Balkans and Neolithic Farmers

[HiveMindTerror]

Hello everyone,

I've recently been watching some guys historical videos on YouTube. He claims haplogroups aren't a good way to determine a persons/peoples actual ancestry/heritage and that one must use autosomal genetics. I never knew this beforehand.
Anyways, he seems to possess a lot of knowledge, but he claimed that people of the Balkans (South Slavs, Greeks, Albanians) descend majority from Neolithic Farmers, with a minority ~20% of Slavic influence (on South Slavs). I was curious as to how true this was. Since I know relatively little on the entire subject.

 

[Angela]

Hello everyone,

I've recently been watching some guys historical videos on YouTube. He claims haplogroups aren't a good way to determine a persons/peoples actual ancestry/heritage and that one must use autosomal genetics. I never knew this beforehand.
Anyways, he seems to possess a lot of knowledge, but he claimed that people of the Balkans (South Slavs, Greeks, Albanians) descend majority from Neolithic Farmers, with a minority ~20% of Slavic influence (on South Slavs). I was curious as to how true this was. Since I know relatively little on the entire subject.

It varies slightly by country. Keep in mind too that Slavs also have Neolithic farmer ancestry, just not from the Balkans.

Read this paper:
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0105090

To know the precise proportion of "local" ancestry vs Slavic from the migration period, we need an ancient sample from the Slavs when they were arriving, i.e. before admixture.

 

[PaschalisB]

Actually all of Europe is more neolithic than paleolithic, but the percentage is a bit higher in the South. It's true that you can't use only the haplogroups to judge the ancestry (for example the Basques are overwhelmingly R1b but they are not an Indo-European people).

 

[HiveMindTerror]

That was an interesting read. I think I could comprehend most of it.

So Western Yugoslavs are closer to Hungarians/Northern Slavs.

Eastern Balkans (Bulgarians, Also Romanians) are closer to Turks or Greeks(?) I might now have understood this one too well.

Serbs/Montenegrins seem to be a middle ground.

But overall the Yugoslavs are closest to one another, and show evidence of migrations off all kinds.

My own K15 puts me closest with 1. Bulgarians (11.74) 2. Romanians (12.56) 3. Croatians (12.57) 4. Serbians (13.02)... etc. Via GEDmatch, and mytrueancestry says something similar for my modern populations, 1. Bosnian (10.93) 2. Bulgarian (13.67) 3. Romanian (14.62) 4. Croatian (14.71)... etc. Which I believe is strange/uncommon for a Croat.

Actually all of Europe is more neolithic than paleolithic, but the percentage is a bit higher in the South. It's true that you can't use only the haplogroups to judge the ancestry (for example the Basques are overwhelmingly R1b but they are not an Indo-European people).

That's interesting, I'm honestly just learning this all now. For a while I was beginning to get convinced that we were overwhelmingly similar to northern Slavs (due to haplogroups), now I can see that may well be different.

 

[Angela]

Actually all of Europe is more neolithic than paleolithic, but the percentage is a bit higher in the South. It's true that you can't use only the haplogroups to judge the ancestry (for example the Basques are overwhelmingly R1b but they are not an Indo-European people).

Indeed. Europe wide, it's just over 50, but in most of northern and central Europe it's even higher. Northern France is, I think, around 55%, while Southern France has more.