Could I2a have been Scythian?

[HiveMindTerror]

So not too long ago I got tested on 23 and Me, then later went to Gedmatch and mytrueancestry.

Mytrueancestry compares your results to that of samples from bones found in ancient cultures burial sites/archeological sites.

I was surprised to find my closest matches were to Scythians and Romans. There were scatterings of other matches like medieval Slavs, Proto-Slavs, even Germans and Gauls to a lesser extent.

The Scythian was very surprising to me. Could they have been I2a heavy? There are the myths of Croats and Serbs descending from these steppic tribes too.

Also, why did I get so much Roman? I also have relations to at least two Dalmatian Illyrian samples and one Thracian. Could this be due to Slavs intermixing with natives?

My 23 and Me results also placed Greece as my third highest relation, which is preposterous, I have no Greek relatives. It was explained to me this is likely again from other Balkan peoples that haven't been sampled as much as Greeks.

Its somewhat confusing becuase I assumed South Slavs were more purely Slavic than mixed, due to our haplogroups.

 

[Mir]

So not too long ago I got tested on 23 and Me, then later went to Gedmatch and mytrueancestry.

Mytrueancestry compares your results to that of samples from bones found in ancient cultures burial sites/archeological sites.

I was surprised to find my closest matches were to Scythians and Romans. There were scatterings of other matches like medieval Slavs, Proto-Slavs, even Germans and Gauls to a lesser extent.

The Scythian was very surprising to me. Could they have been I2a heavy? There are the myths of Croats and Serbs descending from these steppic tribes too.

Also, why did I get so much Roman? I also have relations to at least two Dalmatian Illyrian samples and one Thracian. Could this be due to Slavs intermixing with natives?

My 23 and Me results also placed Greece as my third highest relation, which is preposterous, I have no Greek relatives. It was explained to me this is likely again from other Balkan peoples that haven't been sampled as much as Greeks.

Its somewhat confusing becuase I assumed South Slavs were more purely Slavic than mixed, due to our haplogroups.

I, I1, and I2 are of European origin. They are only rarely found elsewhere and are due to migrations FROM Europe, not TO Europe. Scythians came from outside of Europe, so it is highly unlikely they were I2a. Maybe some of them mixed with Europeans who already carried I2a, but that doesn't make I2a directly associated with their ethnicity. :weird_smile:

 

[HiveMindTerror]

Ahh, that immediately makes the most sense.

 

[Mir]

Ahh, that immediately makes the most sense.

I just took that same test from my autosomal data, and it said I have the most in common with Gauls, Avars and Scythians from ancient populations. I have the I1 i-m227 haplogroup.

So if Avars and Scythians are from outside of Europe, does that mean my DNA (autosomal + y-dna) shares similarities with their original people? Obviously not. When both groups came to Europe, they simply conquered and "absorbed" Europeans into their ethnicity, so eventually Avars became almost exclusively European. So my and your similarities with Avars and Scythians just means we have some shared DNA with them after they were in Europe and melted into the European populations, but not similarities with the "real" or original Avars and Scythians.

Imagine 10.000 Chinese soldiers take over Sweden, melt into the population and we now call it "Scandinavian China". So a Dane takes a DNA test and it shows he is very similar to "Scandinavian Chinese". How's that? Well obviously because they aren't the real Chinese, it's just that a handful of people took over some European land, and "converted" the people there into the newly arrived ethnicity.

If you see your ancient timeline, before 0 BC, you probably rarely see anything from outside of Europe. On Living DNA I can put my timeline back to 20,000 years ago and hardly find anything outside of Europe. So obviously one's association with whatever groups from Asia isn't necessarily on a DNA basis, just the DNA of them after they entered Europe and absorbed the Europeans into their ethnicity.

Hungarians are the best example of this. They aren't genetically related to their original ethnic group at all. They have virtually nothing in common with the settlers there who created Hungary and the modern Hungarian ethnicity. But a small group of invaders were simply successful in establishing cultural dominion over the Europeans in central Europe, and so they made them all Hungarians, even though they are as European as any modern European population is.

 

[HiveMindTerror]

That is all true. Even the sycthian samples rated to me were from Ukraine, Moldova and Bulgaria. Must have just been mixing with natives. Though according to what I've learned we're all VERY mixed.

 

[Mir]

That is all true. Even the sycthian samples rated to me were from Ukraine, Moldova and Bulgaria. Must have just been mixing with natives. Though according to what I've learned we're all VERY mixed.

