Genetic Origins of Minoans and Mycenaeans

[Leandros]

More accurate for Greeks. (Except for Michael Fassbender: I like him a lot, but ancient Greek?) Of course, they had to darken Gerard Butler's hair, eyes, skin, and probably fiddle with his nose. They couldn't find a Southern European descended actor to bulk up like that? Whatever...

They took, as you imply, a lot of license with the Persians. Some of the troops were also decidedly Middle Eastern looking to me, all those black robes etc. Not that the Persians wouldn't have had a lot of troops from all over their Empire, but there was a lot of signalling going on.

300 was a propaganda piece against Persians(iranians) by the Jews of Hollywood.
Simple as that

 

[markoz2]

300 was a propaganda piece against Persians(iranians) by the Jews of Hollywood.
Simple as that

Frank Miller is Irish.

 

[MOESAN]

kind of digest:
8-10% of a warriors elite not organized like Romans has hard work to pass their language to autochtonous pops, I think. But at the time we suppose Mycenians arrived in Greece, I-E whatever its first geographic origin, was spoken in Central Europe by mixed pops; if as I BELIEVE (not KNOW) they arrived through Romania then Central Balkans from the Steppes, they surely had not more than a 40-45% steppic say 25-30% EHG roughly said, rather less. So "Mycenian" # first "Steppic". To complicate things they surely brought with them auDNA already present in Greece and Creta. IBD could help; but EHG were already present there. Finally I think I can guess the Mycenians weighted around 20% or 25% of the total pop.
at the mergin, I have the impression in South, in lands far from the steppes and from the social organization linked to them, the clannic males system didn't function so totally and that the Y-haplos were sometimes mixed, as if there had been passed partnership accords (!) with (well adapted and skilful?) predecessors (this South the Caucasus, Anatolia, or in Southern Europe where pops seemed having stayed more dense and numerous and less easily controlled by steppes newcomers. Just a feeling.

 

[markoz2]

kind of digest:
8-10% of a warriors elite not organized like Romans has hard work to pass their language to autochtonous pops, I think. But at the time we suppose Mycenians arrived in Greece, I-E whatever its first geographic origin, was spoken in Central Europe by mixed pops

People have thought themselves into a corner. There is no evidence for IE in Central Europe before 500 BC. The later Anatolian samples in this paper on the other hand must have either been speakers of IE or their immediate neighbours.

Some interpretations like those of Rajib and the Sailer crowd are laughable. Steppe immigrants conquering an indigenous population with primitive weapons, inferior numbers and without imparting even trace amounts of their ancestry to the subdued population to boot.

 

[Fustan]

IMO, Dorians are proto-epirotes

Elaborate please. Because this makes no sense whatsoever.

 

[Jovialis]

As I explained in post #55 above, modern Greeks, and particularly northern Greeks, are quite different from Minoans and Mycenaeans. Don't be deceived by the simple admixtures using ENF, CHG, EHG and the like. I estimated that to increase the EHG from 7% to 20%, it actually requires the contribution of 25 to 40% of non-Greek European DNA, depending on the source populations. Based on modern Y-DNA in Greece, it can be deduced that the Slavs contributed the most (21% of Y-DNA in modern Greece), followed by the Germanics (10%) then the Romans and La Tène Celts (8% together). That's 39% on the Y-DNA side, but overall it's likely to be a bit less than that as the paternal line of invaders tends to outweigh the maternal line. It's probably less the case for the Slavs and Goths, who moved as whole families, and indeed whole tribes, but it would be truer for the Romans, who were mostly administrators and soldiers stationed in Greece, with few Roman women settling there.

In summary, it's true that the impact of the Romans on these populations was relatively minor (1 to 5%), but that is to be expected as the Romans did not send a big number of colonists to places like Egypt, Phoenicia or Britain. The places most heavily colonised by the Romans outside Italy were Gaul and Iberia, particularly the southern parts like Provence and Andalusia. It would be much more interesting to see the population shift before and after Roman times in those regions.

Thank you to you and Angela for clarifying this, I totally see the increase of non-Greek European DNA over time. It is very clear when you see where modern Greeks cluster, closer to Eastern Europeans, than theses Mycenaean samples.

 

[bicicleur 2]

No, Aegean swords and chariots are for all intents and purposes carbon-copies of their Anatolian predecessors. This is one of the many reasons the results of the paper shouldn't come as a surprise.

show me the Anatolian predecessors
all what has been produced so far is some bronze bar that might resemble a sword to those whit a vivid imagination

 

[markoz2]

show me the Anatolian predecessors
all what has been produced so far is some bronze bar that might resemble a sword to those whit a vivid imagination

What? Alaca Höyük is quite conservative with regards to the first swords. There are also Maykop and Arslantepe (there's a whole stash dated to >3k BC). Later swords are found in Syria and Transcaucasia, then the Aegean. Not sure where you got the Carpathian thing from. It's just not true.


