Minoans and Mycenaeans

It is great to finally see the first data from the most ancient Greeks (Mycenaeans) and also the Cretan Minoans:

• Ancestrally. both Mycenaeans and Minoans were basically Mediterranean, well outside the variation of most Europeans and Near Easterners and >75% from early European-Anatolian farmers.
• Phenotypically, they were dark-haired/eyed
• They weren't pure Mediterraneans, but also partly "West_Asian". Bronze Age people from S.W. Anatolia were even more "West_Asian".
• Mycenaeans also had some "Ancient North Eurasian" ancestry, which may have come from either the north or east of Greece.
• Two Minoans and a Mycenaean were haplogroup J2, one Minoan was G.
• One high-status Mycenaean female from Messenia was not different from the other three Mycenaeans.

Modern Greeks from Greece are more "northern", more "European", and less "Mediterranean" than the Mycenaeans. Bust, Fst-wise Modern Greeks (and assorted neighbors) are still fairly close to Mycenaeans, more so than other people from Europe and the Middle East:

Nature (2017) doi:10.1038/nature23310

Genetic origins of the Minoans and Mycenaeans

Iosif Lazaridis, Alissa Mittnik, Nick Patterson, Swapan Mallick, Nadin Rohland, Saskia Pfrengle, Anja Furtwängler, Alexander Peltzer, Cosimo Posth, Andonis Vasilakis, P. J. P. McGeorge, Eleni Konsolaki-Yannopoulou, George Korres, Holley Martlew, Manolis Michalodimitrakis, Mehmet Özsait, Nesrin Özsait, Anastasia Papathanasiou, Michael Richards, Songül Alpaslan Roodenberg, Yannis Tzedakis, Robert Arnott, Daniel M. Fernandes, Jeffery R. Hughey, Dimitra M. Lotakis, Patrick A. Navas, Yannis Maniatis, John A. Stamatoyannopoulos, Kristin Stewardson, Philipp Stockhammer, Ron Pinhasi, David Reich, Johannes Krause & George Stamatoyannopoulos

The origins of the Bronze Age Minoan and Mycenaean cultures have puzzled archaeologists for more than a century. We have assembled genome-wide data from 19 ancient individuals, including Minoans from Crete, Mycenaeans from mainland Greece, and their eastern neighbours from southwestern Anatolia. Here we show that Minoans and Mycenaeans were genetically similar, having at least three-quarters of their ancestry from the first Neolithic farmers of western Anatolia and the Aegean1, 2, and most of the remainder from ancient populations related to those of the Caucasus3 and Iran4, 5. However, the Mycenaeans differed from Minoans in deriving additional ancestry from an ultimate source related to the hunter–gatherers of eastern Europe and Siberia6, 7, 8, introduced via a proximal source related to the inhabitants of either the Eurasian steppe1, 6, 9 or Armenia4, 9. Modern Greeks resemble the Mycenaeans, but with some additional dilution of the Early Neolithic ancestry. Our results support the idea of continuity but not isolation in the history of populations of the Aegean, before and after the time of its earliest civilizations.

Link

Facial reconstruction of Griffin warrior

The face of Bronze Age fighter revealed: Scientists reconstruct face of the 'Griffin Warrior' who was part of an elite group 3,500 years ago

Luwians vs. Hittites and Mycenaeans vs. Luwians

A rather imaginative reconstruction of the events surrounding the Sea Peoples and the ending of the end of the Bronze Age.

Five people were buried in Amphipolis tomb

Bones found in Magnificent Amphipolis Tomb belong to Five People, Ministry Announced

The Greek Ministry of Culture has announced the long-awaited results of the analysis on the bones found inside the 4th century BC tomb uncovered in Amphipolis in northern Greece, and the news is quite unexpected – the bones belong to not one, but five individuals, pointing to the likelihood that it is a family tomb. 

... 

Person 1: Female, approximately 60 years
Persons 2 and 3: Two men, 35 to 45 years
Person 4: Newborn infant
Person 5: Cremated individual of unknown age and sex  

... 

The scientific team will continue to carry out in-depth studies of the bones, including DNA analysis, to obtain more detailed information about the individuals including their diet, their affinity and place of origin, whether they grew up in Amphipolis or had moved from elsewhere, when they were buried/cremated, and whether the individuals are related to each other.

Tomb II at Vergina belonged to Philip II and a possible Scythian wife

Remains of Alexander the Great's Father Confirmed Found

A team of Greek researchers has confirmed that bones found in a two-chambered royal tomb at Vergina, a town some 100 miles away from Amphipolis's mysterious burial mound, indeed belong to the Macedonian King Philip II, Alexander the Great's father. 

The anthropological investigation examined 350 bones and fragments found in two larnakes, or caskets, of the tomb. It uncovered pathologies, activity markers and trauma that helped identify the tomb's occupants.

Along with the cremated remains of Philip II, the burial, commonly known as Tomb II, also contained the bones of a woman warrior, possibly the daughter of the Skythian King Athea, Theodore Antikas, head of the Art-Anthropological research team of the Vergina excavation, told Discovery News.

Amphipolis caryatid

The constant stream of discoveries from the Amphipolis tomb are fascinating. It is not often that one sees archaeology reported almost in "real time".

It is clear that a tomb with a 500m perimeter from the last quarter of the 4th c. BC (i) was built for someone very important, and (ii) someone that is in the history books. 

