Genetic history and evolution of Greece - megathread

There’s been many discussions about who the Greeks are/are not, where they came from, and – most importantly – what’s their racial make-up.

I think I put together a comprehensive data-set to establish their ethnic history, which will make it possible to answer a lot of questions.

First - their history.

In the PCA image their evolution is clear. The first people populating Greece were the Neolithic peoples who populated the Mediterranean area in that time.
Then they shifted towards the Levant and Anatolia, which is seen by the Minoans.
Then the Mycenaean period came, and so did the northern Europeans – it’s the first time we see a shift towards the north (and the first time any northern admixture appears, which will be shown in the next pic).
From now on, that shift will continue, until the Classical Era, where I used the best 2 samples I could find, from northern Macedonia.
Now we see the Near Eastern gene flow again (mostly in the southern islands), and the Slavic gene flow, which makes modern Greece sit somewhat inbetween the Near East, the Balkans and Classical Greeks.

Here’s the detailed data, based on the Davidski coords, and a chronological chart visualizing the change.

The first apperance of Yamnaya admixture during the Mycenaean period is crucial. It’s probably them who brought the Greek language (not the writing system) there. And the fact that Greek is considered an Indo-European language, will come up later in the story...

Also, going by that information, I think the Mycenaeans (or the Yamnayas who brought the Greek language) can comfortably be called the first “Greeks”.

Sparta is a region worth looking at. Maybe the Yamnayas were the ruling, militaristic elite, and the Helots were the Neolithic natives, who inhabited the Peloponnese from the beginning?

Here’s the same samples on the Davidski coords, as an additional piece of information.

That’s the data, now some speculation:

Did the Yamnayas come to Greece from the north, or south?

It might seem that the former is the obvious choice, but there’s a problem with it.

We know that Greek is an Indo-European language, so there’s an obvious connection. It’s also believed that the language went to Greece during the Indo-European expansion, which took place around 4000-1000 BC. But if that’s the case, why did Greece develop a thriving civilization much, much sooner than other Europeans? The Mycenaean period is dated at around 1750-1050 BC. If other Indos populated other European regions, why did they start creating their countries much later? Even Rome, at its earliest, is dated at 753 BC (and it is a controversial date), which is a whole millenium after the Mycenaean period began. And nevermind the northern Europeans, who were nowhere close to any similar organiozations at that time. Then there’s the question of the alphabet – modern Europeans use either the Latin alphabet, or the Cyryllic one. The only exceptions are Armenia, Georgia and... Greece.

How could this be explained? I think the best theory would be that the origin of Indo-Europeans is in the Near East.

Here’s how it could’ve happened:

From the NE, some of the Indos go straight to Greece and create the Mycenaean civilization. Those who didn’t go there, stay in the Near East for some time, and then go east (to Iran and India) and north (east and west of the Caspian sea) to the Pontic–Caspian steppe, AND THEN, from there, they spread across the world, mostly to Europe, where they immidietly start creating their countries.

That would explain everything:

the same spoken language family (which is passed from parents to children),

the different alphabets (which would develop at different time periods),

why Greece created their civilization much sooner,

Was the increasing Yamnaya admixture in Greece a sign of a continuous population inflow?
Probably not. When they arrived in Greece, they were just probably superior in every way to the local Neolithic farmers, and thus their numbers (absolute and percentage) grew overtime.

The PCA tool: vahaduo.github.io/custompca/

Copy all the coords into SOURCE, go to PCA PLOT, click RUN PCA, and then PLOT PCA. You might wanna flip the X and Y axis sometimes. To do that, click FLIP and then PLOT PCA again.

That's some top tier schizo stuff right there.

Now we see the Near Eastern gene flow again (mostly in the southern islands), and the Slavic gene flow, which makes modern Greece sit somewhat inbetween the Near East, the Balkans and Classical Greeks.

You could insert a meme here: which way, Greek man? And a picture of a hot slavic babe, and some Palestinian femoid.
And I guess they went both ways.

what is the genetic history of the ruling elite of the ancient greeks? were they similar to the average population?

what is the genetic history of the ruling elite of the ancient greeks?

That's a complicated question.
If my hypothesis of the Spartans is correct, then all Ancient Greeks were northern-oriented.

Simply put, they came in, and subjugated the local manlet Neolithic farmers.

And if a Yamnaya Greek has children with Neolithic farmers, are they considered Greeks? It's anyone's guess.

How could this be explained? I think the best theory would be that the origin of Indo-Europeans is in the Near East.

So the Europeans really are the true Israelites after all?

youtube.com/watch?v=ZKpJB2vmhkg

i believe the greeks are just dark nordics

wtf that makes some sense.

