Angela
Elite member
- Messages
- 21,823
- Reaction score
- 12,329
- Points
- 113
- Ethnic group
- Italian
I don't know if it can help but I have since a long time the impression (confirmed by the little aDNAwe have) that Copper and even Bronze Age in Europe ought in some part to a very southern population without too much Yamnayalike imput. We have Montenegro people and Copper of Hungary and Spain. Could these people be akin to the last wave of Neolithic? either someones from Neolithic, acculturated to metallurgy skills or reinforced their auDNAb by new waves from S-East with beginning metallurgy, new waves of same human stock? largely EEF plus some evolved CHGlike imput from East? Cyprus and Egea people of the time?
I can't locate the study right now, but my recollection is that it said that the change in Greece came between the early to late Neolithic, or something to that effect, and that there was no change in the Bronze Age. I, like you, think it's possible this was a last, slightly different wave of the Neolithic, perhaps from Cyprus, but perhaps also through the Aegean, of people who might indeed have brought more advanced metallurgy with them. If CHG ancestry had been filtering into the western areas of Anatolia, this migration might have contained CHG that wasn't previously present, or perhaps present in very small frequencies.
If some of these newer calculators are correct, Oetzi has a bit of CHG, and he may have been a copper worker, if we go by the amount of arsenic they found in his blood.
At any rate, contrary to what some misinformed people are posting on the internet, the CHG levels in Sicily, Southern Italy, and mainland Greece are virtually identical. (These posters seem to be unaware that the Greek sample being used is from Thessaly, so it's not a question of only the Greek islands having similar levels.) The "Balkan" countries score three points lower, 25 versus 28, and that's after the Slavic migrations.
The "West Asian" levels of prior calculators showed exactly the same pattern. So, whatever processes were involved, they had to affect all these areas. That's why I think we're on the right track for a good part of it, although later internal European migrations might have redistributed it. There's also, in the case of southern Italy and Sicily, the Moorish migrations, even if it was minor in comparison, but that would have brought the single digit North African. There's precious little CHG in Tunisia, from which most of the Moorish settlers came.