matadworf
Regular Member
I'll reply to the best of my ability,
1) When I make historical points and references is because I come from such a background, it boggles my mind how some can jump over nearly 1800+ years of Byzantine/Ottoman recorded history and go straight to the Bronze/Iron Age when they want to explain population backgrounds. Ethnographically, with the exception of Tsakonia, Peloponnesians show no unique ethnographic/linguistic evolution of 'ancient times' compared to their other peers.
2) The PCAs obviously show a distorted sense of reality, that's why formal stats are usually preferred in academic papers. If you head to my other thread, you can see that FST distances are better for Albanians than for Greeks in relation to the Mycenean samples (Reich dataset that Lazaridis et al (2017) used).
3) I am not a nordicist or any other -icist. I treasure my nation's ancient/Byzantine/Ottoman past, its history and ethnography equally and I only post historical (or other) references that I can back with sources or that are easy to cross reference. I think that a jump of 2k+ years of historical and ethnographic evolution is not very academic to say the least. Why shouldn't Moreans/Peloponnesians treasure their Albanian, Slavic, Italian, Saracen and Greek roots equally? Aren't they an amalgamation of all these things, just like the historians tell us? Is one past more important and more 'pure' than the others?
4) For disclosure purposes, I am half Arvanite from Thrace from my dad, and half Pontic Anatolian from my mom. Shall I discount my Balkan and South Caucasian genetics, culture and ancestral tradition, just so I can pretend that I am Cretan, like the PCAs say, and henceforth also close to ancient Greeks by proxy? Will I score more internet points if I do that?
I think you have misunderstood me, with all due respect, my background is anthropology and ethnography and so I am very keen on these middle/late Medieval details some people want to leave out.
Hey these autosmal comparisons are in "good fun" and I don't believe anyone is saying that if they cluster with an ancient population then they're a direct descendant. I'm super close to the Logkas 2 sample as are Tuscans and other Central Italians so are we genetically linked? Hardly. We just share similar genetic components but that's what makes it interesting. it allows you (in good fun) to compare your genetic makeup to the ancients. As far as the Medieval history of Greece I find it super fascinating particularly when discussing the various Frankish and Venetian principalities, the Slavic and Albanian settlements, and the strongholds of the Byzantine East. It's absolutely an underappreciated segment of Greek history but for the sake of this thread I was simply trying to present (with the various samples available) how similar Greeks and Italians are when comparing these populations to the Ancients.