Later slashing swords spread in the opposite direction from North Italy.

 

[blevins13]

There's no question that the Mycenaeans are the first population from Greece to speak the Greek language, which is an Indo-European language. Minoan is another story. I think it's likely it's not Indo-European, but as it has never been translated some linguists claim it might be related. I tend to think not.

The question in a nutshell is when and with whom did the Greek language arrive in Greece? The authors of the paper, including Reich, remain agnostic. They give a nod to the Anatolian hypothesis but then also discuss the fact that the movements seen during the Bronze Age from both the north and the east could support the Greek language being introduced by these later peoples.

The first of these later two possibilities, which perhaps they lean toward, is a movement from the steppe down through the Balkans, presumably through the area of present day Romania/Bulgaria.

The other possibility they still cannot exclude statistically is a movement from eastern Anatolia near Armenia bringing the Greek language to Greece. That was the position that Drews took, and he even posited about 10% steppe if I remember the book accurately.

They maintain, and rightly, that more ancient samples from the Balkans are necessary, as are samples from the Caucasus, presumably.

Of course, they may have those ancient samples and have analyzed them already, but they have to play coy because there are a lot of people moving through the Reich Lab who need to write papers. It's a university, after all, and it's going to have to run like one. Or perhaps they're really not sure yet. They haven't been wrong yet, and I'm sure they don't want to ruin their winning streak.

Looking forward to their next paper, maybe that will clarify more about this intriguing topic and Balkan People.


Sent from my iPhone using Eupedia Forum

 

[Angela]

Sorry I didn't get back to you on this Bicicleur; My only excuse is that I totally forgot about it.

Anyway, I think it's questionable that the intrusive element which appeared in Greece proper around 1600 could have brought chariots with them into Greece if they came from the north.

As for the bronze swords, in the interest of time, I'll just use Wiki as it accords with everything I've ever read about the subject:

"Before bronze, stone (such as flint and obsidian) was used as the primary material for edged cutting tools and weapons. Stone, however, is very fragile, and therefore not practical to be used for swords. With the introduction of copper, and subsequently bronze, daggers could be made longer, leading to the sword.Thus, the development of the sword from the dagger was gradual, and in 2004 the first "swords" were claimed for the Early Bronze Age (c. 33rd to 31st centuries), based on finds at Arslantepe by Marcella Frangipane, professor of Prehistory and Protostory of the Near and Middle East at Sapienza University of Rome.^[1][2][3] A cache of nine swords and daggers was found; they are composed of arsenic-copper alloy. Among them, three swords were beautifully inlaid with silver.
These are the weapons of a total length of 45 to 60 cm which could be described as either short swords, long daggers or gladius. Some other similar swords have been found in Turkey, and are described by Thomas Zimmermann.^[4]
The sword remained extremely rare for another millennium, and became more widespread only with the closing of the 3rd millennium. The "swords" of this later period can still readily be interpreted as daggers, as with the copper specimen from Naxos (dated roughly 2800 to 2300 BC), with a length of just below 36 cm, but individual specimens of the Cycladic "copper swords" of the period around 2300 reach a length up to 60 cm. The first weapons that can be classified as swords without any ambiguity are those found in Minoan Crete, dated to about 1700 BC, which reach lengths of more than 100 cm. These are the "type A" swords of the Aegean Bronze Age."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronze_Age_sword

 

[Angela]

Thank you to you and Angela for clarifying this, I totally see the increase of non-Greek European DNA over time. It is very clear when you see where modern Greeks cluster, closer to Eastern Europeans, than theses Mycenaean samples.

My understanding is that the Greeks used for that plot are the Greeks of Thessaly, who are not, in my opinion, representative of all Greeks.

 

[Angela]

Sometimes the authors of papers must wonder why they bother. I know I sometimes wonder why I bother to quote the papers.

Once again, from the paper and one of my posts at the beginning of this thread:

""Cretan from ArmenoiThis individual has only 42,052 SNPs covered in the HOIll dataset and it belongs to a later period(Late Minoan III A-B ~ 1400-1200 BC) than the samples from Moni Odigitria and Lasithi. It does notform a clade with any single (N=1) population of the All set (p-value for rank=0 < 0.001). There are several models that fit (p-value for rank=1 > 0.05) for N=2 that agree on this individual having most of its ancestry from Anatolian Neolithic-related population with additional ancestry from eastern European/North Eurasian hunter-gatherers (Table S2.7), as also suggested by the shift of this individual in PCA relative to other Minoans and indeed even the Mycenaeans (Fig. 1b). We acknowledge the possibility that there was geographical structure in the Bronze Age Cretan population (the Armenoi sample comes from northwestern Crete; Fig. 1a), or that population change had occurred between the time of the samples from Moni Odigitria and Lasithi and the time of thisindividual, however, the lack of high quality data does not allow us to test these hypotheses further."

