic remnants might have then been incorporated, partly explaining the more "southern" shift in modern Britain. Perhaps there was a trickle of Roman era type people, but nothing significant. Then, a folk migration of the Anglo-Saxons, Danes etc. after the fall of Rome, which even then only tracks to about 30% of modern ancestry. After that, only changes around the edges from people like the Normans, who would have been mostly "Gallic" by then.

That's the way it works from what I can see. Significant folk migrations bringing significant change, separated by long periods of stasis and a few smaller migrations tinkering with the percentages around the edges.

About Italy I honestly don't know. It's a black hole in terms of ancient dna, which is the only thing that will straighten it out. Contrary to the expectations of some, the steppe movements of the Bronze Age didn't work out the same way in all places, so we'll see if Italy is like Iberia and Greece or slightly different. What I have gone on record saying is that I believe there was a lot of gene flow into Italy from across the Adriatic. We'll see if I was right.

I just wish one of the "big guns", i.e. the Reich Lab, or Allentoft, or Max Plank were doing the analysis of ancient Italian dna. I don't have particularly high hopes for the group that is working on it.
 
I feel good for some reason :) Congratulations to all who predicted the Y-haplogroups before, very well done.

What can these results tell us about the origin of some of the Minoans social and religious practices like bull leaping and the goddesses they shared with the Indus Valley Civilisation? We had this discussion before, and it didn't help that there was no proof of the Minoans "eastern" ancestry, until now.

The component that these two ancient populations shared was the Iran Neolithic/CHG like admixture, and so we can theorize for the existence of a "proto culture" for an expanding people, very much like the Proto Indo-Europeans, migrating east, west, and north, from that part of the world.

The migration east was in my opinion, with the advance of agriculture, based on the age of the J2 lineages of South Asia, they seem to be older than the subclades that migrated west, which date to the beginning of the Bronze Age. If we were to assume the existence of this ancestral "proto-culture" then can we predict that their languages were also related? of course, we don't know anything about both languages and it may have been the language of the locals, with no language replacement.
 
yes, it's more like a question than an answer

Cultural and technological transmission can occur without genetic transmission.
Chariots and sword making technology can be sold and reverse engineered to the ruling classes of other societies, yeah?

David Reich makes this point at the 32 minute mark of this video. He uses the spread of beakers among heterogenous populations to
demonstrate that people copy each others ideas:

 
Just eyeballing it, the modern Northern Greeks look like they have about 20% "steppe" as defined by Yamnaya, and that's after the Slavic invasions and it's in the north. The Mycenaeans were at about 13%. So, I'm afraid your fantasies and your trying to provoke Greeks are not based on facts, as usual.

Given this data, 13% steppe, why exactly would people assume we'd be finding lots of R1a? I'm not saying there isn't some and it won't show up, btw.

I am not surprised by the results. Antropologist have already proven this more than a century ago. They all noted that Greece has changed surprisingly little since the Bronze Age. And they do add that since the Mycenean era an extra component was added to the population. That said, we should not ignore the Dorians. They did come from the North (like the proto-hellenes) and they could have been more northern admixture. So I do not exclude some more Northern impact on classical Greeks.

What we do need to understand is that perhaps, Myceneans does not equal proto-Greeks.
 
This is, in my opinion, the "heart" of the ancient Greek world, maybe reaching a bit more into the western coast of Anatolia:
70d2ddcdb933ebb9b75996b305fa0148.gif

As you acknowledge, "a good chunk of contemporary northern Greece might not have been particularly 'Greek' at all" until later on. Indeed, some of the "colonies" date to the same period when colonies were being sent to southern Italy and Greece. As I said it is well documented, and I've previously pointed to papers which detail the colonizations. The genetics of the people in these more northern areas may bear the mark of that prior population base to this day. That also is what it is..Of course, it's all on a cline.

With regard to your first paragraph, I'm with Fire-Haired on this one, and population geneticists for that matter. Significant genetic change comes from significant folk migrations. Ydna change fluctuates a lot more. Some groups in West Africa are mostly R1b V88. That doesn't stop them from being West Africans indistinguishable from their neighbors on every genetic measure other than yDna, which is about 2% of their ancestry.