And I forgot about the Aeneas story - Trojans going to Italy and founding Rome.
But why would they have different haplogroups (for the most part) than the Greeks?

OP's stuff would surely suggest that.

you shouldn't overlook the fact that there has been a mini great reset in both cycladitic and minoan civilization due to a mega volcanic explosion in Santorini.
This is believed to have happened at around 2000 b.c.
This volcanic eruption was detrimental for the mountainous population of Crete and the Dodecanese islands due to decline in farming, but fishing remained untouched, so this food source is secured.
Not only that, but early seafaring navigation was HEAVILY reliant on night sky star maps, so any opportunistic military incursions by mainland Greeks to the islands would be thwarted by the volcanic ashes that lingered for years.
So the population must have declined, but remained untouched by other greek and halicarnacean haplogroups during that era

But why would they have different haplogroups (for the most part) than the Greeks?

Maybe the Trojans were different from the start? The Iberians have a different R1b haplo than the Germans.

Is it safe to assume though that modern greeks from thessaly and eastern thrace are more northern shifted than any ancient greek, be it mycenaenian or classical greek due to the slavic admixture they have today?

Do you think this had an impact on how Greece was populated over the centuries? We're talking about literal millenia, and how long can the damages from such event last?

You got that right. The Spartan elite was probably pure Aryan and they practised literal Aryan/yamnaya traditions such as agoge. Macedonians, who were another Dorian tribe, did as well. You can still see Kurgans all over Greek Macedonia. Plus, visiting the museum in Pella is an incredible experience for everyone interested in Indo-European history. You can see how the graves of males and females were radically different, with male ones being full of weapons and even chariot miniatures, while the female ones were filled with jewelry. That’s exactly what the Aryan graves in northern and Central Europe look like. This part of history is hidden in Greece, since it destroys the narrative that Greece was a single homogenous nation. Dorian invasions = Aryan invasions. The rest of the Greeks such as Athenians were probably much more EEF-leaning and weaker than the Spartans and Macedonians. Though more cunning, as proven by history.

Is it safe to assume though that modern greeks from thessaly and eastern thrace are more northern shifted than any ancient greek, be it mycenaenian or classical greek due to the slavic admixture they have today?

The problem is that modern northern Greeks have some Levantine admixture.
Still, after also receiving slavic blood, they might be on par with the Classical Greeks, when it comes to northern admixture.

Had they never received any Levantine blood, they surely would be the most northern shifted Greeks in history.

I think the best theory would be that the origin of Indo-Europeans is in the Near East

too bad this is so ridiculous even very biased "researchers" at Harvard are abandoning it, it's so overwhelmingly clear it's from north of the caucasus(and 100% of living ones, from Ukraine/Sredny Stog)
language families have nothing to do with civilization, IE is characterized ever since people began studying it by a clear pastoral vocabulary, most agricultural terms appear borrowed from the cultures they ran into

True. Do you think they've received the levantine admixture via the byzantine empire or the ottoman empire? I'm genuinely curious about this because it kinda mirrors the romanian genetics. We're over 50% slavic by genes , the other half being a combination of paleo balkan with some minor anatolian admixture (probably of byzantine origin). I've mentioned byzantine to avoid confusion with ANF which is neolithic admixture that all european populations have.

I am Türk

too bad this is so ridiculous even very biased "researchers" at Harvard are abandoning it

I'm aware it sounds ridiculous, but like I said, it fits better to the actual confirmed history.

language families have nothing to do with civilization, IE is characterized ever since people began studying it by a clear pastoral vocabulary, most agricultural terms appear borrowed from the cultures they ran into

But language can work as a link, a connection.
English for example has around 40% vocabulary of French origin, but the structure and conjugation is far from it.
And also - why did Greece develop their civilization much sooner?

There are a few mistakes in what you wrote but honestly I’m too down right now to list them all. First off, the Minoans actually didn't have Levantine ancestry. And the northern ancestry (the ones from further north who show up plot around central or north-central Italy on the PCA, we're not talking Brad Pitt here) came around the middle to late Bronze Age with the Mycenaeans and stopped there. There wasn't some constant flow of it all the way to the Classical period. The people living in what’s now North Macedonia (the country) were different from those in Greece. In Greece, there’s continuity from the Mycenaean period through the Archaic and into the Classical era. Then, during the Hellenistic period (though we don’t have samples yet), it seems like there was a big influx of Anatolian and Levantine people, which kept going through the Roman and early Byzantine periods. After that came the Slavic migrations, and later especially the Albanian/Balkan ones, which had a big impact too.

