Genetic Origins of Minoans and Mycenaeans

[Sile]

In the newest PCA are Greeks of Thessaloniki (Macedonia), Greek_Coriell, and Greek_Cretan_SGDP (two individuals), and they seem quite similar to the Greeks of the oldest PCAs.

Is thessaloniki the same as thessaly? ..........Neolitihic Thessaly ( NT ) had different markers ( as per other papers ) than this papers stated markers. NT had E-V13 while none where found in minoans.

I am unsure if Angela included thessalonki in her statement, some people think of it as one place and others do not.

 

[markoz2]

Etruscans DNA will show no or little Steppe ancestry. Ancient IE Italians will show a significant dose of Steppe. Ancient DNA from Italy and India will confirm Steppe people spread some IE languages. But only Hittite DNA can confirm PIE originated in the Steppe.

Does anyone really think it's a coincidence Myceneans look like Minoans with a tiny dose of Yamnaya?

Wasn't there a PCA showing Etruscans shifted towards Finns rel. to modern Tuscans? This would be what I'd expect considering that North-East Italy was the epicentre of the Urnfield network and the most likely Etruscan homeland.

As for the Mycenaeans - if Lazaridis is right and Armenia is the best proximate source, those Proto-Greeks still would have entered the Peloponnese by way of Bulgaria. So a northern shift is to be expected either way.

 

[Angela]

well Lazarides is used to make us upset every time he publish.
Last year many were upset by his "Genomic insights into the origin of farming in the ancient Near East".
and this year with this one,

I must admit that his work ''took my pants'' and the soil under my ground,

I was used with the idea of yamnaa steppe IE
but considering his scenario that IE speakers Myceneans came from nearby Armenia highlands with so little Steppe,
I think it is time to reconsider many,
I do not know how even I can change some of my posts,
I feel an idiot,

cause if his scenario is Correct
then this is the map of IE langauges

and not only we might speak of J2 IE speakers,
and the model may expand to Italy to Latio Umbria even maybe Villabruna,


off the record
to push my secret inner thoughts
in fact we might have even a difference among J2a centum West part and J2b satem East part from that area and time.

We don't know yet, Yetos, so I wouldn't give away your pants just yet!

 

[Pax Augusta]

Wasn't there a PCA showing Etruscans shifted towards Finns rel. to modern Tuscans? This would be what I'd expect considering that North-East Italy was the epicentre of the Urnfield network and the most likely Etruscan homeland.

Do you mean this?

 

[Angela]

Wasn't there a PCA showing Etruscans shifted towards Finns rel. to modern Tuscans? This would be what I'd expect considering that North-East Italy was the epicentre of the Urnfield network and the most likely Etruscan homeland.

As for the Mycenaeans - if Lazaridis is right and Armenia is the best proximate source, those Proto-Greeks still would have entered the Peloponnese by way of Bulgaria. So a northern shift is to be expected either way.

Lordy...the authors don't say Armenia is the best proximate source. Please re-read some of the posts here which quote from the paper, at least.

They just haven't been able to statistically exclude it. Who knows what the next paper will say?

If they are the best proximate source, which is a big IF, they wouldn't necessarily have entered by way of any meaningful foray into Bulgaria.

The PCA shows elite Etruscans, since that's all we have, clustering near modern day Iberians, where Northern Italians would be, and one of them slightly northeast of that. So, maybe near some Balkan population? However, I don't know how far to trust a PCA from an unpublished paper. We'll just have to wait for the ancient dna.

 

[Sile]

Well this is really interesting.

We know Mycenaeans spoke Greek because Linear B is Greek, so there's that. Just to keep the basics in view. The arrival of the Mycenaeans was also archaeologically VERY obvious, so they are a different culture than pre-Greek Aegean. No questions here, even aside from the trajectory of their arrival.

If people are really surprised that Greek speakers in Crete don't look like Srubna or something then they haven't been paying attention. Remember in the SE Europe paper we have a YAMNAYA BURIAL in Bulgaria that's approx. 40% Anatolian neolithic, 40% steppe, and 20% Ukraine mesolithic (Dnieper Donets). So people who are speaking something close to PIE (Anatolian?) are already almost half Anatolian neolithic.

Linear A was the primary script used in palace and religious writings of the Minoan civilization. It was discovered by archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans. It is the origin of the Linear B script, which was later used by the Mycenaean civilization.

so Linear A is minoan and Linear B is mycenean................A before B ....................myceneans conquered the minoans before the dorians arrived in Greece.
Logically , the myceneans originally spoke something else before Linear B , what did they speak, was it still Greek?