Unfortunately, such a huge monument would be sure to have attracted attention even in antiquity and it's possible that it was robbed; the intact tomb of Philip II in Vergina (where more tombs in the royal necropolis have recently been discovered) is, by comparison, much more modest, which may have contributed to its lucky fate. Even if the tomb was robbed, the non-movable art from the site by itself would make it an amazing discovery from the ancient world.

Perhaps one day non-cremated remains from a Macedonian Argead royal will be tested for ancient DNA. In the Peloponnese, the institution of kingship waned in power and so the tombs of the descendants of the kings of Argos or Sparta might be indistinguishable from those of their Dorian compatriots. Finding the lineage of Hercules may seem like science fiction at the moment, but ancient DNA keeps revealing amazing new things about the past, so one can always hope!

ISBA 2014 titles

Some interesting talks and posters from the upcoming International Symposium on Biomolecular Archaeology. I don't see any abstracts on the site (yet?) but the titles are intriguing. Some that caught my eye:

• Investigating the maternal lineage diversity from an early medieval site in Southern Italy
• Ancient mitochondrial and Y chromosomal DNA reveals the western Carpathian Basin as a corridor of the Neolithic expansion
• Ancient mitochondrial DNA from the Northern fringe of the Neolithic farming expansion in Europe sheds light on the dispersion process
• The effect of demography and natural selection on pigmentation heterogeneity in late Pleistocene and early Holocene Europeans
• The genomics of equine speciation and domestication
• Ancient population genetics: new insights on horse domestication
• Species identification and analysis of the Tyrolean Iceman's clothes using next generation sequencing of ancient DNA.
• Early evidence for the use of pottery: extending the ancient lipid record to the Pleistocene.
• Whey to go – first identification of lactose in prehistoric pottery
• Use of the earliest pottery on the Western and Eastern side of the Baltic
• The geographical distribution of the Polynesian cultural complex and its association with P33-C2a1 Y chromosomes: adding data from Aotearoa (New Zealand)
• Interdisciplinary investigation of an archaic hominin femur from the Swabian Jura (South-West Germany)
• Tracing the genetic history of farming populations of El Portalón Cave in the Sierra de Atapuerca, Spain.
• Ancient human genomes suggest three ancestral populations for present-day Europeans
• Ancient DNA from Early Neolithic farmers in Europe
• Genomic diversity and admixture in Stone-Age farmer and hunter-gatherer groups in Scandinavia
• Ancient DNA reveals the complex genetic history of the New World Arctic
• A prediction of the hybridisation potential between Hominin species using mitochondrial DNA
• Population Genomics of Vikings
• Tracing the genetic profile of Sus scrofa on Romanian territory from the Neolithic period until the Middle Ages
• The origins of the Aegean palatial civilizations from a population genetic perspective
• Ancient DNA evidence for a diversified origin of ancestor of Han Chinese

Craniofacial morphology of Greeks through 4,000 years

Anthropol Anz. 2014;71(3):237-57.

Craniofacial morphology in ancient and modern Greeks through 4,000 years.

Papagrigorakis MJ, Kousoulis AA, Synodinos PN. Abstract

BACKGROUND:

Multiple 20th century studies have speculated on the anthropological similarities of the modern inhabitants of Greece with their ancient predecessors. The present investigation attempts to add to this knowledge by comparing the craniofacial configuration of 141 ancient (dating around 2,000-500 BC) and 240 modern Greek skulls (the largest material among relevant national studies).

METHOD:

Skulls were grouped in age at death, sex, era and geographical categories; lateral cephalograms were taken and 53 variables were measured and correlated statistically. The craniofacial measurements and measurements of the basic quadrilateral and cranial polygon were compared in various groups using basic statistical methods, one-way ANOVA and assessment of the correlation matrices.

OBSERVATIONS:

Most of the measurements for both sexes combined followed an akin pattern in ancient and modern Greek skulls. Moreover, sketching and comparing the outline of the skull and upper face, we observed a clock-wise movement. The present study confirms that the morphological pattern of Greek skulls, as it changed during thousands of years, kept some characteristics unchanged, with others undergoing logical modifications.

CONCLUSION:

The analysis of our results allows us to believe that the influence upon the craniofacial complex of the various known factors, including genetic or environmental alterations, is apt to alter its form to adapt to new conditions. Even though 4,000 years seems too narrow a span to provoke evolutionary insights using conventional geometric morphometrics, the full presentation of our results makes up a useful atlas of solid data. Interpreted with caution, the craniofacial morphology in modern and ancient Greeks indicates elements of ethnic group continuation within the unavoidable multicultural mixtures.

Link

Wine cup of Pericles found

Wine cup used by Pericles found in grave north of Athens

Experts are "99 per cent" sure that the cup was used by the Athenian statesman, as one of the other names listed, Ariphron, is that of Pericles' elder brother.

"The name Ariphron is extremely rare," Angelos Matthaiou, secretary of the Greek Epigraphic Society, told the newspaper.

"Having it listed above that of Pericles makes us 99 per cent sure that these are the two brothers," he said.

Finding the cup of Pericles is cool, but finding his actual tomb would be even cooler. Thanks to Pausanias and other ancient observers, the location and identity of many of the tombs of ancient prominent Athenians is known.

The place of the Armenian language in the Indo-European family

A very interesting talk at the Library of Congress making a good case for a Greek-Phrygian-Armenian clade within the Indo-European family.
 


Of course the testimony of Herodotus is -at least for me- the most convincing argument for an ultimately Balkan origin of the Phrygo-Armenians.