If Nick Patterson signs onto that, then that's the way it is.

Of course, that won't stop some modelers from trying to spin stories from it.

 

[Falco]

There's no question that the Mycenaeans are the first population from Greece to speak the Greek language, which is an Indo-European language. Minoan is another story. I think it's likely it's not Indo-European, but as it has never been translated some linguists claim it might be related. I tend to think not.

The question in a nutshell is when and with whom did the Greek language arrive in Greece? The authors of the paper, including Reich, remain agnostic. They give a nod to the Anatolian hypothesis but then also discuss the fact that the movements seen during the Bronze Age from both the north and the east could support the Greek language being introduced by these later peoples.

The first of these later two possibilities, which perhaps they lean toward, is a movement from the steppe down through the Balkans, presumably through the area of present day Romania/Bulgaria.

The other possibility they still cannot exclude statistically is a movement from eastern Anatolia near Armenia bringing the Greek language to Greece. That was the position that Drews took, and he even posited about 10% steppe if I remember the book accurately.

They maintain, and rightly, that more ancient samples from the Balkans are necessary, as are samples from the Caucasus, presumably.

Of course, they may have those ancient samples and have analyzed them already, but they have to play coy because there are a lot of people moving through the Reich Lab who need to write papers. It's a university, after all, and it's going to have to run like one. Or perhaps they're really not sure yet. They haven't been wrong yet, and I'm sure they don't want to ruin their winning streak.

I think this excerpt from Mathieson et al 2017 could be relevant here:
"One version of the Steppe Hypothesis of Indo-European language origins suggests that Proto-Indo European languages developed in the steppe north of the Black and Caspian seas, and that the earliest known diverging branch – Anatolian – was spread into Asia Minor by movements of steppe peoples through the Balkan peninsula during the Copper Age around 4000 BCE, as part of the same incursions from the steppe that coincided with the decline of the tell settlements.

If this were correct, then one way to detect evidence of it would be the appearance of large amounts of characteristic steppe ancestry first in the Balkan Peninsula, and then in Anatolia. However, our genetic data do not support this scenario. While we find steppe ancestry in Balkan Copper Age and Bronze Age individuals, this ancestry is sporadic across individuals in the Copper Age, and at low levels in the Bronze Age. Moreover, while Bronze Age Anatolian individuals have CHG / Iran Neolithic related ancestry, they have neither the EHG ancestry characteristic of all steppe populations sampled to date, nor the WHG ancestry that is ubiquitous in southeastern Europe in the Neolithic.

This pattern is consistent with that seen in northwestern Anatolia and later in Copper Age Anatolia, suggesting continuing migration into Anatolia from the East rather than from Europe.

An alternative hypothesis is that the ultimate homeland of Proto-Indo European languages was in the Caucasus or in Iran. In this scenario, westward movement contributed to the dispersal of Anatolian languages, and northward movement and mixture with EHG was responsible for the formation of the population associated with the Yamnaya complex. These steppe pastoralists plausibly spoke a “Late Proto-Indo European” language that is ancestral to many of the non-Anatolian branches of the Indo-European language family. On the other hand, our data could still be consistent with the Steppe-Balkans-Anatolia route hypothesis model, albeit with constraints. It remains possible that populations dating to around 1600 BCE in the regions where the Indo-European Luwian, Hittite and Palaic languages were spoken did have European hunter-gatherer ancestry. However, our results would require that such ancestry was not ubiquitous in Bronze Age Anatolia, and was perhaps tightly linked to Indo-European speaking groups. We predict that additional insight about the genetic origins of the potential speakers of early Indo-European languages will be obtained when ancient DNA data become available from additional sites in this key period in Anatolia and the Caucasus."

 

[Angela]

I think this excerpt from Mathieson et al 2017 could be relevant here:
"One version of the Steppe Hypothesis of Indo-European language origins suggests that Proto-Indo European languages developed in the steppe north of the Black and Caspian seas, and that the earliest known diverging branch – Anatolian – was spread into Asia Minor by movements of steppe peoples through the Balkan peninsula during the Copper Age around 4000 BCE, as part of the same incursions from the steppe that coincided with the decline of the tell settlements.

If this were correct, then one way to detect evidence of it would be the appearance of large amounts of characteristic steppe ancestry first in the Balkan Peninsula, and then in Anatolia. However, our genetic data do not support this scenario. While we find steppe ancestry in Balkan Copper Age and Bronze Age individuals, this ancestry is sporadic across individuals in the Copper Age, and at low levels in the Bronze Age. Moreover, while Bronze Age Anatolian individuals have CHG / Iran Neolithic related ancestry, they have neither the EHG ancestry characteristic of all steppe populations sampled to date, nor the WHG ancestry that is ubiquitous in southeastern Europe in the Neolithic.

