Genetic Origins of Minoans and Mycenaeans

One analogy might be the Goths in Italy. They weren't large enough as a group, imo, for them to have much impact on the genetics, but they had even less impact on the culture. Instead, they adopted not only the culture of the inhabitants in many areas, but even adopted their language, eventually discarding their own Germanic one. The Lombards probably had more effect, but even they dropped their language.

This is a very recent review of the Gothic presence in Italy. I don't present it to de-rail the discussion into a discussion of Italy, but as an example of the kind of processes which are possible when a numerically and culturally "simpler" group invades a long settled and advanced culture:

https://www.academia.edu/25092699/Goths_and_Gothic_Identity_in_the_Ostrogothic_Kingdom

"Even those who hold that Goths lived largely among each other in regionalclusters, monopolized the military, and maintained their own cultural andpolitical identity still recognize that Gothic and Roman societies were in theprocess of merging in Italy. The mixed marriages of Brandila and Proculaand Patza and Regina have already been mentioned.������������ Various inscriptions andpapyri also attest to other unions between partners with barbarian and Romannames.������������ Certain individuals seem to have been known by both Roman andGothic names, and there are instances of parents with Gothic names givingtheir children Roman ones.������������ Classical learning was adopted by some of theGothic elite. Gothic geographers are attested in the
Ravenna Cosmography
.������������Theoderic’s nephew Theodahad was versed in Latin literature, Platonic phi-losophy, and ecclesiastical writings, and the king’s daughter Amalasuentha was ������������uent in Greek, Latin, and Gothic, and sought to provide her son Athalaric with a similar Roman education.������������ "

People have to stop expecting every migration to be like that of Corded Ware to northern Europe.
 
ΠΑΝΑΞ said:
How much fun... :LOL:


But the true is that is not what "modern Greeks" bother about. I think they mostly have pride for their language mostly.
An other think is the "slavic"genetic imput as mentioned, it profited us and not damaged us.
It is interesting to see how other people (barbarians, Lol) consider about the Greeks.


Hey it;s a catchy thread and running wild... Nice conversation guys, I wish to have more time, thanks.
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I like that dilemma

But instead of only Slavs should say also Romans Aromani Arbanites Thracians
so the creator must rewrite correct all the add-mixtures,

some people are proud for nothing
 
Angela said:
Do you actually believe this stuff?
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Of course, just quoting Pokorny:

B. pel “castle” in O.Ind. pū́ r, gen. purás “castle, town, city”, pura- n., newer puri-, purī ds.,
compare Singapur “Löwenstadt”, Gk. (Eol.) πόλις “castle, town, city, Staat” (*peli-s), Hom.
Cypr. πτόλις ds., Lith. pilìs, Ltv. pile “castle, Schloß” (see Schwyzer, Gk. 1, 325, 344,
Specht KZ 59, 65f., 11 f., Trautmann 217).
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from the same root Latin plenus and English full. The common meaning for 'town' is shared so once proto-Indoiranians and proto-Greeks dwelt in the same cities.
 
IMO the key is to define where the Mycenaeans came from.

Can't be that one Greek group came one way and an other one (name it Dorians etc) came from somewhere else. Can't happen.

These groups should have lived in very very close proximity and popped out from the same civ, before entering Greece. Imagine at some point, even genetically, they should have been identical (with a normal variation between same groups).

If not Bronze Age, then only some centuries earlier.

So if the case is Balkans, then all these suppositions (Dorians from the "North" Mycenaeans from Vucedol etc etc) may turned out true.

If the case is Anatolia/S. Armenia, we have to think elsewhere.