Modern Armenians are quite distinct from modern populations of the Balkans but who knows how both they and the populations of the Balkans have changed since the beginning of the Iron Age when the Phrygians established themselves in Asia Minor? The recent study by Hellenthal et al. did not find any good evidence for recent admixture in Armenians but this might be due to (i) Armenians being unmixed descendants of Proto-Armenians, (ii) Armenians being near-unmixed descendants of pre-Armenians, or (iii) the method not having enough power to detect admixture.

My guess is that the relative remoteness of the Armenian highlands coupled with the heterodox position of the Armenian church hindered substantial gene flow into the Armenian population over at least the last 1,500 years.

The place of Armenian in the Indo-European language family

Journal of Language Relationship • Вопросы языкового родства • 10 (2013) • Pp. 85—137

The place of Armenian in the Indo-European language family: the relationship with Greek and Indo-Iranian*

Hrach Martirosyan

The main purpose of this paper is to present lexical correspondences that unite Armenian with Greek and/or Indo-Iranian. They include shared innovations on the one hand, and isolated lexemes on the other. These two lexical corpora — lexical innovations on an inherited basis and isolated words — can be placed within the same temporal and spatial framework. After the Indo-European dispersal Proto-Armenian would have continued to come into contact with genetically related Indo-European dialects. Simultaneously, it would certainly also have been in contact with neighbouring non-Indo-European languages. A word can be of a substrate origin if it is characterized by: (1) limited geographical distribution; (2) unusual phonology and word formation; (3) characteristic semantics. The material presented here, albeit not exhaustive, allows to preliminarily conclude that Armenian, Greek, (Phrygian) and Indo-Iranian were dialectally close to each other. Within this hypothetical dialect group, Proto-Armenian was situated between Proto-Greek (to the west) and Proto-Indo-Iranian (to the east). The Indo-Iranians then moved eastwards, while the Proto-Armenians and Proto-Greeks remained in a common geographical region for a long period and developed numerous shared innovations. At a later stage, together or independently, they borrowed a large number of words from the Mediterranean / Pontic substrate language(s), mostly cultural and agricultural words, as well as animal and plant designations. On the other hand, Armenian shows a considerable number of lexical correspondences with European branches of the Indo-European language family, a large portion of which too should be explained in terms of substrate rather than Indo-European heritage.

Link (pdf)

The Nordic razor

I had posted a few studies suggesting links between Mycenaean Greece and Scandinavia, and here is another one. From the paper, this ties a bit to my ideas about the establishment of long-range networks associated with metallurgy in the Bronze Age:

It can be seen that there were two, chronologically separate, lines of introduction or transfer of the razor idea from the eastern Mediterranean to northern Europe. The spread of the two-edged razor to Central and Western Europe including Britain and Ireland took place just before or around 1500 BC. The one-edged razor arrived in Scandinavia in the decades before 1400 BC. The two ‘time-slots’ of transfer from the Mediterranean of two types of razors indicate the use of specific long distance networks that were probably in existence beforehand.

Antiquity Volume: 87 Number: 336 Page: 461–472

The Nordic razor and the Mycenaean lifestyle

Flemming Kaul

*Danish Prehistory, The National Museum of Denmark, Frederiksholms Kanal 12, Copenhagen DK 1220, Denmark (Email: flemming.kaul@natmus.dk)

The bronze razor with the horse-head handle appeared in Scandinavia in the fifteenth century BC. Where did it come from and what did it mean? The author shows that the razor had some antecedents in the Aegean, although none of these objects were imported to the north. He argues that the Scandinavian warrior class consciously adopted elements of the Mycenaean warrior package, including a clean-shaven face. This vividly exposes new aspects of the busy and subtle nature of international communication in the Bronze Age.

Link

mtDNA from Minoan Crete (Hughey et al. 2013)

A very exciting (and open access) new paper on Minoan mtDNA adds new ancient DNA data from the southeastern corner of Europe and from a critical period at the beginning of European history.

The authors are able to reject Arthur Evans's idea that Minoan civilization had a North African origin, since North Africans bear the least similarity to the Minoans among the considered populations. Of course it's possible that Bronze Age North Africa had not yet experienced Sub-Saharan African gene flow -which probably accounts for its distinctiveness today (no African L mtDNA was found in the Minoan sample).

On the other hand, the similarities between the Minoans and other ancient European mtDNA samples probably testifies to Minoans being indeed related to the Neolithic population of Europe. This is particularly interesting in the case of Minoan Crete, which may have been visited in pre-Neolithic times, but  was permanently settled only during the Neolithic, thus minimizing the possibility of an inclusion of a Paleolithic substratum as may be the case in parts of continental Europe.

Supplementary Table S2 shows haplogroup designations of the Minoan individuals which seems to encompass a wide variety:

One thing to note is the absence of mtDNA haplogroup N1a that so typifies central European Neolithic, and also the presence of some haplogroup U5a/U which seems typical of Paleolithic Europeans. I'd be interested in hearing any additional observations people might have on this data.

