Preview: Upcoming Ancient Greek Transect (Mesolithic to Medieval) from Biomuse.

The majority of the samples plot in the range of LBA Myceneans. I guess Olalde 2022 was right to use the Empuries sample.

Ok, thanks Jovialis.
 
You know these guys seem to eat an extraordinary amount of meat and animal products, and a surprisingly low amount of fruits and vegetables.

It's quite a change from the Neolithic period, and even the Archaic period was for some more plant based..

Indeed, Empuries would seem to be a good sample to use for the Classical period as well. Probably Olalde knew the general outlines of what samples were in the Reich Lab for the ancient Greeks.

I think we can put to bed the idea that the original Mycenaean samples we had were somehow not representative. That one goes into the book I'm keeping, too.

Their level of total steppe seems to be pretty close to that of Southern Italians, yes?
 
There was never any reason to believe that Iron Age Greeks would be different to the preceding Mycenaeans in the first place. That original autosomal profile likely lasted all the way through Classical period. It wasn't until the Hellenistic period when Greek civilization came to dominate the Eastern Mediterranean that we see the formation of a distinctively modern looking Cretan/Dodecanesian/Cypriot-like genetic profile, very similar to the Imperial Roman samples, after extensive intermixing between the original IA/Classical Greek and Greek-speaking but autosomal West Asian people. It's highly likely that this sort of Southeast Mediterranean genetic profile persisted well into the Roman/Byzantine period, where the assimilation of the Slavs crystallized the difference we see between the mainland and islands today.

This is why there is a similar level of Mycenaean-like ancestry (40-60%) across all modern Greeks (with the exception of Pontians from the Black Sea), with an inverse relationship between East European vs. West Asian admixture based on geography e.g. a Rhodian is a Cypriot with roughly 6% more Slavic, thus 6% less West Asian, Cretan is a Rhodian with around 8% more Slavic etc. all the way until you reach Macedonia.

Why don't we stick to facts and not endless speculation which in most cases has been proven to be false. I know it will be difficult, but try.
 
The input from more recent near eastern admixture has been greatly exaggerated by Levantist, nordicists, and woke liberals. I am not the only one who proposed such a model. Raveane et al. 2022 also puts this forward in a way. However we came to that conclusion independently. Moreover, Apulia and other parts of the south are show among the highest affinity to the Ancient Greeks, along with other specific Peloponnesian populations.

^^Natufian confounds the model, because it has a ton of Anatolia_N. There's also the Moors to consider, who brought some north African which also serves to confuse the model. Using minoan isolates that. The eastern Mediterraneans are mostly Anatolia BA, and that is represented in the model I put forward as well.

Roman_Greek has a levant shift yes, but I suspect the input is trivial in the grand scheme of things.

All of these populations have a fit of 4 or less using this model. Observe the autosomal make up of Island Greeks, not all are the same.

Also, many of the Greek colonies were founded by eastern Peloponnesians

DeHJsK7.png

The usual suspect(s) just can't stand being wrong yet again.
 
I can only make out Thessaloniki, Abdera as post Bronze Age. While Doliani is medieval. The rest is not on the chart. While the descriptions of other Iron Age Greeks is light hair and/or pale skin and in some cases light eyes. While Mycenaeans were described as very dark by Lazaridis. Where are Archontiko, Agios Panteleimonas, Sparta, Tenea on the PCA? The rest are from the Neolithic.

What are you looking at?

Of the summaries presented, one has blue eyes and brown/blonde hair (Sparta), and one, from around 1000 BC has red hair with no information on the color of the eyes.

The rest all have dark hair and dark eyes.

If you have data for other samples than those posted here, please present it.

Otherwise, please stop spreading misinformation.
 
It's quite a change from the Neolithic period, and even the Archaic period was for some more plant based..

Indeed, Empuries would seem to be a good sample to use for the Classical period as well. Probably Olalde knew the general outlines of what samples were in the Reich Lab for the ancient Greeks.

I think we can put to bed the idea that the original Mycenaean samples we had were somehow not representative. That one goes into the book I'm keeping, too.

Their level of total steppe seems to be pretty close to that of Southern Italians, yes?

Indeed, they get about 15-20% with a huge amount of Minoan.

Also, the Mycenaeans profile has indeed survived into the iron age, and is certainly representative of what they looked like in the Bronze Age. This study is vindicating for sure.
 
Also they seem almost like they're on the paleo-diet with as much as 90% (!) of what they consume being meat and animal products.

So much for the canard that "civilization is bad because the diet is not as good as what meat eating HGs ate, blah, blah, blah". These people ate meat, and in a large amount. I guess that's what happens when you have an advanced civilization with access to what you want to have. :)
 
apparently "Upcoming Ancient Greek Transect (Mesolithic to Medieval) from Biomuse"


Thanks for the response, glad the threads were combined. Any word on who some the researchers on the paper might be.
 
