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Byzantine Empire 717 A.D.
I’ve been looking at some European genotype data. So I have some samples from Greece. One of the things I noticed is that there seem to be two clusters of Greece. You can see it above. The Italian sample is really a southern Italian one (not Sicilian though). The Balkan sample are Serbs, Bulgarians, and Romanians. You can see that they are shifted toward the Poles. And so are the Greeks, in comparison to the Italians. This is not entirely surprising. What was surprising to me was that there were a number of Greeks who in the same cluster at the Italians.
The historical context for this are the Sclaveni migrations. These were Slavic peoples who pushed south, as far as the Peloponnese, after the Byzantine Empire ceded the Balkans to barbarian groups due to threats in the east from Persians and then Muslims. In fact the demographic basis of the Byzantine Empire between the loss of the Levant and Egypt and the Battle of Manzikert was Anatolia in 1056, though there were fortifications around major cities such as Thessaloniki. After the loss of their Anatolian heartlands to the Seljuks the Empire turned back toward the Balkans, which had been conquered by Basil II in the first decades of the 11th century.
These results, and others, indicate the impact of the Slavic migrations on the Balkans, and Greece proper. But, what they also suggest is that there is population structure within Greece. Why? I can think of two hypotheses. First, some of the islands in the Aegean were never touched by Slavs, and may have maintained endogamy until the modern period. Even if the Slavs never conquered the cities, their impact would be felt by migration from rural areas. But in a pre-modern era barriers such as water and mountains often serve as potent obstacles to continuous gene flow. The second, to me more plausible, scenario is the second cluster without much Slavic genetic impact are those who descend from Anatolian Greeks, who arrived in the early 20th century due to the population exchange with Turkey. These western Anatolian Greeks would have shielded from the Sclaveni migrations obviously.
To tease the relationships apart I decided to run TreeMix 20 times. As per reader suggestion, I won’t give you all the plots. But you can download them. Below is a representative one. The various Jewish groups form their own clade. The affinity of Cypriot Greeks with Anatolians is a function I believe of the fact that they are culturally Hellenized (the ancient Bronze Age polity of Cyprus was part of the orbit of Egypt, and was not Greek), even if that is an ancient occurrence. I separated the Greeks into two cluster, the major one being “Greece” and the minor one clustering with southern Italians as “GreeceItaly.” What is pretty obvious is that GreeceItaly has much less of the Slavic admixture. In this tree the Greeks proper are placed near the Balkan and Polish position on the graph, but with a huge migration arrow from nearly the GreeceItaly position. The Balkan node has a smaller migration parameter. The Greeks tend to flip from being near the Poles to being near the GreekItaly cluster, and swapping the migration arrow direction.
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It might just be me, but this link doesn’t work…
https://www.unz.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/treemix.tar.gz
“Forbidden”
also, for anyone who cares, 250,000 SNPs.
https://www.unz.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/treemix.tar.gz
"Forbidden"Replies: @Razib Khan
i guess the settings here don’t allow access to tar.gz files. it’s uploaded to my other site, so try the link now.
also, for anyone who cares, 250,000 SNPs.
Does this indicate that Anatolian Greeks were Hellenized Lydians etc rather than the product of Greek settlement whereas Greek settlements in Southern Italy had a major impact on the population?
In ancient Greek military history, cavalry from Thessaly and Thrace was famed as were archers from Crete and Trebizond. Reportedly Manzikert was a crippling blow to the “native” manpower of the Byzantines as it dried up the heavy Greek recruitment from the Pontic region of the larger Anatolia (and the loss of the area greatly accelerate the already heavy Byzantine dependence on foreign mercenaries).
The military capacity of the Black Sea region must have been considerable because the men of Trebizond overthrew the Seljuks, and formed a kingdom of their own even after Manzikert.
I find the colors on these PCA plots confusing. I think that there are better options than the default color scheme. I don’t know how to get very good colors, but I think it would look a little better as ggplot(…)+scale_color_manual(values=rainbow(13)). (Where 13 is the number of colors you need. Having to specify that manually is awful.) Also, if I understand the plot correctly, you are overplotting a black shape on a group also represented by a color. If removed the two special groups from the rainbow plot, that would reduce the number of colors to 11, making them easier to distinguish. Also, that’s small enough to use scale_color_brewer(palette=”Set3″).