Those significant folk migrations are pulses separated by thousands of years. For vast stretches of time people were born, lived and died right where their ancestors did, especially the "peasants", who were always the biggest chunk of the population. If you'll permit a personal digression, my family tree, particularly on my father's side, goes back to an extremely circumscribed area of a few villages for six hundred years. No in, no out. If there were written genealogical records I'm sure the line would go all the way back to 1000 AD or thereabouts when the villages were founded. That's 1000 years. That happened in a lot of places, and especially in places like Italy and a lot of Greece, which are very mountainous and also surrounded by water. Geography has a lot to do with genetics.

Look at England. There was a Neolithic migration. Then there was depopulation, followed by a huge movement of what look to be Bell Beaker like people from Central Europe in the Bronze Age. After that, nothing, although remaining Neolithic remnants might have then been incorporated, partly explaining the more "southern" shift in modern Britain. Perhaps there was a trickle of Roman era type people, but nothing significant. Then, a folk migration of the Anglo-Saxons, Danes etc. after the fall of Rome, which even then only tracks to about 30% of modern ancestry. After that, only changes around the edges from people like the Normans, who would have been mostly "Gallic" by then.

That's the way it works from what I can see. Significant folk migrations bringing significant change, separated by long periods of stasis and a few smaller migrations tinkering with the percentages around the edges.

About Italy I honestly don't know. It's a black hole in terms of ancient dna, which is the only thing that will straighten it out. Contrary to the expectations of some, the steppe movements of the Bronze Age didn't work out the same way in all places, so we'll see if Italy is like Iberia and Greece or slightly different. What I have gone on record saying is that I believe there was a lot of gene flow into Italy from across the Adriatic. We'll see if I was right.

I just wish one of the "big guns", i.e. the Reich Lab, or Allentoft, or Max Plank were doing the analysis of ancient Italian dna. I don't have particularly high hopes for the group that is working on it.

Ed. To be clear, the mixing population into the "natives" of Greece which brought this steppe related ancestry need not have been directly from the steppe, i.e. Yamnaya itself, and probably was not, imo. If it came from the Balkans, as is more likely, imo, than Armenia, it would have been mixed with EEF itself, and maybe even some CHG if it had already arrived, so yes, to get an idea of the actual population turnover we would need a comparison of Bronze Age Balkan people with the Mycenaeans. So yes, the EEF/Anatolian farmer genes in modern Greeks might have come from north of Mycenae.

Also, we need to get a handle on the Bronze Age collapse and its effects on the genome. Might the Dorians have had a slightly different genetic make-up? Perhaps slightly more "steppe", even if it had a more "western" flavor after quite a bit of admixing? We need samples from that area and time period to know.
 
I am not surprised by the results. Antropologist have already proven this more than a century ago. They all noted that Greece has changed surprisingly little since the Bronze Age. And they do add that since the Mycenean era an extra component was added to the population. That said, we should not ignore the Dorians. They did come from the North (like the proto-hellenes) and they could have been more northern admixture. So I do not exclude some more Northern impact on classical Greeks.

What we do need to understand is that perhaps, Myceneans does not equal proto-Greeks.

Then who does? The Mycenaeans are in the heart of ancient Greece and are the first people we can assert unequivocally spoke the Greek language.

To be sure, I'd like to get a look at the "Dorian" genomes, and most avidly of all, I'd like to see the genomes of the classical Greeks.
 
Cultural and technological transmission can occur without genetic transmission.
Chariots and sword making technology can be sold and reverse engineered to the ruling classes of other societies, yeah?

David Reich makes this point at the 32 minute mark of this video. He uses the spread of beakers among heterogenous populations to
demonstrate that people copy each others ideas:


Indeed. Chariots spread all the way to Egypt very quickly as these things go. Did they have lots of steppe ancestry too? Anyone who hasn't read the Egyptian ancient dna paper shouldn't answer. :)
 
Most light hair and eyes came in middle ages. In ancient and prehistoric Greece, it was rare if not non existent.