 

[LeBrok]

1. Anatolian Neolithic base
2. Minoan result of east/Iran/Caucus movement
3. Mycenean result of something else bringing in Steppe
4. Modern Greeks have even more Steppe

In #3, could this be caused by further movement from the East/caucus which by that time had more steppe due to IE expansion? Rather than over land, a Black Sea route could be plausible.

If the Myceneans were part of a conglomeration of sea peoples as depicted by Egyptians, they could have picked up steppe from contact with other Sea Peoples such as from the Black Sea through trade.

What do we know of people living on the Georgia coast and Crimea at the time?

Sent from my XT1080 using Eupedia Forum mobile app

I'm thinking along similar lines.

What do we know of people living on the Georgia coast and Crimea at the time?

In Late Bronze Age we have predominantly Yamnaya/Steppe type people live their in Srubna Culture, and it continues through Iron Age with Sarmatians and Scythians. Quite different genetically from Balkan BA.

We know much less about BA Anatolia genetics, especially the North. We have one sample of low quality Kum4, which shows 50/50 Anatolia Neolithic with Steppe.

 

[markoz2]

Lordy...the authors don't say Armenia is the best proximate source. Please re-read some of the posts here which quote from the paper, at least.
They just haven't been able to statistically exclude it. Who knows what the next paper will say?
If they are the best proximate source, which is a big IF, they wouldn't necessarily have entered by way of any meaningful foray into Bulgaria.
The PCA shows elite Etruscans, since that's all we have, clustering near modern day Iberians, Northern Italians/Tuscans, and one of them slightly northeast of that. So, maybe near some Balkan population? However, I don't know how far to trust a PCA from an unpublished paper. We'll just have to wait for the ancient dna.

I care more about what the authors data says, though still they clearly state that the northern and eastern shifts are related to the same phenomenon. The best proximate two-way model does involve the Armenian source.

An unsampled Balkan population might provide an even more accurate fit, but for now Armenia is the best proximate source. Period.

 

[Sile]

Well Trojans are supposed to be relevant to Romans (see Aeneas). Actually, it took so many years for Troy to fall. They should have done the jerb in two years max.

Aeneas was not a trojan. He was a dardanian
besides, the only ancient script they found in Troy was Luwian script which originates in modern SE Turkey...........next, if you read the iliad, you will note that the myceneans already had colonies in turkey near samos and rhodes before the trojan war

 

[LATGAL]

Yes, likely from North-Western Balkans. Mallory in his book In Search of the Indo-Europeans mentioned two possible urheimat for the Proto-Greeks, a north-western one - the tumulus builder - and a north-eastern one - the Ezero culture. Now we know that Ezero had no steppe admixture...so..

View attachment 9002

Yeah, those are the two broad scenarios I guess. They cite Sakellariou's 'Les Proto-Grecs' in the paper who from memory overall preferred the second, an early arrival from the Northeast in various directions to the south, even by sea considering the destruction wave, and west then that western reserve leading a bigger wave from northwest Greece to the south but I don't remember his exact argument about the path they took within the Balkans first.

With more extensive sampling and mapping early R1b and R1a subclade migrations in the Balkans people might arrive at a reasonable conclusion. We have R1b-Z2103 in the West and R1a-z93 in the East and Greek has features connecting it with both western and eastern IE languages.

And Dorians hanging out in Epirus in the Bronze Age as sile mentioned isn't too extravagant. That's one area where 'West Greek' has been thought to arrive from and that Northwest Greek-speaking populations inhabited in later times.

 

[Angela]

I care more about what the authors data says, though still they clearly state that the northern and eastern shifts are related to the same phenomenon. The best proximate two-way model does involve the Armenian source.

An unsampled Balkan population might provide an even more accurate fit, but for now Armenia is the best proximate source. Period.

Yes, indeed, you're more capable of interpreting the data and doing the statistics than the statisticians at Harvard who created the programs. Right, I should have known.

Next.

 

[Sile]

Don't go far. How often have principalities in Italy fought against each other?

We can also surmise that only the cities that went to fight for Agamemnon in the trojan war where mycenean cities and they also spoke mycenean

what was the most northern Mycenaean city that went with the greek to troy?

 

[Diomedes]

@Angela (post #210)

Savage

 

[Diomedes]

One god knows--it means we are not sure about something,--as we say in Greece.

We can also surmise that only the cities that went to fight for Agamemnon in the trojan war where mycenean cities and they also spoke mycenean

what was the most northern Mycenaean city that went with the greek to troy?

 

[markoz2]

Yes, indeed, you're more capable of interpreting the data and doing the statistics than the statisticians at Harvard who created the programs. Right, I should have known.

Next.