Many years ago, didn’t you used to plot the names of the groups on the graph? Maybe at the average location? I think that worked well. Did you lose the ability to do this when you switched to ggplot or something?
Razib,
I’m also receiving the Forbidden message. Thanks!
I'm also receiving the Forbidden message. Thanks!Replies: @Razib Khan
did you use david’s url? that’s not going to work. click the original link, i changed it.
Many years ago, didn't you used to plot the names of the groups on the graph? Maybe at the average location? I think that worked well. Did you lose the ability to do this when you switched to ggplot or something?Replies: @Razib Khan, @Unzerker, @Douglas Knight
i still have that script. if people think it was better i’ll use that. yes, it was pre-ggplot, but it’s fine.
Many years ago, didn't you used to plot the names of the groups on the graph? Maybe at the average location? I think that worked well. Did you lose the ability to do this when you switched to ggplot or something?Replies: @Razib Khan, @Unzerker, @Douglas Knight
You’re not the only one. I’m not colorblind, but I can’t make heads or tails from these charts.
Why Slav migrations and not simply “balkanic flow of people”, going up and dow both ways, I mean Greece is right next to the balkans, so it makes sense genetically they pull towards them. Also, there is the Bronze Age steppe people coming with Yamna-like ancestry, and also we still don’t know about proto-Greeks, how they were genetically.
There were minor Slavic incursion into Anatolia – in fact some Slavic tribes were said ti be resettled by Emperors as far as in Syria.
Razib,
If I am reading the graph correctly some of the Balkan samples are extremely close to the Greeks. Do you think this is simply due to shared ancestry dating to the time of the Slavic invasions, or is it true that South Slavs are partially descended from the ancient non-Slavic inhabitants of the region?
Thanks,
Beowulf
If I am reading the graph correctly some of the Balkan samples are extremely close to the Greeks. Do you think this is simply due to shared ancestry dating to the time of the Slavic invasions, or is it true that South Slavs are partially descended from the ancient non-Slavic inhabitants of the region?
Thanks,
BeowulfReplies: @silviosilver
That’s what I believe. The population of the territory of modern Bulgaria is estimated at about 500,000 in 1AD, and I think it’s doubtful that a number much greater than this of Slavs migrated there. By most accounts, the number of central Asian Bulgar arrivals (from whom the state has long taken its name) was much lower than the number of Slavs, so the pre-Slavic component has surely weighed heavily in the region’s population ever since.
Many years ago, didn't you used to plot the names of the groups on the graph? Maybe at the average location? I think that worked well. Did you lose the ability to do this when you switched to ggplot or something?Replies: @Razib Khan, @Unzerker, @Douglas Knight
Actually, my suggestion to use rainbow() is a mistake. If you were using opaque colors, I think rainbow is a little better than the defaults, but with transparency it is worse. I think a wide range of colors from all over the color cube would be worth ditching transparency, but rainbow() is not.
Nice illustration of ancient components of various European ancestry in diagrams I can understand
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn27850-how-much-of-a-caveman-are-you-faq/
The print edition has Tuscans having no hunter gatherer ancestry, less than Sardinians.
App for calculating ancestry http://caveman.newscientistapps.com/
It calculates Greeks as 14 % Hunter gatherers, 63% Neolithic farmers, and 19% steppe -pastoralists
https://www.unz.com/pfrost/the-past-is-another-country/
Razib,
Do you know of any studies done recently that sequenced Greek skeletons recovered from graves during the Classical/Hellenistic/Roman eras? Something for example, like sequencing those skeletons recovered from Chaeronea and comparing them to modern Greeks.
