"The Genetic History of the Southern Arc: A Bridge between West Asia & Europe"

[Ahuwarhd]

this is how the paper summed up the data sofar

 

supp p298: In a recent publication on the population history of the ancient city of Rome(436) it was observed that the population of Imperial Rome experienced an “eastward” (towards the Eastern Mediterranean) shift relative to that of the Iron Age and Republic periods, which was then followed with a “northward” (towards continental Europe) shift during Medieval and Early Modern periods after the fall of the city of Rome

the etrurian paper concluded that the best match for that 'northward' shift are indeed the longobards Notably, among the best supported models are those that feature individuals associated with Longobard cemeteries from Hungary and northern Italy (31) that such a shift is observed (see:samples) post migration period in the early medieval further underscores it; szolad (see:supp) was even the best match and szolad is a great source as it encompasses everything the longobard migration brought to italy incl provincials and such provincials also show up in late antiquity rome ie R33 and the crypta balbians

first i thought the discussion would be about new data but since it is not collegno and a preview PCA on lavazza have shown what the data for late antiquity north italy is like and going to be like; notably early medieval CL36 with more ema to come in the future paper(s); the preview PCA on pre longobard italy could even suggest that the source (proximate) of the near east shift were the romans themselves ie cline

The profile of modern like Northern Italian genetics was already in place during the bronze age. They were less homogenous, but the averages were already there. This is corroborated by northern adriatic samples from IA croatia and slovenia which looked identical to a N. Italian profile and emerged from the commonly accepted balkan route of italic langauge migrations into italy. The Etruscans/latins forming a cline with such genetics is no coincidence either. What's more is we already see the same profiles in Roman military camps abroad during the early empire, and you see them in C. Italy more commonly to the tune of about 20% of the population by the late empire. Those who believe northern italian like genetics were birthed from some germanic or frankish mixing event during the middle ages/late empire are setting themselves up for massive disappointment. Modern Northern Italians have far too much neolithic anatolian ancestry to be a result of central or northern european influence.

Dark squares are bronze age northern Italians. Diamonds are bronze age C. Italians.

[Avraam Kyriakidis]

Based on what?? Other way round looks more likely due to the bigger presence of slavic y dna in tosks which points to an early founder effect during a period when there were less people/males

That is true.In fact i have noticed that Albanians overall are less I2din than Greeks.But for some reason Albanians seems to be more R1a.Tosks are for sure more I2din indeed but i am seeing overall more R1a in Albania.Might be coming from Antes.Sclaveni would carry mostly I2din and less R1a.

Now when it comes to autosomal dna i think we have seen samples from northern Albanians that sometimes might plot more northern and even near to South Slavs.While Tosks sit near mainland Greeks most of the time.Usually Albanians from Kosovo or Montenegrin Albos can show a more northern autosomal dna.

[Bodilkas]

The genetic of the southern arc is very different because there, whg does not exist or exists in vey small percentages thanks to the Iron Gates hgs. I suppose that in the Balkans, the migratory waves from Anatolia would have a much more important demographic effect than in western europe and practically erased the mesolithic genetic legacu of the region

[Bodilkas]

Iberians, tartessians, southern Gauls, central european celts, etruscans, italics and northern illyrians differ from the rest of iron age balkan peoples in their percentages of whg. We can say that an iron age group has survived until today and that is why they are so similar to northern italians and spaniards.

[Karagjoz]

That is true.In fact i have noticed that Albanians overall are less I2din than Greeks.But for some reason Albanians seems to be more R1a.Tosks are for sure more I2din indeed but i am seeing overall more R1a in Albania.Might be coming from Antes.Sclaveni would carry mostly I2din and less R1a.

Now when it comes to autosomal dna i think we have seen samples from northern Albanians that sometimes might plot more northern and even near to South Slavs.While Tosks sit near mainland Greeks most of the time.Usually Albanians from Kosovo or Montenegrin Albos can show a more northern autosomal dna.

Bruzmi told us that kosovo albanians actually plot more southern than tosks. Also albanians vary everywhere, some tosks will plot more northern, some more southern. It seems to depend mostly on how much slavic autosomal each individual has (i think germanic input also plays a role). Montenegro albanians have more slavic autosomal which is why they may plot a bit more northern than other albanians

As for i2a-din and r1a, whats the frequency in greece?

