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Post by Artemidoros on Jan 18, 2004 14:02:23 GMT -5
I posted the passage pasted below in Alex's forum and more recently Trog/Keltia's forum as a response to her technical/"scientific" advisor Anon/White Racialist/Refuting Racial Myths posting extracts from the relevant study of Richards et al. The only response was that I was not a geneticist so what I say does not count. When I answered appropriately the forum owner disappeared for a week and after I posted a link to that discussion in this forum, the short lived and ill-fated board was deleted by the owner. I am not posting this claiming I am right. I am only claiming Richards can not be right. Hopefully we can have a fruitful debate here. I was recently browsing Alex’s site www.geocities.com/refuting_kemp/anon_european_admix.htmlwhen I noticed this extract from Anon’s one (now dead and expected to be resurrected under a new name) Note: "Neolithic" markers (HG9 and HG21) in Central and Northern Europe are probably genuinely Neolithic. The same can't necessarily be said in Greece, Portugal, southern Spain, or southern Italy, where more recent gene flow is likely indicated (Richards et al. 2002)"
Alex’s refutation is strong but only deals with the Iberian peninsula. I wanted to see for myself what exactly has been “discovered” in the rest of southern Europe so I followed Alex’s link to the study In Search of Geographical Patterns in European Mitochondrial DNA by Richards et al. www.journals.uchicago.edu/AJHG/journal/issues/v71n5/024085/024085.html (1) I found out that the study has to a great extent based its conclusions on an older study, titled Tracing European Founder Lineages in the Near Eastern mtDNA Pool by Richards et al. www.journals.uchicago.edu/AJHG/journal/issues/v67n5/001799/001799.htmlthe results of which indicate that a significant portion of the maternal ancestry in European populations reflects Post-Neolithic population movements. Nothing to do with HG9 and HG21 (which are Y-chromosome haplogroups) as Anon claims. (2) The data from an earlier study by Semino et al. on Y-chromosomes are re-analyzed using the same methods as Richards et al. The results are broadly similar to Semino’s.This, Richards uses to support his own mth-DNA findings. (3) The third “fact” Richards’ conclusions are based on, is that Archaeological evidence (or rather lack of it) does not support the expansion of agriculture along the Mediterranean coastline. Therefore Neolithic farmers had not moved to S. Europe in substantial numbers and any Near/Middle Eastern ancestry might be more recent for the biggest part. Based on (1), (2) and (3) he proposes (as a possibility only) that the biggest part of south European ancestry assigned to Neolithic expansion is actually post-Neolithic. He also implies that this expansion is Near Eastern in origin (in the case of Iberia N. African). A) Let’s start from (3). There is clear evidence of an agricultural expansion along the Mediterranean coast. “The Two Routes to Central European Agriculture It is currently accepted that agriculture reached Central and Western Europe by two routes. One agricultural movement from the Near East followed the Mediterranean and is thought to be traceable by a Cardial-Impressed pottery. Reaching the Mediterranean Coast of Italy and France a northward progress from these pottery using groups unfolded around 6000-5600 cal BC.[7] Starting around 5500 cal BC, bone-tempered pottery known as La Hoguette, named after a site in western France, appears along with Mesolithic-like stone tools and sheep-goat bones in the Rhône valley, Northern France, Switzerland and Southwest Germany (e.g. Jochim 2000:192-193). Although the pottery is linked to the Mediterranean Neolithic, the stone tools reveal a continued Mesolithic tradition.”
The extract is from www.comp-archaeology.org/AgricultureOrigins.htmTherefore Middle/Near Eastern Y-chromosomes & mth-DNA in S. Europe can be mostly Neolithic.