From the paper:

The PCA analysis also highlights the high affinity of the Minoans to the current inhabitants of the Lassithi plateau as well as Greece. Among the top 10 nearest neighbours to our Minoan population sample, four are Greek populations and two of these from Lassithi prefecture (Fig. 5). The close relationship of the Minoans to modern Cretans is also apparent, when analysis is restricted to populations originating from Greece (Fig. 6b). Particularly in respect to the first PCA (capturing 92% of the variance of this particular subset of the data), the Minoans are extremely close to the modern Lassithi population, the populations from the islands of Chios and Euboea, as well as the populations of Argolis and Lakonia (Southern Greece ) (Fig. 6b). Thus, the modern inhabitants of the Lassithi plateau still carry the maternal genetic signatures of their ancient predecessors of the Minoan population.

It seems that there is (at least in terms of mtDNA) continuity in Crete since the Bronze Age, just as there is in Sardinia. And, indeed there appears to be some similarity between Bronze Age Sardinia and Minoan Crete (see Tables S5 and S6 of the supplement).

This is very exciting stuff which was probably made possible -in part- by the preservation of the material in a sealed cave ossuary, but hopefully more ancient DNA is to be had from Greece and surrounding regions.

UPDATE (From Nature News):

It is likely, says Stamatoyannopoulos, that the Minoans descended from Neolithic populations that migrated to Europe from the Middle East and Turkey. Archaeological excavations suggest that early farmers were living in Crete by around 9,000 years ago, so these could be the ancestors of the Minoans. Similarities between Minoan and Egyptian artefacts were probably the result of cultural exchanges across the navigable Mediterranean Sea, rather than wholesale migrations, he adds. 

Wolfgang Haak, a molecular archaeologist at the University of Adelaide in Australia, thinks that Crete’s early history is probably more complicated, with multiple Neolithic populations arriving at different times. “It's nevertheless good to see some data — if authentic — from this region of Europe contributing to the big and complex puzzle,” he says. 

Stamatoyannopoulos notes that his team’s findings are limited, because mitochondrial DNA represents only a single maternal lineage for each individual — a mother’s mother, and so on. With Johannes Krause, a palaeogeneticist at the University of Tubingen in Germany, the team now plans to sequence the nuclear genomes of Minoans and other ancients to learn more about their history. 

“For the last 30, 40 years there’s been a growing sense that Minoan Crete was created by people indigenous to the island,” says Cyprian Broodbank, a Mediterranean archaeologist at University College London. He welcomes the latest line of support for this hypothesis. “It’s good to have some of the old assumptions that Minoans migrated from some other high culture scotched,” he says.

Nature Communications 4, Article number: 1861 doi:10.1038/ncomms2871

A European population in Minoan Bronze Age Crete

Jeffery R. Hughey et al.

The first advanced Bronze Age civilization of Europe was established by the Minoans about 5,000 years before present. Since Sir Arthur Evans exposed the Minoan civic centre of Knossos, archaeologists have speculated on the origin of the founders of the civilization. Evans proposed a North African origin; Cycladic, Balkan, Anatolian and Middle Eastern origins have also been proposed. Here we address the question of the origin of the Minoans by analysing mitochondrial DNA from Minoan osseous remains from a cave ossuary in the Lassithi plateau of Crete dated 4,400–3,700 years before present. Shared haplotypes, principal component and pairwise distance analyses refute the Evans North African hypothesis. Minoans show the strongest relationships with Neolithic and modern European populations and with the modern inhabitants of the Lassithi plateau. Our data are compatible with the hypothesis of an autochthonous development of the Minoan civilization by the descendants of the Neolithic settlers of the island.

Link

Links between Mycenaeans and Scandinavia

Three papers on a similar theme. An excerpt from a source mentioned in the second paper:

Det visar sig att alla undersökta svenska föremål utom ett enda - en slaggbit - kommer från gruvor och malmfyndigheter från platser på Cypern, Sardinien, Iberiska halvön, Massif Central i nuvarande Frankrike, Tyrolen samt Brittiska öarna. Kopparn har transporterats hit och i utbyte har man skeppat tillbaka stora mängder bärnsten. Fram träder en bild av en tid då internationella kontakter över stora vatten var självklarheter, och det redan cirka 2000 år innan vikingarna gav sig iväg på sina färder. [Google Translate]: It turns out that all examined Swedish subject except one - a slaggbit - comes from mines and ore deposits from sites in Cyprus, Sardinia, the Iberian Peninsula, the Massif Central in the current France, Tyrol and the British Isles. Copper has been transported, and in return it has been shipped back large amounts of amber. What emerges is a picture of a time when international contacts over large water was obvious, and there are already some 2000 years before the Vikings set off on their journeys.

From the third paper:

Both the lead isotope and chemical analyses have undoubtedly showed that the copper from the 33 Scandinavian Bronze Age artefacts diverges significantly from Scandinavian copper ores and that the copper must have been imported from elsewhere. The results furthermore indicate that there are variations in metal supply that are related to chronology, in resemblance with artefacts from Scandinavia as well as from other parts of Europe indicating analogous trade routes for copper, during the respective periods. Maritime networks and changing sources of metal seem to have been a key feature for Scandinavia in the Bronze Age.

Archaeology, Ethnology and Anthropology of Eurasia

Volume 40, Issue 2, June 2012, Pages 99–103

Grave Circle B at Mycenae in the Context of Links Between the Eastern Mediterranean and Scandinavia in the Bronze Age

I.B. Gubanov

Artifacts from royal burial graves Gamma and Omicron of grave circle B at Mycenae attest to cultural ties between the Eastern Mediterranean elite and that of the Scandinavian Early Bronze Age (mid- and late 2nd millennium BC). The appearance of the running spiral motif and representations of ships with rams in Scandinavia coincide with the beginning of the Mycenaean civilization. These facts, along with the finds of Baltic amber only in the royal burials at Mycenae but not in Crete, suggest that a principal role in the introduction of these cultural elements in Scandinavia during the Scandinavian Bronze Age (periods I–III according to Montelius) was played by the Mycenaean elite.