[xz1333]

Most slavic ancestry in albanians is very early (early medieval) and predates the bulgarian/serbian empires

That is possible. As there were Slavic tribes that invaded the areas before Serbs or Bulgarians.

For a tribal population with a fairly low level of material culture, reaching the line of the Danube and looking south was the equivalent of a hungry man pressing his face against the window of a grocery. The Balkans, fully restored to Byzantine control under the energetic Emperor Justinian (527-65), contained many flourishing towns and cities, supported by productive agriculture and active trading routes. The Slavs were not the first to cross the Danube in search of better things. Germanic Goths had done so (with Byzantine permission, at first) in the fourth century, and had gone raiding as far as Greece and the Albanian coast thereafter; Huns, under Attila, had attacked in the 440s, and Bulgars (a Turkic tribe) had started raiding at the end of that century. [2] But none of these earlier invaders left any imprint on the Balkans comparable to that of the Slavs. Indeed, by the time that the Turkic-speaking Bulgars came to settle permanently in the Balkans in the seventh century, the Slav element was already so well established there that the conquering Bulgars were eventually to lose their own language and be absorbed by their Slav-speaking subjects.

It was at this point, in the 610s or 620s, that the Emperor of the day (according to a detailed but somewhat confused account by a later Emperor-cum-historian, Constantine Porphyrogenitus) invited the Croats to come down from central Europe and deal with the Avar threat. [6] This they did, bringing with them their neighbours, the Serbs. Both populations then settled in the territories abandoned by the Avars: the Croats in modern Croatia and western Bosnia, and the Serbs in the Rascia area on the north-western side of Kosovo, and in the region of modern Montenegro. In some of these areas they supervened on an already existing Slav population, which, as a result, must gradually have taken on a 'Croat' or 'Serb' identity. The Serbs did not have anything like a state at this stage, but they developed several small tribal territories, each called a zupa and ruled by a tribal chief known as the zupan. [7]

The first major Slav raids took place in the middle of Justinian's reign. In 547 and 548 they invaded the territory of modern Kosovo, and then (probably via Macedonia and the Via Egnatia across central Albania) got as far as Durres on the northern Albanian coast. [4] More substantial invasions took place in the 580s, bringing Slavs deep into Greece. Historians used to think that it was only these later invasions that involved any permanent settlement; but there is evidence of Slav place-names in the Balkans - particularly along the river Morava - by the 550s, which suggests a more continuous process of infiltration. [5] One factor which may have turned the southward movement of Slavs from a trickle to a flood was the arrival, in the north-western part of the Balkans, of an especially warlike Turkic tribe, the Avars, who subjugated or coopted some Slavic tribes but drove many others away. By the early seventh century the Avar armies were raiding as far as the walls of Constantinople, and threatening the very existence of the Byzantine Empire.

By the mid-seventh century, Serbs (or Serb-led Slavs) were penetrating from the coastal lands of Montenegro into northern Albania. Major ports and towns such as Durres and Shkodra held out against them, but much of the countryside was Slavicized, and some Slav settlers moved up the valleys into the Malesi. By the ninth century, Slav-speaking people were an important element of the population in much of northern Albania, excluding the towns and the higher mountainous areas (especially the mountains in the eastern part of the Malesi, towards Kosovo).

[8] Slav-speaking people lived in the lowlands of this area, gradually becoming a major component of the urban population too, until the end of the Middle Ages

Finally, before turning to the most mysterious problem of all - the origin of the Albanians - it is worth looking once more at the pattern of settlement in the Kosovo area during the early Slav centuries. Kosovo did not fall within the Serb territory of Rascia, which was further to the north-west: the Serbian expansion into Kosovo began in earnest only in the late twelfth century. About the other early Slav settlers in this part of the Balkans we have much less information. Byzantine sources just referred generally to 'Sklaviniai', Slav territories, in the Macedonian region; in the few cases when they made more localized references they often used names derived from rivers, so that it is not clear whether these were the names of Slav tribes or just geographical labels. The 'Moravoi' or 'Moravlians', for example, who are first mentioned in the ninth century, lived somewhere near the river Morava, but that is all we know about them. Historical map-makers, who do not like leaving too many blank spaces, place these Moravlians over much of south-eastern Serbia from as early as the sixth century, with arrows showing them passing into Kosovo; real evidence for this is lacking. [17]