This pattern is consistent with that seen in northwestern Anatolia and later in Copper Age Anatolia, suggesting continuing migration into Anatolia from the East rather than from Europe.

An alternative hypothesis is that the ultimate homeland of Proto-Indo European languages was in the Caucasus or in Iran. In this scenario, westward movement contributed to the dispersal of Anatolian languages, and northward movement and mixture with EHG was responsible for the formation of the population associated with the Yamnaya complex. These steppe pastoralists plausibly spoke a “Late Proto-Indo European” language that is ancestral to many of the non-Anatolian branches of the Indo-European language family. On the other hand, our data could still be consistent with the Steppe-Balkans-Anatolia route hypothesis model, albeit with constraints. It remains possible that populations dating to around 1600 BCE in the regions where the Indo-European Luwian, Hittite and Palaic languages were spoken did have European hunter-gatherer ancestry. However, our results would require that such ancestry was not ubiquitous in Bronze Age Anatolia, and was perhaps tightly linked to Indo-European speaking groups. We predict that additional insight about the genetic origins of the potential speakers of early Indo-European languages will be obtained when ancient DNA data become available from additional sites in this key period in Anatolia and the Caucasus."

It's indeed relevant imo. That's why we need more Balkan area adna, and the adna from the Caucasus and eastern Anatolia as well. The lack of such data is why the authors of the instant paper could not exclude the possibility that a movement from Anatolia, a la Drews, brought the Greek language into Greece.

More generally, as I will address below, if the steppe peoples contributed rather small amounts of ancestry to the people living in the Balkans, those latter people had very little steppe ancestry to pass on.

 

[holderlin]

It originally appeared on Lazaridis' twitter account as a reply to @PreznitCamacho, @PaIeodeadlift and other two.

https://twitter.com/iosif_lazaridis/status/892931776372498434



Yes, Northwest I think.

Don't forget the involvement of @bronzeagemantis aka Bronze Age Pervert

 

[Pax Augusta]

My understanding is that the Greeks used for that plot are the Greeks of Thessaly, who are not, in my opinion, representative of all Greeks.

In the newest PCA are Greeks of Thessaloniki (Macedonia), Greek_Coriell, and Greek_Cretan_SGDP (two individuals), and they seem quite similar to the Greeks of the oldest PCAs.

 

[holderlin]

What? Alaca Höyük is quite conservative with regards to the first swords. There are also Maykop and Arslantepe (there's a whole stash dated to >3k BC). Later swords are found in Syria and Transcaucasia, then the Aegean. Not sure where you got the Carpathian thing from. It's just not true.


Later slashing swords spread in the opposite direction from North Italy.

Yeah this isn't right

 

[Angela]

In the newest PCA are Greeks of Thessaloniki (Macedonia), Greek_Coriell, and Greek_Cretan_SGDP (two individuals), and they seem quite similar to the Greeks of the oldest PCAs.

Is this the "newest" PCA to which you're referring? If not, whose PCA are we discussing?
https://www.researchgate.net/profil...CA-on-all-present-day-west-Eurasians-with.png

Don't mean to be rude, but you got this information from a reputable source?

Assuming all the answers are yes, and given that "north" is to the left of the PCA, and that Mycenaeans are somewhere around Sicilians (I don't think we can say much more than that) then the change from Mycenaens to more southerly Greeks is really a pull to the east, toward ANE/Caucasus. I don't think that's primarily down to Slavic admixture.

Btw, if that furthest blue X near the Cypriots is a Cretan sample, or even the one north of that, so much for the Cretans being indistinguishable from Sicilians.

 

[holderlin]

Well this is really interesting.

We know Mycenaeans spoke Greek because Linear B is Greek, so there's that. Just to keep the basics in view. The arrival of the Mycenaeans was also archaeologically VERY obvious, so they are a different culture than pre-Greek Aegean. No questions here, even aside from the trajectory of their arrival.

If people are really surprised that Greek speakers in Crete don't look like Srubna or something then they haven't been paying attention. Remember in the SE Europe paper we have a YAMNAYA BURIAL in Bulgaria that's approx. 40% Anatolian neolithic, 40% steppe, and 20% Ukraine mesolithic (Dnieper Donets). So people who are speaking something close to PIE (Anatolian?) are already almost half Anatolian neolithic.

 

[Cato]

@Cato, that's possible - or some of the Beaker-influenced cultures in the West Balkans. Clever modelling will likely not get us anywhere closer to a solution is my guess but more Y-DNA might.

Yes, likely from North-Western Balkans. Mallory in his book In Search of the Indo-Europeans mentioned two possible urheimat for the Proto-Greeks, a north-western one - the tumulus builder - and a north-eastern one - the Ezero culture. Now we know that Ezero had no steppe admixture...so..