"Mycenaeans do not form a clade (N=1) with any population of the All+ set (p-value for rank=0 < 1e-6). They can only be modelled as a 2-way mixture of Neolithic Anatolia and Chalcolithic orMiddle/Late Bronze Armenia (Table S2.13). This suggests that Mycenaeans could be a mixture ofearly Neolithic people (represented by the Neolithic Anatolian population) and further input from theeast related to populations of Armenia. This seemingly contradicts the results of our earlier modelingas a 3-way mixture of Anatolian Neolithic, Iran Neolithic or Caucasus hunter-gatherers, and EasternEuropean hunter-gatherers or Upper Paleolithic Siberians (Table S2.2), which suggests input fromboth the east (related to Iran) and north. "

"Interestingly, the proportion of ‘eastern’ and ‘northern’ ancestry inTable S2.26 are anti-correlated (r=-0.95) suggesting again that they both capture the same underlyingphenomenon. Table S2.26: 3-way mixture models. Left = (Mycenaean, A, B, C). The Right set is All++""

I doubt they would have included it at all if it wasn't the best model.

 

[Yetos]

Equus is Latin, not ancient Umbrian. And Latin Equus is thought to derive from proto-Italic *ekwos, that derives from Proto-Indo-European *h₁éḱwos (“horse”). It's a word connected to all the Indo-European languages. I don't think it can prove a specific connection.

Mycenean is ικκος eqqos but change to ιππος eppos notice the hephew or hepfew,
the Q-P change must have to do with this

 

[Sakattack]

so Linear A is minoan and Linear B is mycenean................A before B ....................myceneans conquered the minoans before the dorians arrived in Greece.
Logically , the myceneans originally spoke something else before Linear B , what did they speak, was it still Greek?

Linear B was just the written expression of the archaic Greek AKA Mycenaean language. We can assume that they had no alphabet, so they adopted the Linear (slightly changed from A to B) writing system from the Minoans to write down their language.

Minoan language was different.

 

[Yetos]

Is thessaloniki the same as thessaly? ..........Neolitihic Thessaly ( NT ) had different markers ( as per other papers ) than this papers stated markers. NT had E-V13 while none where found in minoans.
I am unsure if Angela included thessalonki in her statement, some people think of it as one place and others do not.

what? when V-13 found in Neolithic thessaly?
the oldest possible V-13 found is at iron age Thrace around 5-6th century BC,

the theoritical posibility of exist has nothing to do with found?

 

[Yetos]

Well Trojans are supposed to be relevant to Romans (see Aeneas). Actually, it took so many years for Troy to fall. They should have done the jerb in two years max.

if that is certain then Carthagenians should also be simmilar to Troyans,

Aeneas bedore Rome went to Africa.

 

[Ygorbr]

So, the amount of actual "admixture", and not, to emphasize, from any simplistic admixture like calculator, but from very sophisticated statistical modeling techniques by people who understand how they work because they created them would probably be around 20% from such a "proximate" source, which would be enough to effectuate linguistic change. I mean, if the "Hungarians" could do it in Hungary with even less genetic input, it could happen in Greece. We have to also keep in mind that like the "Hungarians", this intrusive group adopted much of the culture of the pre-existing population, as well as bringing in some additional elements of their own. Perhaps the effect of the "Turkish" migration to Anatolia might be a reasonably good example as well.

The confusion over this shows why precise definitions are so important, and people need to know them. When the authors wrote about Mycenaeans having 4-16% "steppe", they meant as in actual Yamnaya ancestry.

Thanks for this enlightening answer. IMHO if we consider that the recent study on West Iberian ancient DNA indicated an introgression of EHG without CHG (probably, I'd guess, accompanied by quite a lot of EEF found between Eastern Europe and beyond the Pyrenees), then I'm starting to assume that the proximate sources (emphasis on the plural) of IE languages/cultures were much more varied than the "simpler" transplantation of Yamna-like people to other regions and subsequent mix with decaying EEF, the "Aryan warriors wiping Old Europe out" stuff.

The scenario looks increasingly complex, pointing to alternative hypotheses that would result in very different admixture outcomes. Some peoples were pretty much Yamna-like, others must've been a relatively even mix between Europe_LN and Yamna-like, others yet mainly indigenous Europe_N under a foreign ruling elite, and even Kurganized EHG+EEF natives - if that CHG-less EHG "invasion" of Iberia really brought the first IE languages (Pre-Lusitanian?) to Iberian. Depending on where the Mycenaeans came, their actual contribution as a whole could've had a wide range.

As a Latino, that situation looks quite plausible: even though Spanish and Portuguese spread almost uniformly throughout a huge continent, the actual European admixture varies widely from as little as 15-20% to as much as 80%. A colonization by Argentines will yield a very different result from one from theri neighbor Bolivians.