Link

Journal of Geography and Geology Vol 5, No 1 (2013)

The Bronze Age in SE Sweden Evidence of Long-Distance Travel and Advanced Sun Cult 

Nils-Axel Mörner, Bob G. Lind

The Bronze Age of Scandinavia (1750-500 BC) is characterized by the sudden appearance of bronze objects in Scandinavia, the sudden mass appearance of amber in Mycenaean graves, and the beginning of bedrock carvings of huge ships. We take this to indicate that people from the east Mediterranean arrived to Sweden on big ships over the Atlantic, carrying bronze objects from the south, which they traded for amber occurring in SE Sweden in the Ravlunda-Vitemölla–Kivik area. Those visitors left strong cultural imprints as recorded by pictures and objects found in SE Sweden. This seems to indicate that the visits had grown to the establishment of a trading centre. The Bronze Age of Österlen (the SE part of Sweden) is also characterized by a strong Sun cult recorded by stone monuments built to record the annual motions of the Sun, and rock carvings that exhibit strict alignments to the annual motions of the Sun. Ales Stones, dated at about 800 BC, is a remarkable monument in the form of a 67 m long stone-ship. It records the four main solar turning points of the year, the 12 months of the year, each month covering 30 days, except for month 7 which had 35 days (making a full year of 365 days), and the time of the day at 16 points representing 1.5 hour. Ales Stones are built after the same basic geometry as Stonehenge in England.

Link

Journal of Archaeological Science
Volume 40, Issue 1, January 2013, Pages 291–304

Moving metals or indigenous mining? Provenancing Scandinavian Bronze Age artefacts by lead isotopes and trace elements

Johan Ling et al.

The aim of this study is to further the discussion as to whether copper was extracted locally or imported to Sweden during the Bronze Age or if both of these practices could have coexisted. For this purpose, we have carried out lead isotope and chemical analyses of 33 bronze items, dated between 1600BC and 700BC. Among these are the famous Fröslunda shields and the large scrap hoard from Bräckan and other items from three regions in southern Sweden which are also renowned for their richness in copper ores. It is obvious from a comparison that the element and lead isotope compositions of the studied bronze items diverge greatly from those of spatially associated copper ores. Nor is there any good resemblance with other ores from Scandinavia, and it is concluded that the copper in these items must have been imported from elsewhere. The results furthermore indicate that there are variations in metal supply that are related to chronology, in agreement with other artefacts from Scandinavia as well as from other parts of Europe. Altogether these circumstances open up for a discussion regarding Scandinavia’s role in the maritime networks during the Bronze Age.

Link

Estimating the date of composition of the Homeric epics

This might be an interesting way of dating literary works for which there are no/conflicting traditions about their date of composition.

Bioessays DOI: 10.1002/bies.201200165

Linguistic evidence supports date for Homeric epics

Eric Lewin Altschuler et al.

The Homeric epics are among the greatest masterpieces of literature, but when they were produced is not known with certainty. Here we apply evolutionary-linguistic phylogenetic statistical methods to differences in Homeric, Modern Greek and ancient Hittite vocabulary items to estimate a date of approximately 710–760 BCE for these great works. Our analysis compared a common set of vocabulary items among the three pairs of languages, recording for each item whether the words in the two languages were cognate – derived from a shared ancestral word – or not. We then used a likelihood-based Markov chain Monte Carlo procedure to estimate the most probable times in years separating these languages given the percentage of words they shared, combined with knowledge of the rates at which different words change. Our date for the epics is in close agreement with historians' and classicists' beliefs derived from historical and archaeological sources.

Link

Warlike Minoans

War was central to Europe's first civilization, contrary to popular belief

Research from the University of Sheffield has discovered that the ancient civilisation of Crete, known as Minoan, had strong martial traditions, contradicting the commonly held view of Minoans as a peace-loving people.

The research, carried out by Dr Barry Molloy of the University of Sheffield's Department of Archaeology, investigated the Bronze Age people of Crete, known by many as the Minoans, who created the very first complex urban civilisation in Europe.

"Their world was uncovered just over a century ago, and was deemed to be a largely peaceful society," explained Molloy. "In time, many took this to be a paradigm of a society that was devoid of war, where warriors and violence were shunned and played no significant role.

"That utopian view has not survived into modern scholarship, but it remains in the background unchallenged and still crops up in modern texts and popular culture with surprising frequency.

Personally, I'm not very surprised about this re-appraisal of the relationship of Minoans with war. There are multiple lines of evidence for Minoan power (e.g., the Thucydidean thalassocracy, the belief in Minos and Rhadamanthys as judges in Hades, the Theseus/Minotaur/Attican tributes legend) that have always suggested to me that the Bronze Age Cretans did not achieve pre-eminence only due to the attractiveness of their culture and/or their trading acumen, but also because they actually projected power by force.

One of the biggest arguments for Minoan pacifism was the lack of fortifications in Minoan sites. But, I've never found that argument convincing, because this lack might actually signify an excess of power (strong nations having no need of fortifications), and we need not forget that other unfortified city called Sparta, which, hopefully, no one could ever mistake as a champion of pacifism.