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Post by Artemidoros on Jan 18, 2004 14:08:43 GMT -5
B) Piece of scaffolding number (2). Richards’ results are broadly similar with Semino’s. They show nothing new. Therefore they can support the rival theory as well as Richards’. They simply point to an expansion from the Near East. They do not indicate when the expansion took place. C) Having a look at the older study – piece of scaffolding (1) www.journals.uchicago.edu/AJHG/journal/issues/v67n5/001799/001799.html I could not help noticing that the E. Mediterranean sample consisted of “eastern Mediterranean-65 Greeks from Thessaloniki, 60 Sarakatsani from northern Greece, and 42 Albanians (Belledi et al. 2000);”
The Sarakatsani are a Greek speaking group of nomadic pastoralists, who roamed the southern and central Balkans, until the formation of modern state borders put some limits to their wanderings. They mostly live in Greece but as many as 10,000 of them have settled in central Bulgaria and some in the FYRO Macedonia. As far as I know, a relatively small (possibly very small in the past) and genetically isolated population like the Sarakatsani tends to show “drift” in the Y-chromosomes and mth-DNA. They are an interesting population but not a representative sample of eastern Mediterranean. Thessaloniki was perhaps Europe’s most cosmopolitan city until the beginning of the 20th century. The biggest ethnic group of the city, were Shephardic Jews! The founder of modern Turkey, Mustapha Kemal Ataturk was born there. After two population exchanges, between Greece and Bulgaria and between Greece and Turkey, the Greeks became the biggest ethnic group. The Jewish community was almost completely exterminated by the Nazis in WW2. Since the 1920s, a very big part of Thessaloniki’s population consists of refugees from Turkey. Pontic, Cappadocian and Ionian Greeks. Does a random sample from a city with such history inspire confidence in the study? Even if people with ancestry amongst the 20th century refugees were excluded, would there not be an increased chance of Jewish ancestry, to give one example? “central Mediterranean-49 Italians from Tuscany (Francalacci et al. 1996; Torroni et al. 1998) and 48 from Rome, 90 Sicilians (42 from Troina and 48 from Trapani), and 115 Sardinians, including 69 from the study by Di Rienzo and Wilson (1991);”
More than 1/3 of the Italian sample is Sardinian. It is well known that Sardinians have genetic characteristics that set them apart not only from Italy but from the whole of Europe as well! It is obvious that the study’s needs for a large sample and a lack of resources have produced a substantial compromise. Data from an assortment of studies with completely different targets were pooled together in order to produce a sufficiently large sample. Is the compromise big enough to completely invalidate the study’s conclusions? Not necessarily in my opinion and as far as the earlier study Tracing European Founder Lineages in the Near Eastern mtDNA Pool is concerned. But when largely the same sample is used In Search of Geographical Patterns in European Mitochondrial DNA then it is evidently unsuitable, at least for the central Mediterranean region, since it is unrepresentative. The samples from the eastern Mediterranean are not the best possible either. Although they may give some indications, they may equally well be misleading.
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Post by Artemidoros on Jan 18, 2004 14:26:28 GMT -5
In the study Richards includes this regional table. www.journals.uchicago.edu/AJHG/journal/issues/v67n5/001799/001799.tb5.html It is not clear to me whether in this table, what is called Bronze Age/recent migration is supposed to represent 1) exclusively migration from the Middle/Near East, or 2) it includes migration from within Europe. If it is 1), then I would have to question the validity of Richards elaborate methods, even though I am not in the slightest qualified to judge them. For how can anyone imagine uniform settlement of Middle Easterners all over Europe, between 5% and 9%? No gradients, no clines. Did the migrants parachute to their destinations? Can any of you imagine a Hittite invasion or colonization of Scandinavia that would have contributed 7.4% of the maternal ancestry of today’s Swedes? Or is it more recent? Did the Phoenicians have trading posts in Norway? What about areas well away from possible ancient trade routes? On a side note I would like to add that according to this table Scandinavia and north-central Europe (Anon’s ancestral territories) have higher percentages of the cursed “recent” migration than central or western Mediterranean. For the sake of Richards’ methods I have to assume number 2). In this case the 19.5% of post-Neolithic gene flow in eastern Mediterranean is probably mostly from the north and central Balkans, not Anatolia. I am not saying there was no recent migration from Anatolia. There must have been at least some. The question is in which direction did the main flow move. The fact that Near/Middle Eastern lineages were involved is not proof of the direction. Central and northern Balkans must have had a higher ratio of Neolithic/ Paleolithic ancestry than now. It was the primary area of Neolithic expansion. An area that had previously supported a number of hunter-gatherers could have supported many times that number of farmers. Subsequent invasions and settlement right up to the southward movement of Slavic tribes have reduced the Near Eastern component to today’s figures. We have to take archaeological and historical evidence into account if it exists, don’t we? All the evidence is stacked on Europeans back-migrating to Anatolia from at least the Bronze Age onwards. It is actually in correlation with Richards’ own findings of back-migration from Europe towards the Near East. “In fact, the historical evidence for gene flow between Europe and the Near East provides strong grounds for assuming that there is at least some back-migration from Europe across the Bosporus or, farther east, across the Caucasus into the Near East throughout the past 10,000 years. Candidates include the Philistine migrations from the Aegean into the Levant during the Bronze Age (Kuhrt 1995; Tubb 1998); the expansion of Greek, Phrygian, and Armenian speakers into western Anatolia, central Anatolia, and Armenia, respectively, 1,200 B.C.”