Thanks for the response, glad the threads were combined. Any word on who some the researchers on the paper might be.

I think I may have found it here:

BIOMUSE - TETRAGON

CONSORTIUM



History and Ethnology Department-Anthropology Laboratory DEMOCRITUS UNIVERSITY OF THRACE, TETRAGON SA (Greece), Institute of Organismic and Molecular Evolution Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Reiss-Engelhorn Museen (Germany)


 
Fantastic, so it is not just a paper, but an entire museum exhibit.

Thanks for the link, yes, looks as you suggest, and entire museum with constructing biographies of the individuals with representations of what they look like based on DNA. Impressive project.
 
Hi guys, I just want to know some predictions from you. What do you think which haplogroup will be dominant and will E-V13 finally be found among the Greeks? Do you expect more Southern and Northern shifted outliers? The Roman paper leak was pretty much accurate but there were some unexpected results too. However, this paper is very promising and appears to be exciting.

J2a, G2a, R1b-Z2103 representing the older Mycenean Greek and E-V13 representing the newer Eastern Urnfielder Late Bronze Age to Early Iron Age influence.

My prediction.
 
It's quite a change from the Neolithic period, and even the Archaic period was for some more plant based..

Indeed, Empuries would seem to be a good sample to use for the Classical period as well. Probably Olalde knew the general outlines of what samples were in the Reich Lab for the ancient Greeks.

I think we can put to bed the idea that the original Mycenaean samples we had were somehow not representative. That one goes into the book I'm keeping, too.

Their level of total steppe seems to be pretty close to that of Southern Italians, yes?

Honestly it seems to me they are a bit different: I recall that the Aegean_BA cluster was below and east of Sicilians on a PCA, whereas this main Greek cluster seems just below Sicilians, and it seems to me that they fall in the place in the PCA occupied by some previous Balkan samples, those that cluster around Bulgarian_IA. Just a tiny bit shifted away from the Aegean_BA cluster but not overlapping nonetheless.

The issue with the Mycenean samples is that they were quite heterogenuous, which is a situation one expects in cases of recent invasions, so it wasn't clear how IA Greeks would turn out to be exactly, though of course they would be roughly similar to Myceneans.

The Empuries samples as well covered quite some timeframe, and I suspected that later samples had higher Anatolian admixture, and the one sample from the classical age (I'd take as a recent colonist from Phocea) was at the higher edge of the Aegean_BA cluster, clustering where one Balkan antiquity sample clusters (the one literally over the contour of the Aegean_BA cluster) and where the Abd4 sample clusters too, at the edges of the Sicilian cluster, inbetween Sicilians and Maltese. I think that obviously such a shift is due to some low Anatolian admixture in Greeks from Anatolia.
F1.large.jpg
 
Mycenaeans were parallel with Sicilians but in western direction (kinda like that of Sardinians/Minoans/EEF).
 
There was never any reason to believe that Iron Age Greeks would be different to the preceding Mycenaeans in the first place. That original autosomal profile likely lasted all the way through Classical period. It wasn't until the Hellenistic period when Greek civilization came to dominate the Eastern Mediterranean that we see the formation of a distinctively modern looking Cretan/Dodecanesian/Cypriot-like genetic profile, very similar to the Imperial Roman samples, after extensive intermixing between the original IA/Classical Greek and Greek-speaking but autosomal West Asian people. It's highly likely that this sort of Southeast Mediterranean genetic profile persisted well into the Roman/Byzantine period, where the assimilation of the Slavs crystallized the difference we see between the mainland and islands today.

This is why there is a similar level of Mycenaean-like ancestry (40-60%) across all modern Greeks (with the exception of Pontians from the Black Sea), with an inverse relationship between East European vs. West Asian admixture based on geography e.g. a Rhodian is a Cypriot with roughly 6% more Slavic, thus 6% less West Asian, Cretan is a Rhodian with around 8% more Slavic etc. all the way until you reach Macedonia.

50-60% Classical Greek admixture in Cretans and Aegean Islands is very probable. But Rhodians seem to be closer to Central Anatolians than to Mycenaeans. And Cretans are basically a more Slavicized version of Rhodians with some negligible Venetian admixture. Rhodes is very close to Western Anatolia and many Aegean Islands were abandoned and repopulated even during the Middle Ages so maybe those islands got repopulated with a Byzantine Anatolian population during the Middle Ages. (that happen to resemble the Marathon sample ~95%) This could be true especially about Cyprus.