The Annual of the British School at Athens, 107, pp 87-142doi:10.1017/S0068245412000044

MARTIAL MINOANS? WAR AS SOCIAL PROCESS,PRACTICE AND EVENT IN BRONZE AGE CRETE 

Barry P.C. Molloy

Together with politics, economics and religion, war is one of the fundamental factors that canshape a society and group identities. In the prehistoric world, the sources for the study of war are disparate and their interpretation can be inconsistent and problematic. In the case of Cretein the Bronze Age, a systematic analysis of the evidence will be undertaken for the first time inthis paper, and this opportunity is used to critically evaluate the most effective ways of employing the widely agreed sets of physical correlates for ancient war in the archaeological record. A further objective in exploring the diachronic roles of war in these societies is to movethe discussion from a niche field to a more integrated, and systematic, social analysis. Theexistence and character of a warrior identity is examined, and it is proposed that it oftenconstituted a conspicuous element of male identity. The varying scales and time spans throughwhich war can influence a society are discussed, and a broad framework for understanding war in social process, practices and events is proposed.

Link

Y chromosome study of Italy (Brisighelli et al. 2012) incl. sample of Greek speakers from Salento

This is a wonderful new source of information on Y-chromosome variation in Italy, that also includes some samples of the linguistic minorities of Ladins and Griko speakers.

The latter is particularly interesting to me, because, these last Greeks of Magna Graecia are descended either from the ancient colonists or medieval Eastern Roman settlers, and as such may represent a group of Greek descendants that (i) may have admixed to some extent with local Italic speakers, but (ii) will not have had an opportunity to experience much post-medieval gene flow that may have affected Greeks from the Aegean.

There may be something wrong with the presentation of the haplogroup frequencies on the left; in particular, based on the text, I think that what appears as R1* is in fact R1*(xR1a1).

In any case, here are my observations on the Grecani Salentini sample:

• They, as well as the Messapi, possess the highest frequencies of E-M78. This ties them to the Balkans in a very obvious way; this haplogroup was also interpreted as a signal of Greek colonization in Sicily and Massalia. This seems like the most obvious explanation; note that Salento is in Messapia, so the high frequency in the non-Greek denizens of the region may be simply the result of language shift, since the remaining Greek speakers are presumably the last remnant of a once much more numerous population that was linguistically Italicized as have most other Greek speaking populations of Italy and Sicily.
• Their highest frequency haplogroups are R1*(xR1a1) and J2. Both are fairly common haplogroups in both Greece and Italy, so only a fine-scale analysis would be able to differentiate between what might be pre-Greek and what is Greek in origin. In any case, I have proposed that these two haplogroups were typical of (albeit not limited to) the Graeco-Phrygo-Armenian clade, so their occurrence in this sample is not surprising.
• There is an occurrence of I*(xM26) chromosomes. This requires finer phylogenetic resolution, but certainly the absence of M26 -which has a SW European distribution- is interesting to note.
• Haplogroup G-M201 again requires finer-scale resolution, and could be anything from a relative of the Neolithic Italians (having been found in the Tyrolean Iceman) to much more recent events.
• Within haplogroup J, the majority of the chromosomes belong to clade J2, with about a tenth of the frequency made up of J*(xM62, M172). Note that these are not necessarily J*(xJ1,J2) as indicated in the figure, since M62 defines only a part of the J1 lineage.
• The absence of haplogroup R1a1 in this sample is perhaps the most interesting finding. This occurs at a frequency of ~10% in Greek samples from Greece and is fairly variable. I have previously observed that it was absent in the south stream of Indo-European based on its paucity in Armenians, Albanians, and its uneven distribution in Greeks. Its absence in the Italian Griko sample reinforces this idea. A caveat, however, is that the origin of the Greek settlement of Italy can be traced to southern Greece and western Anatolia, so it's still possible that some R1a1 was present in other areas of the Aegean basin since pre-medieval times.

The authors of the paper use many conventional labels of what is "Neolithic" and what is not (e.g., R1*(xR1a1) is claimed as Mesolithic). But, certainly, both age estimation of modern chromosomes (e.g., Wei et al. 2012) and the ancient Y chromosome studies cast doubt on this association. I would say that rather than being predominantly pre-Neolithic, it might appear that the Y-chromosome gene pool of Italy may have been formed in late Neolithic to medieval times, with the only lineages that can convincingly trace their ancestry to the Neolithic or earlier epochs being G and I-M26.

As for the Ladins, the high frequency (67.7%) of R1*(xR1a1) is consistent with what I believe to have been the main Italo-Celtic lineage.

Finally, I should point out the occurrence of a couple of haplogroup L samples; this haplogroup is more typical of populations much to the east, being the "eastern" cousin of the more "western" haplogroup T within the LT clade. Certainly a finer-scale resolution of these two L samples might be informative about their potential origins and/or the ancient distribution of this rather mysterious haplogroup.

PLoS ONE 7(12): e50794. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0050794

Uniparental Markers of Contemporary Italian Population Reveals Details on Its Pre-Roman Heritage

Francesca Brisighelli et al.

Abstract
Background

According to archaeological records and historical documentation, Italy has been a melting point for populations of different geographical and ethnic matrices. Although Italy has been a favorite subject for numerous population genetic studies, genetic patterns have never been analyzed comprehensively, including uniparental and autosomal markers throughout the country.