Obviously some Slavs did spread through all these areas sooner or later. But there is one intriguing line of argument to suggest that the Slav presence in Kosovo and the southernmost part of the Morava valley may have been quite weak in the first one or two centuries of Slav settlement. If Slavs had been evenly spread across this part of the Balkans, it would be hard to explain why such a clear linguistic division emerged between the Serbo-Croat language and the Bulgarian-Macedonian one. The scholar who first developed this argument also noted that, in the area dividing the early Serbs from the Bulgarians, many Latin place-names survived long enough to be adapted eventually into Slav ones, from Naissus (Nish), down through the Kosovo town of Lypenion (Lipljan) to Scupi (Skopje): this contrasts strongly with most of northern Serbia, Bosnia and the Dalmatian hinterland, where the old town names were completely swept aside. His conclusion was that the Latin-speaking population, far from withering away immediately, may actually have been strengthened here (and in a western strip of modern Bulgaria), its numbers swelled, no doubt, by refugees from further north. These Latin-speakers would have thus formed 'a wide border-zone between the Bulgarians and the Serbs'. [18]

Only in the ninth century do we see the expansion of a strong Slav (or quasi-Slav) power into this region. Under a series of ambitious rulers, the Bulgarians - a Slav population which absorbed, linguistically and culturally, its ruling elite of Turkic Bulgars - pushed westwards across modern Macedonia and eastern Serbia, until by the 850s they had taken over Kosovo and were pressing on the borders of Rascia. Soon afterwards they took the western Macedonian town of Ohrid; having recently converted to Christianity, the Bulgar rulers helped to set up a bishopric in Ohrid, which thus became an important centre of Slav culture for the whole region. And at the same time the Bulgarians were pushing on into southern and central Albania, which became thoroughly settled by Bulgarian Slavs during the course of the following century.

Albanian dialect split predate the Slavs, also Slavic admixture cannot be based on only Y-DNA , there were intermarriages. There were also Goths.

[xz1333]

It is very possible that Slavic Y-DNA in Albanians predates the Serbs and Bulgarians as there were Slavic tribes that raided Macedonia, Montenegro, Albania etc, some of them settled, since they weren't all massive permanent settlements it's possible they were assimilated into some of the natives, there is also Albanian I1 that matches Serbian tribe Macure which possibly predates the arrival of the Serbs . By the time Bulgars arrived Bulgaria had already been massively settled by Slavs. This does not seem to be the case for the Morava Valley, Kosovo, Macedonia and Northern Albania were some pre-Slavic toponyms survived such as Nish, Shtip, Shkup, Shkodra, Lezha, Durres, Drisht, Drin, Lipjan, and possibly Viciana (Vushtrri) , etc


Anyway, like Bruzmi said, let's leave this thread for other topics.

[Avraam Kyriakidis]

Bruzmi told us that kosovo albanians actually plot more southern than tosks. Also albanians vary everywhere, some tosks will plot more northern, some more southern. It seems to depend mostly on how much slavic autosomal each individual has (i think germanic input also plays a role). Montenegro albanians have more slavic autosomal which is why they may plot a bit more northern than other albanians

As for i2a-din and r1a, whats the frequency in greece?

In Greece I2din to me it looks like the 3rd major/dominant yDNA along with R1b after EV13 and J2a.R1a has a lower frequency but still it’s there.Obviously Sclaveni were dominantly I2din men with lower amounts of R1a and maybe EV13.The point is that Antes tribes migrated to the southern balkans as well.In Bulgaria for example there were Antes who probably increased R1a lineages there.

[Granary]

Did anyone manage to do some formal stats on the proposed shared drift between Levantines and Steppe populations?

[epoch]

Did anyone manage to do some formal stats on the proposed shared drift between Levantines and Steppe populations?

It would be nice to see if the Baltic Corded Ware samples that showed no farmer admixture whatsoever have it too. Plinkaigalis242 and Gyvakarai1 from Mittnik 2018 and Latvia_LN1 from Jones 2017. Corded Ware may behave differently from Yamnaya.

https://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2018/...m-genetic.html

Also would be nice to look how X to autosomal ratio for CHG is in these samples.