How much for a kebab?

There's an ancient letter written from the Spartans to the Israelites. They call them their kin in that letter.

Yeah, that’s just made-up stuff. During classical times in Greece, there weren’t any 'native Neolithic' people left, they’d pretty much been wiped out or more accurately, mixed in everywhere, even on Crete. The Yamnaya had nothing to do with the Mycenaeans, there’s like 1,500 years between them. And the people who brought Greek into Greece had already mixed with a lot of non-Indo-European Neolithic DNA in the Balkans before they even got there.

First reason is the Byzantine empire. When Greece suffered from some invasion from the north, they moved those to other regions, such as Anatolia and brought non Greeks (though Greek speakers) from there. For example in Crete, the Arabs literally replaced the locals through many waves of invasions. The Byzantines genocided the Arabs and brought in Armenians, especially in eastern Crete. Today you can notice vastly different phenotypes between western and eastern Crete. Similar stuff happened in Kephalonia, which is in western Greece. Second reason is the refugees who arrived from Anatolia in the 1920s and settled in northern Greece, replacing the local Slavs and Arvanites. They were so numerous that nowadays it’s hard to find a single person without Anatolian ancestry, especially in Thessaloniki. You can very easily notice the difference in phenotypes travelling from Thessaloniki to inner Chalkidiki, or Thessaly where light features are way more common.

it fits better

it really doesn't, in no way shape or form, neither archaeologically, nor linguistically, nor genetically

English for example has around 40% vocabulary of French origin, but the structure and conjugation is far from it.

you are saying something that works against your argument, languages' belonging is not determined by overall frequency of lexical roots, but by the most frequent word-particles and the grammar
if you limit english to the most common words and the most important particles e.g pronouns, prepositions, etc.. it's overwhelmingly Germanic
likewise, there's no common agricultural basis found in IE, but what you find is a common basis for mobile pastoral life, terms for chariot/horse/wheel/animals as well as trees or animals found typically in more northern regions

And also - why did Greece develop their civilization much sooner?

civilization in Greece is not Indo-European, so it's irrelevant; it's the first because proto-Greeks were the first who ran into civilization(Minoans) within Europe and eventually conquered it by adopting much of its structures, palatial system, linear A, etc....

Do you think they've received the levantine admixture via the byzantine empire or the ottoman empire?

It might be sooner. Remember that after Alexander the Great BTFO'd Persia, he also conquered the Near East. It might be then when those people started migrating to mainland Greece (similar how the were migrating to southern Italy after they took over those lands from the Greeks).

The so-called Dorian invasion just isn't a thing, archaeologically speaking. You've bought into way too many 19th-20th century romantic/nordicist fantasies buddy.

Thanks for the info.
What do you think of my hypothesis in the post here ? Do you think the Aryan Greeks came from the north or south?

The Yamnaya influence among Greeks and Italians was mostly cultural and linguistic rather than genetic.

In Greeks and Italians, the WSP/WSH admixture was <15% and no more than 20-25% in rare cases, it also came from a different branch of the WSH (the brachycephalic one, rather than the northern dolichocephalic one that moved into Scandinavia), that pushed the Vinca/Varna (pre-Slavic population) out of the Balkans and created a breed of people who then encountered proto-Greeks and proto-Italians. Therefore, Greeks and Italians have WSH admixture via an off-shoot proxy population of that was 50% WSH at most, whereas other Europeans received it directly. The difference between northern Europeans and southern Europeans (excluding Balkan Slavs among Southern Europe) are their respective WSH and EEF infusion densities.

Greeks and Italians both have large amounts of Anatolian Neolithic, which also partially broke off into CHG (admixing into Semitic populations). Then there's the WHG component, and between 10-20% WSH/WSP.

MENA (Middle East North Africa) percentages with southern European genetic tests are remnants of Early European Farmer DNA, technically ANF, (specifically Iranian Neolithic/CHG that derived from European Anatolians), as well as more recent historical southern European admixture in Semites (i.e., during ancient Greece and Rome) being cross referenced and backlogged into southern European results.
There is also a high probability that most if not all of the "non-European" results in this case are actually Ionian Greek.

The famed contributions from Germanic and Semitic populations are nil if not 1-2% within statistically insignificant individuals.

If there is a shift in any southern European gene-pools, it's from all the Slavs, Africans, Asians and LATAMS in those countries today.

And the Minoans had nothing to do with Levantines. Stop making shit up from the haplomeme David Reich tier "science".