Methods/Principal Findings

A total of 583 individuals were sampled from across the Italian Peninsula, from ten distant (if homogeneous by language) ethnic communities — and from two linguistic isolates (Ladins, Grecani Salentini). All samples were first typed for the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) control region and selected coding region SNPs (mtSNPs). This data was pooled for analysis with 3,778 mtDNA control-region profiles collected from the literature. Secondly, a set of Y-chromosome SNPs and STRs were also analyzed in 479 individuals together with a panel of autosomal ancestry informative markers (AIMs) from 441 samples. The resulting genetic record reveals clines of genetic frequencies laid according to the latitude slant along continental Italy – probably generated by demographical events dating back to the Neolithic. The Ladins showed distinctive, if more recent structure. The Neolithic contribution was estimated for the Y-chromosome as 14.5% and for mtDNA as 10.5%. Y-chromosome data showed larger differentiation between North, Center and South than mtDNA. AIMs detected a minor sub-Saharan component; this is however higher than for other European non-Mediterranean populations. The same signal of sub-Saharan heritage was also evident in uniparental markers.

Conclusions/Significance

Italy shows patterns of molecular variation mirroring other European countries, although some heterogeneity exists based on different analysis and molecular markers. From North to South, Italy shows clinal patterns that were most likely modulated during Neolithic times.

Link

Talk by Christina Papageorgopoulou on Mesolithic/Neolithic Greek DNA

The talk is in Greek but the slides are mostly in English. This is related to the BEAN Project which I have covered before in this blog.

She discusses various aspects of DNA preservation (poorer than Central Europe/Siberia due to higher temperature, and potentially because non-freshly excavated samples were tested) which appears to be variable across sites.

A screenshot of haplogroups detected so far (X, K, J, H, T). Interestingly, the X haplogroup only comes from Franchthi cave, although Dr. Papageorgopoulou cautions against very simple interpretations of this fact.

She mentions a complete absence of haplogroup U in all her samples so far (either Mesolithic or Neolithic), in contrast to Central European Mesolithic samples where it predominates.

Fst values between Greek Mesolithic/Neolithic samples and Central European Mesolithic ones are high (~0.2), but with Linearbandkeramik they are very low (0.03-0.05).

I'm looking forward to the first publication of these important results, and hopefully they will be soon supplemented with results from Bulgaria and Anatolia that are also to be studied as part of the BEAN Project.

Armenians as Phrygian colonists, or, rolloff analysis of Armenians as a mixture of Sardinians+Balochi

I analyze the Yunusbayev et al. Armenians_Y sample in a similar manner as the South Indian Brahmins. The 30 lowest f3 statistics are:

Sardinian Velamas_M Armenians_15_Y -0.00349 0.000264 -13.23 239451
Sardinian Piramalai_Kallars_M Armenians_15_Y -0.003213 0.00028 -11.484 239389
Sardinian GIH30 Armenians_15_Y -0.002983 0.00023 -12.986 241310
Balochi Sardinian Armenians_15_Y -0.002837 0.000193 -14.681 241698
Sardinian Sindhi Armenians_15_Y -0.002794 0.000203 -13.757 241928
Sardinian Muslim_M Armenians_15_Y -0.002761 0.000295 -9.351 238639
Indian_D Sardinian Armenians_15_Y -0.002743 0.000224 -12.226 241916
Sardinian Kanjars_M Armenians_15_Y -0.002727 0.000281 -9.722 239240
Iyer_D Sardinian Armenians_15_Y -0.002718 0.000263 -10.322 238943
Brahui Sardinian Armenians_15_Y -0.002715 0.000196 -13.882 241885
Sardinian Dusadh_M Armenians_15_Y -0.002666 0.000281 -9.502 238994
Sardinian INS30 Armenians_15_Y -0.00265 0.000237 -11.162 240965
Iyengar_D Sardinian Armenians_15_Y -0.002624 0.000297 -8.847 238564
Sardinian Dharkars_M Armenians_15_Y -0.002501 0.000267 -9.359 239505
Sardinian North_Kannadi Armenians_15_Y -0.002463 0.000288 -8.545 239278
Sardinian Chamar_M Armenians_15_Y -0.002445 0.000275 -8.904 240102
Sardinian Kshatriya_M Armenians_15_Y -0.002372 0.000267 -8.897 239047
Pathan Sardinian Armenians_15_Y -0.00224 0.000199 -11.264 241759
Sardinian Brahmins_from_Uttar_Pradesh_M Armenians_15_Y -0.002189 0.00025 -8.774 239395
Jatt_D Sardinian Armenians_15_Y -0.001806 0.000273 -6.608 238465
Cypriots Kanjars_M Armenians_15_Y -0.001699 0.00026 -6.547 238237
Cypriots Velamas_M Armenians_15_Y -0.001642 0.000275 -5.965 238392
Cypriots Muslim_M Armenians_15_Y -0.001618 0.000279 -5.798 237762
Cypriots Dusadh_M Armenians_15_Y -0.001611 0.000279 -5.779 238096
GIH30 Cypriots Armenians_15_Y -0.001608 0.000223 -7.216 239819
Iyer_D Cypriots Armenians_15_Y -0.001562 0.000251 -6.217 238012
Sindhi Cypriots Armenians_15_Y -0.001544 0.000209 -7.383 240276
Cypriots North_Kannadi Armenians_15_Y -0.001464 0.000276 -5.298 238273
Cypriots Kshatriya_M Armenians_15_Y -0.001438 0.00026 -5.534 238076

I carried out rolloff analysis using the Balochi and Sardinians as references, for a total of 510,844 SNPs. Note that the Burusho were not used in this experiment, because they were culled due to more than 5% East Eurasian admixture, as per the followed procedure. 