A bit too affirmative? In ancient time dark hair pigmentation (in the general sense: brownish black to jet black) was I think the rule among inhabitants of today Greece like in the current pop. At the I-E times it would have been very close to the today Greece one too: later times send a bit more depigmented people, but not a lot. BTW, today people of Creta are LIGHTER pigmented than continental Greece...
But my point was: Greeks on the phenotypic level don't have 79% of "middle hues" hair: no pop has; to be of some use we have to divide this big bag into more than one: the english term "brown" is very unuseful in phenotypes: it spans a too wide range of colours; by dividing this category we can show very evident differences between pops, in hues AND surely in concerned genotypes, differences concealed by this terminology - Greeks of today are dominantly dark haired, about 66 to 70% at least (cf Portugal: about 78%, Cyprus about 80%, Spain about 60%, Arabic countries between 90 to 98%, more often over 95%: all that makes sense), and seldomly light, under 3% I think (as a mean). The remnant is middle mixed hues, not over 30% all the way in Greece. This concerning still wide categories. Every category has subcategories which implies at least partly distinct genetic background. If the study of todate known genotypes dont allow more precision it shows we are not already aware of all the acting genes on hair pigmentation and their way to act, or maybe, that we have a general feeling of which ones cause some depigmentation, but without more info about the depth of this depigmentation.
Personally I think the dominance in pigmentation can be broken down after some generations of crossing and that a lot of middle hues are not the result of specific mutated genes but the result of interaction of diverse genes (causing dark or light) after crossings. No proof, only feeling (I'm not genetist).
I answer you here but this is aside the principal topic about haplo's (poor) and auDNA and their discussed origins.
I think auDNA is useful but uneasy to interpret for pops mixed since a long time, with common ancient ancestors, whose genes have been acquired more than a time in diverse times and places: wide place to intepretation: the help of archeology and other tools is needed I think (I'm very little knowledged in archeology aside some general info's).
My vague feelings todate are: some pops attained Creta and Greece at EBA (and even Eneolithic) from Anatolia, already crossed with Iranic farmers and Caucasian HG's descendants (after metals acquisition). later came pops - since MBA? - from North (Carpathian Bassin, then the rivers, not the mountainous Balkans), with maybe some precited elements but with more Eastern (EHG/WHG) and Central Europe elements (EEF/WHG): very general but senseful I think. AuDNA in itself cannot be very more precise without help of other tools and without numerous uniparental haplo's. and the socail classes discrimination too coud be useful.
 
Stone Henge and the Minoan civilization were created by very close relatives, mind blowing. Both were 70-80% EEF.

Another interesting thing is both the Minoans and the Egyptians were indigenous to their separate regions. Egyptians mostly Levant_Neo, Minoans mostly Anatolia_Neo. Both were indigenous, descended from the primitive stone age people that lived in their regions 1,000s of years earlier.

I had said that the megalithic European passage tombs and the 'tomb of Agamemnon' are conceptually similar.
 
Then who does?

The people who carried the IE language prior to their arrival in Greece. To say that Myceneans are proto-Greeks is to say that current Balkan Slavs are are proto-Slavs.

I supported many times that mainland Greek ancestry is more limited in the islands because it went through more phases of intermixture, hence the autochtonous ancestry pervails. Same is true for the Myceneans vs the proto-Hellenes who migrated to what is now Greece.

The thing is, those proto-Hellenes are not the catch. It is the dominant, numerically superior, indigenous people around the Aegean which are the carriers of ancient Greek civilization. The Minoans, the Greeks in the Anatolian coasts, the Dorians etc. Why claim the Myceneans if Greeks from Anatolia had an equal share in making Greek civilization flourish? People where so focused on the Myceneans because they argued that they somehow brought fire to the people (to use an example of Greek mythology). The newcomers were however a simple addition. Greece is just absorbing layers of newcomers since before the Bronze Age. The proto-Hellenes were just one of them. And they were not the Myceneans. They were already absorbed.

At the very least I would argue that the Proto-Greeks were the one who occupied parts of Thessaly, Epirus and Macedonia. They went South and mixed with more numerous Minoan like peoples. They were absorbed to become the early Myceneans.
 
Has anyone already uploaded Minoans and Mycenaeans on GEDmatch?


The extra-steppe Armenoi sample seems to be particularly close to Tuscans and mainland Greeks on PCA anyway.

Crete Armenoi is more southeastern than Tuscans (Tuscans are a western version of Greek_Thessaloniki in Lazaridis' PCA). Crete Armenoi is closer to modern Greeks, or just intermediate between Greek_Thessaloniki and Sicilians. Anyway, Lazaridis has said that Crete Armenoi is a low quality sample, can't be labelled Minoan or Mycenaean.


WK6QnI2.png
 

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