And also “We estimate that 10%-20% of extant Near Eastern lineages have a European ancestry, although this estimate falls to 6%-8% for the core zone of the Fertile Crescent.”<br>This is funny! Even the percentages match. 19.5% (or the biggest part of it) when the Greeks moved south into Greece, 10%-20% when the Greeks and their Balkan relatives moved southeast into Anatolia! Actually no. My estimate is that the back-migrants represented a much larger percentage of Anatolia’s population, regardless of what type of genetic markers they carried. To explain this, see how Richards estimates back-migration: He uses markers of European derivation. Say, marker “EX” is found in 20% of Europeans and 2% of Anatolians in a sample. So EX represents 1/5 of back-migrants. He multiplies the 2% of EX Anatolians by 5 and gets a result of 10% genetic contribution of the back-migrants in Anatolia. What he does not consider is that the source of back-migrants was not Europe as a whole, it was primarily the Balkans. Based on what I said earlier, the Balkans would have had much less EX than the European average, say 10% or 1/10 of the population. Richards should have multiplied 2% by 10 and got a result twice the size. (I am not actually suggesting any figures, this was only a crude example). The value of the correct estimation of back-migration I can not quantify but Richards himself assigns great importance to. “It emphasizes the importance of taking back-migration from Europe into account when colonization times are estimated by founder analysis”
And “Recurrent gene flow would raise the number of matches between the two regions and would reduce the estimated divergence times.”<br>Should I take this to mean “a Neolithic migration may appear as post-Neolithic” if we underestimate the extent of back-migration? Because in my opinion this is exactly what Richards has done. Another issue is the “founder effect”. “ Several features of worldwide mtDNA diversity patterns imply support for strong founder effects during colonization for example, during the late-Pleistocene movement of anatomically modern humans out of Africa (Watson et al. 1997; Quintana-Murci et al. 1999) and during the colonization of Oceania from Indonesia (Redd et al. 1995; Sykes et al. 1995; Richards et al. 1998b).”<br>I don’t think Richards has taken this sufficiently into account. He simply elbows aside colonization along the coast as unimportant. It did happen though and as it was “linear” in the form of its expansion, it would have been more prone to “founder effects”. Small groups would have disembarked at suitable locations and settled. While the group was still small they would have come into contact with local hunter-gatherers and mixed. As a result of founder effect their original maternal lines would be reduced or could altogether disappear and be replaced with hunter-gatherer ones. These ultimately successful groups would grow and have a significant impact in some regions. I mentioned all that in support of my conclusion that you might use the most advanced methods, yet get results that do not reflect genetic history. I think the study is way off the mark, where southern Europe is concerned. Even in the rest of the continent I can only discern meaningful patterns if Neolithic and “recent” ancestry are added together. I can not accept that the region with the highest Neolithic ancestry is northwest Europe. Of course there were population movements in the past 6,000 years. People did not halt and wait for trains to be invented. Where from, to where or when is not easy to answer and computer simulations will not give correct results if other conditions are not met.
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Prove
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Post by Prove on Jan 18, 2004 23:27:42 GMT -5
Great post and effort Artimidoros. I haven't had the chance to look at all of it in-depth as it's getting close to my bedtime...I only wish I had found it earlier. Rest assurred, I will be all over it tomorrow. Incidentally, I had also found a genetic study on Italy from a mtDNA perspective (albeit it is rather old...1995... ). But the results would be enough to crush the feelings of a certain Saracen that we all know and love.