The Balochi are very similar to the Burusho otherwise, and this also gives me the opportunity to see a Sardinian+Balochi population pair to complement a previous analysis of French as Sardinian+Burusho, which presented an f3 signal of quite similar intensity. The exponential fit is seen below.

The jackknife gives an age estimate of 113.194 +/- 14.674 generations, or 3,280 +/- 430 years, assuming a generation length of 29 years.

I had somewhat expected the Armenians to show a more recent signal of admixture than the French, as they lived much closer to the boundary of Europe and Asia, and may have had more opportunity to admix between Sardinian-like populations of Europe and "West Asian"-like populations of Asia.

But, the inferred date also raises another possibility. Herodotus says of the Armenians who were part of the army of King Xerxes:

the Armenians were equipped like Phrygians, being Phrygian colonists" (7.73)

Now, the Phrygians became masters of Central Anatolia during the tumultuous events near the end of the Bronze Age (12th century BC), following the collapse of the Hittite Empire. And, their ancestral homeland was in Thrace. And, there is fairly good evidence that Armenian is the closest language related to Greek within the Indo-European language family. And, we have some tantalising evidence that even during the Iron Age, the population of Thrace was Sardinian-like. And, the Armenians do contrast with their Caucasian neighbors in possessing ~10% of the Sardinian-like Atlantic_Med component that South and Northeast Caucasians lack.

All of the above combine to make a pretty compelling story. Could it be that Armenians preserve a legacy of admixture between a linguistically Indo-European speaking, genetically Sardinian-like population, which arrived in Asia Minor from the Balkans at the end of the Bronze Age, finally settling in the Armenian Highlands, and mixing with the local people they encountered?

The plot thickens. And, this is, certainly, a question that can be answered by ancient DNA research, e.g., by comparing the genomes of historical Phrygians and Armenians with those from Hittite-era, or earlier Anatolians.

rolloff analysis of North European admixture in Greeks.

One of the signals of admixture in my recent post on the Greeks on the crossroads of Eurasia was between north European and Near Eastern populations, with several pairs of such populations showing a significant negative f3(Greek_D; North European, Near Eastern) statistic. I used rolloff to estimate the date of this admixture.

Note that rolloff assumes a pulse model of admixture, whereby the two populations mix at a point in time, rather than experience gene flow over a protracted period. This may not be applicable in the case of Greeks, since gene flow may have occurred repeatedly throughout history. Also, rolloff estimates admixture times in the absence of very accurate ancestral populations, by exploiting allele frequency differences between them. So, for the first example below, with Finnish_D and Yemen_Jews as reference populations, which showed the most negative f3 statistic, this does not mean that Greeks are the product of admixture between Finns and Yemen Jews, but rather that allele frequency differences between these two populations reflect a contrast between North Europeans and Near Eastern populations, which may, presumably map, to the west Eurasian cline of diminishing Near Eastern "Neolithic" ancestry.

This experiment was performed on a set of 292,223 SNPs, and using the Rutgers map for Illumina chips. The first plot is using Finnish_D and Yemen_Jews as references. The fit does not visually appear extremely convincing, perhaps due to a smaller number of SNPs, or to the aforementioned deviation from the pulse admixture model.

(NB: I used the expfit.sh script with default parameters to do the exponential fit/plotting; note that negative weighted correlation points are not visible in the produced output)

The jackknife estimate of this admixture is 87.849 +/- 20.254 generations, or, assuming a generation length of 29 years, into 2,550 +/- 590 years.

The second plot uses Polish_D and Saudis as references:

The jackknife gives 67.235 +/- 22.148 generations, or 1950 +/- 640 years. The fit seems to capture the rise of the exponential for smaller cM genetic distances reasonably well.

Recently, Graham and Coop used fastIBD to identify a signal of possible Slavic admixture in the Balkans dating to the medieval period, using a similar generation time of 30 years. That method uses shared IBD segments between populations, so it may be limited to uncovering the most recent signal of admixture. Another piece of evidence comes from an abstract in ASHG 2012, according to which an Iron Age individual from Bulgaria was Sardinian-like. Since the Iron Age starts at the conclusion of the 2nd millennium BC, it might seem that a northern European element -whether present or not- had not admixed yet with the people who lived in the Balkans at the time. This seems to parallel the situation in two other earlier locations (c. 5ka in the Tyrolean Iceman and Gok4 Swedish TRB farmer), in which the North_European component was absent, although we cannot yet exclude its absence from the Iron Age Bulgarian, since a little such admixture might still leave an individual mostly Sardinian-like. Finally, levels of the North_European component in Greek individuals seem fairly variable, and this might indicate that levels of this element of ancestry had not had sufficient time to even out in the population.

(A different possibility is that the admixture signal reflects admixture of a Near Eastern kind. I consider this less likely, since there is evidence of "Southern" and "Southwest Asian" ancestry (in the K7b/K12b sense) already in Neolithic Europe.)

More research on the issue is certainly needed, but a first reading of the evidence suggests that this type of admixture may reflect events that took place during the historical period of Greek history.

Each of these experiments took about 1.5 days to complete. I am currently running another set of experiments with ~2-fold more SNPs, and assuming that finishes in good time, I may re-visit the question addressed in this post, to see if standard errors decrease and/or time estimates change with denser coverage.