We are! I feel incredibly humbled when I look at my results. It shows I am from all over Eastern/Central Europe and nothing specifically indicates Bosnia, even though it is my homeland. If more people took these tests they'd probably be less hateful toward other nationalities than their own.

And people like "white nationalists" would also probably be humbled when realizing that if they are not of Haplogroup I, then they don't have the native European "signature", and thus are about as European as an Arab - using their logic. Using a nativist argument, one can easily argue that even most (like 78-80%) of modern Europeans are primarily non-European and only those with haplogroup I are genuine/native Europeans. Would that be humane? Nope. So we should all just realize we are very mixed, nobody is "pure" anything, and, we're just humanoids who wandered across lands and produced diverse and wonderful populations all over! Any obsessive nationalistic (especially racial of kind) mindset is very dangerous and inhumane.
:weird_smile:

 

[JajarBingan]

So not too long ago I got tested on 23 and Me, then later went to Gedmatch and mytrueancestry.

Mytrueancestry compares your results to that of samples from bones found in ancient cultures burial sites/archeological sites.

I was surprised to find my closest matches were to Scythians and Romans. There were scatterings of other matches like medieval Slavs, Proto-Slavs, even Germans and Gauls to a lesser extent.

The Scythian was very surprising to me. Could they have been I2a heavy? There are the myths of Croats and Serbs descending from these steppic tribes too.

Also, why did I get so much Roman? I also have relations to at least two Dalmatian Illyrian samples and one Thracian. Could this be due to Slavs intermixing with natives?

My 23 and Me results also placed Greece as my third highest relation, which is preposterous, I have no Greek relatives. It was explained to me this is likely again from other Balkan peoples that haven't been sampled as much as Greeks.

Its somewhat confusing becuase I assumed South Slavs were more purely Slavic than mixed, due to our haplogroups.

Scythians, like all the folk from steppe confederacies were a diverse bunch. Their autosomal profile swinged from East Asian to West Asian to European and everything in between.

Here are the Y-DNA they carried according to the available male samples:

R1a1a1b2a2a
N
R1
G-PF3378
R1b1a1a2
R1b1a1a2
R1b1a1a2
R1b1a1a2
N1b1a
R1a-M417
R1a-Z645
J2a8-B437
R1a2-Z93
R1a-Z645
J2a8-B437
R1a2-Z93
Q1c-L332
R1a-Z645

 

[Joey37]

Strange that you should use Arab, as they are predominantly haplogroup J, which is the brother clade to I! Of course, Ainu are predominantly haplogroup D, while Bantu are predominantly E, and they live thousands of miles away from each other! Hey, is that G-PF3378 a clade of G1? I've read that the Scythians had some central Asian G1.

 

[Messier 67]

So not too long ago I got tested on 23 and Me, then later went to Gedmatch and mytrueancestry.

Mytrueancestry compares your results to that of samples from bones found in ancient cultures burial sites/archeological sites.

I was surprised to find my closest matches were to Scythians and Romans. There were scatterings of other matches like medieval Slavs, Proto-Slavs, even Germans and Gauls to a lesser extent.

The Scythian was very surprising to me. Could they have been I2a heavy? There are the myths of Croats and Serbs descending from these steppic tribes too.

Also, why did I get so much Roman? I also have relations to at least two Dalmatian Illyrian samples and one Thracian. Could this be due to Slavs intermixing with natives?

My 23 and Me results also placed Greece as my third highest relation, which is preposterous, I have no Greek relatives. It was explained to me this is likely again from other Balkan peoples that haven't been sampled as much as Greeks.

Its somewhat confusing becuase I assumed South Slavs were more purely Slavic than mixed, due to our haplogroups.

I2 is found among Steppe populations in rare amounts, there is one theory that before the R1s (possibly the proto-Turks) arrived, the Steppe was populated with I2 men. They disappeared like the native Iberians and rest of native European men disappeared. A remnant of Native European men remained by 2000 BCE, but only a remnant... before the Germanic, Roman and Southern Slavic invasions to bring their population to 25%.

So you are thousands of years off.

 

[catosicarius]

I2 is found among Steppe populations in rare amounts, there is one theory that before the R1s (possibly the proto-Turks) arrived, the Steppe was populated with I2 men. They disappeared like the native Iberians and rest of native European men disappeared. A remnant of Native European men remained by 2000 BCE, but only a remnant... before the Germanic, Roman and Southern Slavic invasions to bring their population to 25%.

So you are thousands of years off.

im guessing now, due to the fact its a sole relation to scythians in europe, that these were newcomers to scythian culture, or mixed with locals.