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Post by Artemidoros on Jan 19, 2004 17:40:53 GMT -5
Tony might console himself with being right (perhaps) about Sciacca. "Annals of Human Genetics Volume 67 Issue 1 Page 42 - January 2003 doi:10.1046/j.1469-1809.2003.00007.x Autosomal Microsatellite and mtDNA Genetic Analysis in Sicily (Italy) V. Romano1,a, F. Calì2, A. Ragalmuto2, R. P. D'Anna1,a, A. Flugy1,a, G. De Leo1,a, O. Giambalvo3, A. Lisa7, O. Fiorani7, C. Di Gaetano5, A. Salerno1,b4, R. Tamouza6, D. Charron6, G. Zei7, G. Matullo5 and A. Piazza5,* Summary DNA samples from 465 blood donors living in 7 towns of Sicily, the largest island of Italy, have been collected according to well defined criteria, and their genetic heterogeneity tested on the basis of 9 autosomal microsatellite and mitochondrial DNA polymorphisms for a total of 85 microsatellite allele and 10 mtDNA haplogroup frequencies. A preliminary account of the results shows that: a) the samples are genetically heterogeneous; b) the first principal coordinates of the samples are correlated more with their longitude than with their latitude, and this result is even more remarkable when one outlier sample (Butera) is not considered; c) distances among samples calculated from allele and haplogroup frequencies and from the isonymy matrix are weakly correlated (r = 0.43, P = 0.06) but such correlation disappears (r = 0.16) if the mtDNA haplogroups alone are taken into account; d) mtDNA haplogroups and microsatellite distances suggest settlements of people occurred at different times: divergence times inferred from microsatellite data seem to describe a genetic composition of the town of Sciacca mainly derived from settlements after the Roman conquest of Sicily (First Punic war, 246 BC), while all other divergence times take root from the second to the first millennium BC, and therefore seem to backdate to the pre-Hellenistic period. A more reliable association of these diachronic genetic strata to different historical populations (e.g. Sicani, Elymi, Siculi), if possible, must be postponed to the analysis of more samples and hopefully more informative uniparental DNA markers such as the recently available DHPLC-SNP polymorphisms of the Y chromosome." www.blackwell-synergy.com/links/doi/10.1046/j.1469-1809.2003.00007.x/abs
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Andrea
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Post by Andrea on Jan 29, 2004 5:25:48 GMT -5
Hi Artemidoros,
With respect to your post above I have the following short comment:
You are right in pointing out that the sample taken from Northern Greece is actually a biased statistical sample and not a random one. I don't say that it was deliberately taken as such.
If we analyze the Table 5 of Richards et al. 2000 paper we can see that only Northern Greece (classified as Eastern Mediterranean) has so large post - Neolithic (recent) contribution of roughly 20 %. The neighbouring Bulgaria and Romania (classified as South - Eastern Europe) have drastically smaller percent of post - Neolithic contribution (roughly 8%). So, one can say that there is some genetic barier between Northern Greece and the rest of the Balkans in a sense of the time of the genetic contribution.
I agree totally with you in a sense that the recent Middle Eastern contribution in Northern Greece is actually of a very, very recent date (after the Balkan wars and especially after the Asia Minor catastrophe in 1920 - ties) when a large population wave of Asia Minor Greeks (more than 600 000) settled in northern Greece after the exchange of the Slavic speaking population (Slavophone Macedonians) with Bulgaria and to a lesser degree Serbia where they settled in the part which is now R. Macedonia.
This event, as you say, can really explain why the post-Neolithic, Middle Eastern contribution is so strong (19.5%) in Northern Greece and falls to mere 8.2 % in Bulgaria and Romania.
In that sense the Richards et al. model can be considered as very accurate. Taking into account only the mathematical formalism of genetic dynamics it predicts the latest population movements of people in Northern Greece.
(Here I have to correct you about the Saracatsans. They are not a Greek speaking population, but a Vlach or Aromanian speaking population. Of course, they are bilinguals and those living in Greece speak Greek too. In Bulgaria they speak Aromanian and Bulgarian and in R. Macedonia they speak Aromanian and Macedonian).
On the other hand, the Semino et al. study, which is a Y-chromosome study ( graph 3) reveals that Macedonians from Northern Greece cluster with Checzs, Chroats....Ukrainians ...etc. These are not consistent results with the previous one.
So, either their methods are different or there is so much genetic diversity in Northern Greece that when speaking about those populations one has to mention precisely on what population is the study conducted.
All in all a very entangled situation.