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Angela said:
For those interested in phenotypic data:

The actual snp data is on page 59 of the Supplement.
https://images.nature.com/full/nature-assets/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/extref/nature23310-s1.pdf

View attachment 8993

"Present-day Europeans are almost fixed for the derived (light pigmentation) allele G atrs1426654, but the ancestral allele occurred in western European hunter-gatherers3,4. Werecord no copy of the ancestral allele in 9 individuals with at least one sequence. We alsoexamined the rs16891982 SNP in SLC45A2, the second strongest signal of selection inEuropeans discovered in a genome-wide scan3. The overall frequency of the C allele could beestimated as 24% (C.I.: 8-47%) in the Aegean Bronze Age. The frequency of the minor Callele in present-day Greeks is 14% (95% C.I.: 11-17%)5. The C allele has decreased infrequency in eastern Europe6 or Europe in general3 due to likely selection since the BronzeAge, but with the available data, the Bronze Age frequency is consistent with its modernprevalence."

"Classic blond hair has been associated with the C allele in the rs12821256 SNP in KITLG9.We have reads covering this site in 11 individuals and do not detect the C allele."

"The rs12913832 SNP in HERC2 is a major determinant of blue eye color in humans7. Thefrequency of the A allele could be estimated as 86% (C.I.: 64-98%) in the Bronze AgeAegean. The G allele was present in Anatolia since Neolithic times3and our results suggest itspresence in all studied Bronze Age groups at a low frequency."

"These results suggest that ancient Bronze Age individuals from the Aegean and southwesternAnatolia had mostly dark (brown or black) hair and brown eyes. Blue eyes were uncommonas predicted by the lack of homozygotes for the G allele at rs12913832 which is the majorpredictor of this trait, however, this allele did occur in all studied populations (Table S4.1),thus the phenotype would have been uncommon but not unknown in the region. The browneye phenotype is still the most common in present-day Greeks occurring in ~3/4 of them, withthe remainder split between blue and intermediate shades1. Similarly, ~79% of present-dayGreeks have light or dark brown hair, with the remainder split between blond and black."

So much for blonde-blue eyed Mycenaeans.

I guess this reconstruction of the Mycenaean "Griffin warrior" may be pretty accurate, despite all the naysayers.
Facial-Reconstruction-Griffin-Warrior.jpg
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q9MdO2dm.jpg


This app is actually really interesting.
 
blevins13 said:
Is there a logical reasoning behind your answer....I would like to understand your point of view.


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There isn't any logical reasoning behind the point of view that it is Dorian. You consider facts things an internet persona writes on Eupedia. Present your arguments.
 
A. Papadimitriou said:
There isn't any logical reasoning behind the point of view that it is Dorian. You consider facts things an internet persona writes on Eupedia. Present your arguments.
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If you read my previous posts, I stated that this is an hypothesis....presented by Maciamo. I just wanted to consider the opposing arguments for this hypothesis since i have a vested interest on it.


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In my opinion so called Dorian invasion came from within Greece,you don't really need to look very north and imagine Nordic origin or Central European origin of the invaders,they most probably "invaded" from the region of Doris just north of Mycenae,Peloponesus.They replaced the old ruling elite and made themselves new masters,maybe similar like the Macedonians later.
 
i'm of the same opinion, Dorians were just northern Greeks, originally, probably from Epirus. There are some chances that they absorbed a bit of Illyrian blood which could explain why classical Greeks where - probably - more northeners than Mycenaeans...other Northern genes came with the Slavs and so you have modern Greeks
 
Milan.M said:
In my opinion so called Dorian invasion came from within Greece,you don't really need to look very north and imagine Nordic origin or Central European origin of the invaders,they most probably "invaded" from the region of Doris just north of Mycenae,Peloponesus.They replaced the old ruling elite and made themselves new masters,maybe similar like the Macedonians later.
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afaik they spoke a similar language
is that correct?
 