Crete as a large island was never abandoned and is fairly distant geographically from Anatolia so that suggest that Greeks during the Hellenistic period were mixed with something exotic and distant like ARM_LA. (A speculation of mine)

Otherwise I don't believe Cretans are more Anatolian than Classical Greek/Mycenaean-like. And I also don't believe it for Dodecanese Islands unless the scenario that I mentioned above is true.
 
50-60% Classical Greek admixture in Cretans and Aegean Islands is very probable. But Rhodians seem to be closer to Central Anatolians than to Mycenaeans. And Cretans are basically a more Slavicized version of Rhodians with some negligible Venetian admixture. Rhodes is very close to Western Anatolia and many Aegean Islands were abandoned and repopulated even during the Middle Ages so maybe those islands got repopulated with a Byzantine Anatolian population during the Middle Ages. (that happen to resemble the Marathon sample ~95%) This could be true especially about Cyprus.

Crete as a large island was never abandoned and is fairly distant geographically from Anatolia so that suggest that Greeks during the Hellenistic period were mixed with something exotic and distant like ARM_LA. (A speculation of mine)

Otherwise I don't believe Cretans are more Anatolian than Classical Greek/Mycenaean-like. And I also don't believe it for Dodecanese Islands unless the scenario that I mentioned above is true.

Resettlements took place during Nikephoros Phokas reign, after the recapture of Crete.

(on the translated page: not Central Asian populations, it's a mistranslation, the original text mentions Asia Minor populations)
https://www-goodnet-gr.translate.go..._sl=el&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=el&_x_tr_pto=wapp
 
Honestly it seems to me they are a bit different: I recall that the Aegean_BA cluster was below and east of Sicilians on a PCA, whereas this main Greek cluster seems just below Sicilians, and it seems to me that they fall in the place in the PCA occupied by some previous Balkan samples, those that cluster around Bulgarian_IA. Just a tiny bit shifted away from the Aegean_BA cluster but not overlapping nonetheless.

The issue with the Mycenean samples is that they were quite heterogenuous, which is a situation one expects in cases of recent invasions, so it wasn't clear how IA Greeks would turn out to be exactly, though of course they would be roughly similar to Myceneans.

The Empuries samples as well covered quite some timeframe, and I suspected that later samples had higher Anatolian admixture, and the one sample from the classical age (I'd take as a recent colonist from Phocea) was at the higher edge of the Aegean_BA cluster, clustering where one Balkan antiquity sample clusters (the one literally over the contour of the Aegean_BA cluster) and where the Abd4 sample clusters too, at the edges of the Sicilian cluster, inbetween Sicilians and Maltese. I think that obviously such a shift is due to some low Anatolian admixture in Greeks from Anatolia.
F1.large.jpg

My point was addressed to the fact that the usual suspect maintained that future Mycenaean samples would be very different, far more "Corded Ware" like.

Even though it seemed to many to be unlikely that Empuries was a good sample to use in the interim for Greeks of the classical era it seems to have been a "passable" sample. I really don't get what you're arguing about.

To be honest, I'm tired of the incessant speculation. When the paper is published, and hopefully the raw data as well, and we can see the statistical methods used on that data, we'll know if the authors' conclusions are justified, and indeed whether we have more clues as to what happened over time. Given the analysis of the modern genomes from the mainland and the islands, clearly there's a lot of variation depending on local history.

So far, I don't see anything that negates the Raveane et al conclusions quoted above.
 
What are you looking at?

Of the summaries presented, one has blue eyes and brown/blonde hair (Sparta), and one, from around 1000 BC has red hair with no information on the color of the eyes.

The rest all have dark hair and dark eyes.

If you have data for other samples than those posted here, please present it.

Otherwise, please stop spreading misinformation.

Let me add this to your overall correct statement. There was one archaic Macedonian sample, a female with blue eyes and brown hair. So from 9 (minus the 1 mesolithic sample) 2 samples had blue eyes.

1yfInAS.png



Anyway, anyone who is familiar with Ancient Greek primary sources would expect nothing but that Ancient Greeks were majority dark-haired and dark-eyed Mediterranean people. However, in this study, the Greeks aside from one outlier that had intermediate to dark complexion, were all pale or pale to intermediate. In contrast in the "Aegean palatial civilizations" paper, the BA Greeks were predicted as being very dark which took us all by surprise.
 
J2a, G2a, R1b-Z2103 representing the older Mycenean Greek and E-V13 representing the newer Eastern Urnfielder Late Bronze Age to Early Iron Age influence.

My prediction.

Your prediction sounds good and plausible.
 
I can't wait for the paper to be released it's going to answer so many questions. Some samples from the MBA and EIA seem to cluster between modern Greeks and myceneans
 

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