Do you know of any studies done recently that sequenced Greek skeletons recovered from graves during the Classical/Hellenistic/Roman eras? Something for example, like sequencing those skeletons recovered from Chaeronea and comparing them to modern Greeks.Replies: @Razib Khan
no, but it’ll happen. right now the priority is on doing older stuff to publish sexy papers. the skills aren’t widely distributed yet. at some point in next 10 years ancient DNA will be a utility, not a value-add, and they’ll sequence everything. though the habit of cremation before xtianity is not going to help 🙂
Controversial Soviet historian Lev Gumilyov’s view was that modern Greeks are Hellenized Slavs. I think he also thought that Byzantine Greeks from Asia Minor were “real” Greeks.
One interesting anecdote is that Cyrillic alphabet was developed for the dialect of Slavs from Salun (Thessaloniki). So at the time Thessaloniki had a large Slavic population.
Even today there are some Bulgarian-speaking Muslim Slavs in Greek Thrace [2]. In my opinion the only reason that they survived as an ethnic minority is a different religion. Had they been Greek Orthodox they would’ve assimilated into Greek identity, like for example Aromanians [3].
Part of Albanians also may have Slavic ancestry.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev_Gumilyov
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomaks
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aromanians
According to this map from 1877 - there are almost no Greeks in modern Northern Greece:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/21/Ethnographic_map_of_European_Turkey_from_1877_by_Carl_Sax.jpgReplies: @silviosilver
Part of Albanians also may have Slavic ancestry.[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev_Gumilyov
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomaks
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AromaniansReplies: @LevantineJew, @Joe Q.
Apologies for double posting.
According to this map from 1877 – there are almost no Greeks in modern Northern Greece:
I have seen many Greek autosomal analysis results (including Anatolian Greek results). Based on them, I can say that Anatolian Greeks except those in the far west in general genetically cluster with other Anatolian populations such as Anatolian Turks, Armenians and Assyrians rather than any European population (including Balkan Greeks). I think those southern Italian-like Greeks are southern Balkan Greeks, Aegean Island Greeks, far western Anatolian Greeks and/or Greeks who are only partially descended from Anatolia proper.
According to this map from 1877 - there are almost no Greeks in modern Northern Greece:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/21/Ethnographic_map_of_European_Turkey_from_1877_by_Carl_Sax.jpgReplies: @silviosilver
Northern Greece received an infusion of about a million Anatolian Greeks in the 1920s, which, in combination with a much smaller-scale population exchange with Bulgarian, completely altered the demographic balance in that region. It is inaccurate to claim there were no Greeks in northern Greece before this, however; the proportion of Greeks was just much smaller, that’s all. In fact, the territories that Greece acquired after the Balkan Wars – Macedonia and western Thrace – were majority Greek in 1913, although there were (and still are) a number of Slavic-speaking villages dotted near the new border.
In regards to the GEDmatch relatives popping up from the Bulgarian, Greek, Turkish, Ukrainian, Russian, Iranian, etc. block. I just had relatives pop up with the surname Sheremet. The descendents of Nykolaj Sheremet who migrated through Austria to Michigan in 1914, when he was 18, (I wonder why???) Anyway, they were a prominent family in the Russian aristocracy. The name, Sheremet is thought to be of Tartar and even Turkish/Persian origin. Sounds pretty Persian to me. Also, sharing the Greek block of relatives on the area of DNA on my 15th chromosome is one Italian, Alessandro Zecchin, living in Italy.
Another relative popped up on chromosome 20, a Teddy LoPiccolo. He posted on the PBS website that he may, after DNA testing, be, by way of Sicily, be descended from “Romans, Greeks or Phoenicians. May, or may not be related to my DNA chunk, of course.
Part of Albanians also may have Slavic ancestry.[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev_Gumilyov
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomaks
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AromaniansReplies: @LevantineJew, @Joe Q.
On a similar note, I remember seeing a video about a group of Greek-speaking Muslims in northern Turkey (Trebizond area? Can’t remember) They are said to speak a relatively “pure” Byzantine Greek even after all these centuries. They are Muslim but somehow have not assimilated into the Turkish-speaking majority population.
I ran some more of the very few Italian Americans, genuine ones, on my relative list through and 2 more came out on the 15th chromosome, also, 2 white descendants of prominent slave owners and 2 African-Americans and a few Jews match. Strange brew!