Ygorcs
Active member
- Messages
- 2,259
- Reaction score
- 812
- Points
- 0
- Ethnic group
- Multiracial Brazilian
Thanks, yeah, that all makes sense.
One of the other things I learned in this book on Carthage is more detail on Greece following the Bronze Age collapse: worse than the Dark Ages in Central and Western Europe after the fall of Rome: severe depopulation, little to no trade or manufacturing, and they even forgot how to write.
I wonder if there was a little continued migration from the east? Or, the sample from Spain might have been an islander. We really need more Greek samples from later periods both on the mainland and on the islands. Particularly interesting would be samples from the period of Magna Graecia in the large Greek city states which sent settlers to Sicily and Southern Italy.
Have you done any analysis of people from Crete? Are there available samples from Rhodes or the Dodecanese?
Yes, in my opinion the Empuries Greek sample does look like an Aegean islander, it seems to have even less steppe ancestry and to be much more Minoan-shited, but also less Iranian/Caucasian-shifted than the Mycenaean. I wonder how IA Cretans were like autosomally because of that...
Unfortunately I can only work with the samples used in the Global25 datasheets. They're so poor, too broad, as far as the Greek population is concerned. They just subdivide them into "Greek" (I assume mainland Greece, but there's quite a bit of structure even there), "Greek_Trabzon", "Greek_Central_Anatolia" and "Greek_Crete". There are also Cypriots. It's a pity they don't have anything more region-specific. The "Greek" average population sample looks particularly problematic, in each and every model I have made they look like they have a huge chunk of "northern" ancestry not found in Mycenaean or Empuries Greek samples. I presume many if not most of the samples used for that "Greek cluster" are northern Greeks.
Modern Cretans, even more than modern Greeks (I reckon mainlanders, as I said), have some really strange results using the same old reference populations (the former preference to Yamnaya and Catacomb becomes a preference for CWC, mainly CWC_Poland and CWC_Baltic). I assume it doesn't have only to do with subsequent autosomal changes (like "northern" influences, mainly Slavic ones), but also with additional millennia of genetic drift making the ancient fits much less perfect, so the algorithms are much more likely to choose other "unlikely" aDNA samples to explain the modern genetic structure, especially since virtually all BA steppe samples (whether they are CWC, BB, Yamnaya, Catacomb, Sintashta etc.) are very similar to each other. Anyway, they seem to be much more Levant and Caucasus/Iran-shifted than the Mycenaean Greek samples. So Aegean islanders are the source of part of the Iran and Levant affinities of Italians? I think that's likely. As for steppe ancestry, it's clear that both mainland Greeks (mainly north in this datasheet? I believe so) and Cretans received a significant input from more steppe-rich populations since the BA.
Here are some new calculations I have just done using only the reference steppe-related populations that appeared in the ancient Mycenaean and Empuries samples:
[1] "distance%=1.1921 / distance=0.011921"
Greek_Crete
Kura-Araxes_Kalavan 31.30
Levant_N 17.10
Tisza_LN 14.90
Balaton_Lasinja_CA 12.50
Yamnaya_Ukraine 6.75
Yamnaya_Bulgaria 6.10
Tepe_Hissar_ChL 4.75
Yamnaya_Samara 3.30
Balkans_N 1.70
Minoan_Lasithi 1.60
[1] "distance%=1.8034 / distance=0.018034"
Greek
Anatolia_EBA_Isparta 34.15
Tisza_LN 24.95
Yamnaya_Bulgaria 14.70
Yamnaya_Ukraine 10.10
Comb_Ceramic_Estonia 5.20
Catacomb 5.05
Greece_N 3.75
Levant_N 2.10
[1] "distance%=1.0167 / distance=0.010167"
Cypriot
Levant_N 25.05
Armenia_ChL 16.90
Kura-Araxes_Kalavan 15.80
Hajji_Firuz_ChL 14.80
Tisza_LN 7.05
Tepe_Hissar_ChL 5.65
Balkans_N 4.95
Starcevo_N 4.45
Catacomb 4.10
Anatolia_EBA_Isparta 1.25
[1] "distance%=1.612 / distance=0.01612"
Mycenaean
Greece_N 36.60
Balkans_N 22.95
Kura-Araxes_Kalavan 17.85
Yamnaya_Ukraine 8.80
Anatolia_EBA_Ovaoren 6.35
Maykop 3.55
Vucedol_no_steppe 2.55
Morocco_EN 1.35
[1] "distance%=2.018 / distance=0.02018"
Minoan_Lasithi
Greece_N 38.15
Anatolia_EBA_Isparta 21.40
Vucedol_no_steppe 12.25
Barcin_ChL 10.70
Balkans_N 9.15
Anatolia_EBA_Ovaoren 5.15
Hajji_Firuz_ChL 3.20