Dorian invasion as in northern Greeks moving from Pindus down south following the collapse of Mycenaean civilization is realistic and I think it's somewhat corroborated by DNA, you see the appearance in Crete of Logkas/Balkan_BA types suddenly by the end of the bronze age, corresponding roughly to when Dorians ought to have invaded according to ancient sources

We sent you 1 million swarthy anatolians and received 500 thousand high steppe lightskins
Best deal

There wasn't some constant flow of it all the way to the Classical period.

And I typed exactly that in the 4th post. You didn't read the whole thing.

Can you provide more info about that?

Lmao typical ζητωπατριώτης state sponsored pseudo history reader. Muh Indo-European myth, muh modern Greeks are 99,9% ancient Greeks and Pontians are Ionians LOL

fanfic written by jews, I get from the flag that you are bound by the ritual of circumcision to obey to everything jews say but still

Over the centuries, no.
But it drastically changed the way of life and therefore culture.
So any specific, targeted cultural analysis of those places, should be chronologically divided in their analysis in a pre and post catastrophy era, and viewed from this scope.
Always keep in mind of the scale of this destruction, which nearly wiped away civilization in a radius of 300 km.
Just look at a map. Find Santorini and look were Crete is relative to it. Then look were Sparta is relative to it.
If we assume that the same scale destruction occured in Sparta in the same time period and consider that Sparta is connected to mainland Greece terrestrially, then it's easy to assume that Sparta was populated by totally different people when opportunity was given.

I hate that but you’re right lmao at least you have the K*rds and I can troll you for that

relevant PCA for Greece, the LBA Cretan clusterfuck from Chania I think is key, it kinda reflects the formation of proper historical Greece, EMBA Crete being the pelasgians, oldest inhabitants(in that timeframe) and source of much of Greek ancestry, Mygdalia, Krousonas and those outliers from Chania close to Macedonia IA early Hellenic speakers, like Herodotus says, few in numbers but dominant enough to get people to start speaking their language; then there's also Anatolian samples from the Aegean coast through obvious contacts with the other side

You're getting it mixed up, those samples from Crete that show up further north in the PCA are (some of) the Mycenaeans, not Dorians. They're dated to around 1300-1200 BC, while the so-called Dorian invasion (which isn’t even backed up archaeologically) happened in the early Iron Age. But the whole idea is kinda nonsense anyway, you can tell because the few samples we have from the Archaic period don't even show more Steppe ancestry than usual.

Italy is much longer as peninsula so it had varying levels, but from Romans/Etruscans and Picenes we know it was definitely higher than 15% on average, more like 25-30% in central Italy and higher in the north, and it did came from Bell Beakers, it's Greece which is the outlier directly from Yamnaya

It's honestly exhausting dealing with idiots on Anon Babble. I never said modern Greeks are 99% the same as the classical ones, obviously they're not, and they're not even 50% the same, for that matter.

Redpill me on the I2a2 haplogroup. Specifically why it is so common among the more ancient Gaelic and Norse-Gaelic of Irish/British when the broader I2a is Slavic and Sardinian

Previous map doesn’t show I2a2 in West Coast Ireland as much, but it’s there as well.

Pic related is the I2a haplo

A very detailed schizo take I've heard said that we are a completely distinct migration wave from the other Indoeuropeans. We migrated south from the Caucasus, then into Anatolia, then we finally settled around the Aegean, but here comes the schizoest bit, the Minoans are actually the Dorians who are actually the Sea People who went into full Mad Max mode after the Thera eruption causing the post-Mycenyan dark ages (along with other atrocities), then some of them settled in Pelonnesus (enslaving and conquering every other state in the province except Argos)

but they are clearly different from known Mycenaean samples, they look straight from the north and the location is also important, Crete, all the way south, which is known to have been invaded by Dorians and someone must've brought western Greek dialects there divergent from Mycenaean-Cypriotic Greek, which is eastern Greek
it corresponds to the ancient account, more or less, of the Dorians coming somewhat after the Trojan war
archaeologists have a bad rep in many cases on these matters, remember the purported "lack of invasion" of Britain from Bell Beakers? boy was that an humiliating shitshow once DNA came out; same thing they tried to say for Tartessians

I2 is the oldest main lineage in Europe and began diversifying very early so it's not surprising you find it in disparate ethnic groups; IIRC I2a2 specifically might have been spread with Unetice culture, picked up from local WHG-rich late neolithic populations of Germany/central Europe

Yamnaya had hardly any impact on what became modern European populations. they fizzled out in the east for the most part.

What most people attribute to Yamnaya really came from Western Steppe Pastoralist/Herder (WSP/WSH.

Not sure why there's this borderline fetish with trying to attribute the nobility with Yamnaya "Indo-Europeans".