berun said:
Z2103 is yet as it was, in the steppes, so it can't be trusted the IE expansion to it. Instead R1a is relied to EHG (all IE samples have it much or less) and they are related to the demuc expansion in Asia, the Indo-Iranian one. I see that Greek -polis is the same as Indic -pur. Both branches share a lot of cultural cases... where it's possible to look at the first IE cities? in Arkhaim
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Without touching haplogroups, you raised an interesting discussion.
It has long been known that similar bits and meander patterns were found in Sintashta-Andronovo and Mycenae. Also noticeable traces of horse breeding in Mycenaeus, which characteristic in general for the Indo-Iranians. Perhaps bits and meander came to Mycenae not from Sintashta, but from the Babyno culture (Multi-cordoned ware), which is possible associated with proto-greeks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-cordoned_ware_culture

Also Arkaim is not considered a city in the classical sense, because there was no stratification of the population. But nevertheless, the polis theme of Indo-Iranians and Greeks finds parallels. As well as their mythology. Starting from centaurs / gandhavers to cerberus / carbaras.
 
bicicleur said:
afaik they spoke a similar language
is that correct?
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Yes, that's right. It's just one of the ancient Greek dialects.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Greek_dialects

What we see in Anatolia is the movement of Greek speakers from different parts of Greece. We can see the same thing in what they called "Magna Graecia" or Greater Greece, by which I think they meant "expanded Greece".

edf0bb232499e8d177204519fec37bca--italian-dialects-doric.jpg


The following, as to the "Doric migration", is obviously speculative.

greekmigration.gif


1200px-Magna_Graecia_ancient_colonies_and_dialects-en.svg.png


The only thing that will settle the questions is ancient dna, imo.
 
Dov said:
Without touching haplogroups, you raised an interesting discussion.
It has long been known that similar bits and meander patterns were found in Sintashta-Andronovo and Mycenae. Also noticeable traces of horse breeding in Mycenaeus, which characteristic in general for the Indo-Iranians. Perhaps bits and meander came to Mycenae not from Sintashta, but from the Babyno culture (Multi-cordoned ware), which is possible associated with proto-greeks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-cordoned_ware_culture

Also Arkaim is not considered a city in the classical sense, because there was no stratification of the population. But nevertheless, the polis theme of Indo-Iranians and Greeks finds parallels. As well as their mythology. Starting from centaurs / gandhavers to cerberus / carbaras.
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As far as I have read and learnt, I also tend to believe that the Proto-Greeks were associated with the Babyno culture or perhaps even the Cotofeni (close enough to where Babyno culture would arise) or Vucedol, considering the increasing likeliness that the Proto-Greeks were from their beginning a largely EHG-admixed EEF-majority people who shifted to IE language and culture. That'd explain nicely the cultural links of Mycenaeans to northern cultures and also the relatively little impact of steppe-like component in Mycenaean Greece.
 
The myth of Heracleidae pretty much describes with good detail, if I may add, the movements of the Dorians. Indeed the Dorian migration was a movement of Greeks within Helladic space.
 
That image of the person of the archaic Greece that you guys show looks like Alexis Georgoulis, a Greek actor.
 
@Dov @Ygorbr
The linking of steppe cultures to known IE branches in the south in not so easy as we need to count there with Anatolian, Greek, Armenian, Thracian and others... the Asiatic IE expansion is more easy to find out as it only involves a branch (Tocharian nobody knows from which planet they came and when).

Moreover for the Greek-Iranic issue may be it was not different cultures but different economies: protogreeks farming and protoindoiranians herding and roaming around.
 
bicicleur said:
Minoan and Mycenean culture and people are percieved as different from each other.
The later Mycenean culture is not derived from the Minoan culture.

Yet the genetic difference is small :

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.

Did these few EHG shape the Mycenean culture? Where they a small ruling elite?
Well, they had charriots and swords ..

btw, is there a way to go around the paywall?
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Yet not a single "Steppic" yDNA found among them. The only Steppic thing found among them was some little EHG (which could have came via the Caucasus anyways) and a female mtDNA.

So either there was some J lineage among the Steppic cultures we don't know off yet, or Mycenian comes from a culture that is not located in the Steppes.
 
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