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Post by Artemisia on Jan 29, 2004 11:50:22 GMT -5
(Here I have to correct you about the Saracatsans. They are not a Greek speaking population, but a Vlach or Aromanian speaking population. Of course, they are bilinguals and those living in Greece speak Greek too. In Bulgaria they speak Aromanian and Bulgarian and in R. Macedonia they speak Aromanian and Macedonian). The Saracatsans themselves say that they have nothing to do with the Vlachs. Although the do speak an Aromanian (Latin) dialect, it could be the case that they were not of the same Vlach tribes. Some recent work states that the Saracatsanoi in the Balkans could be the descendents of the Thracian population which became mostly Latinized. That does not surprise me. There are many people in northern Greece (especially Epirus and parts of Macedonia) who are of Vlach or Saracatsan ancestry. One only needs to look at the area around Ioannina and Zagorochoria (they still speak Aromanian) and you can see that many of these Vlachs do not blend in with the Greek population.
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skord
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Post by skord on Jan 29, 2004 11:57:47 GMT -5
Interesting. there's an area in northern Croatia/southern Slovenia called Zagorje-highlands.
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Andrea
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Post by Andrea on Jan 29, 2004 13:19:54 GMT -5
Artemisia, you are correct. Here I have a genetic study (with classical markers) conducted by a German team in Bulgaria, Albania, Greece, R. Macedonia, Romania, Yugoslavia and Croatia (Istria). The target groups were Aromanians (populations speaking Aromanian language) and dominant populations in those countries.
What is interesting is that Aromanians, taken as a linguistic group show much less intra-group genetic simmilarity than for instance the simmilarity between the Gramostian and Pindoan Aromanians (Greece) and Macedonians (taxonomic distances = 21 - 28). Moskopolian Aromanians (Krushevo - R. Macedonia), Frasheriot Aromanians (living in Albania), Romanian and Istrian Aromanians are much more distant from those above mentioned (taxonomic distances = 38 -57).
This results might be a sign of different Balkan populations which were romanized, but also a sign of romanized collonists from all over Europe during the Roman times.
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Andrea
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Post by Andrea on Jan 29, 2004 13:24:32 GMT -5
Yes Skord, also there is Zagora in Thessaly, Stara Zagora in Bulgaria, Zagora in Paflagonia....those are Slavic toponyms.
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skord
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Post by skord on Jan 29, 2004 13:30:06 GMT -5
Artemisia, you are correct. Here I have a genetic study (with classical markers) conducted by a German team in Bulgaria, Albania, Greece, R. Macedonia, Romania, Yugoslavia and Croatia (Istria). The target groups were Aromanians (populations speaking Aromanian language) and dominant populations in those countries. What is interesting is that Aromanians, taken as a linguistic group show much less intra-group genetic simmilarity than for instance the simmilarity between the Gramostian and Pindoan Aromanians (Greece) and Macedonians (taxonomic distances = 21 - 28). Moskopolian Aromanians (Krushevo - R. Macedonia), Frasheriot Aromanians (living in Albania), Romanian and Istrian Aromanians are much more distant from those above mentioned (taxonomic distances = 38 -57). This results might be a sign of different Balkan populations which were romanized, but also a sign of romanized collonists during the Roman times. Hi Andrea, do you have anything on Serbs and Montenegrins?
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Post by Artemisia on Jan 29, 2004 15:41:51 GMT -5
Interesting. there's an area in northern Croatia/southern Slovenia called Zagorje-highlands. Yeah, it's one of those Slavic toponyms. There is Zagorochoria (choria means villages in Greek) in Greece and Zagorie in Albania. Does "Zagoria" mean "behing the mountain" or something like that? The people living in Zagorochoria today are actually Aromanic-speaking Vlachs rather than Slavs but the place-name is indeed Slavic.
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Post by Artemidoros on Jan 29, 2004 16:21:01 GMT -5
Hi Andrea, thanks for your reply. The Sarakatsani are actually monolingual. They only speak Greek. They are the only genuine European nomads and should not be confused with the mostly semi-nomadic Romance speaking Vlachs. "In continental Greece north of Corinth the observant traveller is soon aware of communities of Greek-speaking transhumant shepherds know as Sarakatsani...Greek villagers generally refer to the Sarakatsani simply as Vlachs, that is sheppherds who, in step with the rhythm of the seasons, lead their animals alternately down to the plains and up to the mountains. The occupational reference of the word, Vlach, is an old one, already in use during the Byzantine period. But it may also be used, in its original and more specific sense, to describe Koutsovlachs, an ethnic minority group speaking a romance language akin to Rumanian, or the related groups of Albanian Vlachs who are trilingual, speaking the Koutsovlach language as their mother tongue and greek and Albanian for political and commercial reasons. These different connotations of the word, Vlach, have led to some confusion, which has been all the greater because many Koutsovlachs lead a transhumant shepherd life, identical in its general outline with that of the Sarakatsani. To the unitiated eye they mayt appear to dress alike, to build the same type of thatched hut, and many of their communities graze their flocks in areas of the Pindus mountains neighbouring on those used by the Sarakatsani. The result has been that many nineteenth-century travellers, and even some Greek observers, failed to realize the existence of the Sarakatsani and imagined that all 'nomad' shepherds were Koutsovlachs. "But although many Koutsovlachs are transhumant shepherds, many are not. For instance, in the eastern half of the Zagori district in Epirus, the majority of the Koutsovlach villagers make their living from timber and agriculture. Probably since the sixteenth century a considerable number of Koutsovlachs have been established in their own villages in the high Pindus. They have pretensions to culture, and for generations sons of rich Koutsovlach families have been prepared for commerce, politics, and the professions. In these respects the Koutsovlachs differ from the Albanian Vlachs who, in so far as they continue to be recognized as 'Albanian,' are generally concerned only with shepherding. Some of these Albanian Vlachs have grazing areas close to the Albanian frontier which until 1930 they were able to cross in their search for winter pastures." --J.K Campbell, Honour, Family and Patronage (NY, 1974) www.farsarotul.org/nl8_7.htmAccording to some they are pre-Neolithic. www.aee.gr/english/5sarakatsani/sarakatsani.htmlIf that is the case, it might be an explanation for the very low percentage of Neolithic ancestry in the sample. Do you know if the sample was Slav Macedonians, Greek Macedonians or Macedonians in general? The fact it is listed separately from the Greek sample is an indication they were Slavs but I am not sure. The population exchange of 1919 involved only Slavs from eastern Macedonia (about 80,000 who were swapped for 50,000 Bulgarian Greeks). Most of the ones from western Macedonia are still there, although many went to Yugoslavia as refugees at the end of the Greek Civil War. I have no info on the fate of the 10,000 or so Thessalonikan Slavs of the early 20th cen.
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Post by Artemidoros on Jan 29, 2004 16:31:20 GMT -5
Yeah, it's one of those Slavic toponyms. There is Zagorochoria (choria means villages in Greek) in Greece and Zagorie in Albania. Does "Zagoria" mean "behing the mountain" or something like that? The people living in Zagorochoria today are actually Aromanic-speaking Vlachs rather than Slavs but the place-name is indeed Slavic. I find it amazing that so many of the Vlach villages have Slavic names. Many have Greek names too. Metsovo is the Biggest Vlach Town in the Balkans. The Vlachs themselves call it Aminciu not Metsovo like the Greeks. Yet Metsovo is Slavic (Mecovo). I believe the Vlachs settled in areas previously settled by Slavs and assimilated them culturally and genetically. The Slavic name of the place probably survived amongst the neighbouring Greek speaking populations. BTW I have visited The Zagoria and Metsovo many times. Its one of my favourite parts of Greece.
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Andrea
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Post by Andrea on Jan 30, 2004 4:52:45 GMT -5
Hi Artemidoros,
Sorry, I don't have that information. In the study that target group is defined solely as Macedonians.
Yes, it could be an explanation. Actually what Richards et al. 2002 (p.1172) claim is that..." we seem to be withnessing, in the mt DNA data (and perhaps in the autosomal and Y chromosome data as well), the results of a palimpsest of processes, some possibly more recent than the Neolithic period and some much more ancient" .
So the percentage should be dispersed to some" possibly more recent" and some "much more ancient" processes. All in all it does not sound bad at all.
Now, the "possibly more recent processes" with respect to the Neolithic period could be processes that are much ancient as well. For instance, here is what the archaeologist Weinberg says on the Early Bronze age in Macedonia:
" with the opening of the Early Bronze Age about the begining of the third millenium BC, parts of Macedonia expirienced some disruption. Intrusions from the east penetrated the Emathian plain into its western parts, driving the inhabitants into the upper cantons. The general turmoil seems to have affected regions as far away as Pelagonia." (Weinberg, The stone age in the Aegean, p. 607).
So, there could be some additions of Near Eastern genes in this area even after the Neolithic.
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