Post- Neolithic ancestry in S. Europe

[Andrea]

Hi Artemisia,

Yes Zagora means something like "beyond the mountines". It comes from "Iza" or "zad" = beyond, over, behind and "gora" = mountain, high hills.

[Andrea]

Hi Scord,

Hi Andrea, do you have anything on Serbs and Montenegrins?

Yes I have (an information from the above mentioned study).

Only Serbs are mentioned and they are closest to the Aromanians living in Romania (taxonomic distance = 32).

[Artemisia]

Andrea said:

Hi Artemisia,

Yes Zagora means something like "beyond the mountines". It comes from "Iza" or "zad" = beyond, over, behind and "gora" = mountain, high hills.

Andrea, are you a Yugoslav living in the US? And are you a scholar of anthropology/history/sociology or any other related field? It's nice to have people and scholars who know a lot about their places of origin. In fact, I believe that native scholars can be more helpful when it comes to information about their own places of origin than foreigners can. For example, I am Greek and there are many more things I can tell you about ancient/modern Greece than scholars who are foreign. I believe that the best anthropologists/scholars are those who study their own territories. Even if, for example, I spent my whole life studying, say, Norway, a native Norwegian anthropologist would certainly have more to say about his country than I would. Do you agree?

[Dean]

Artemisia said:

It's nice to have people and scholars who know a lot about their places of origin. In fact, I believe that native scholars can be more helpful when it comes to information about their own places of origin than foreigners can. For example, I am Greek and there are many more things I can tell you about ancient/modern Greece than scholars who are foreign. I believe that the best anthropologists/scholars are those who study their own territories.

While I am neither an anthropologist nor a scholar and was born in the U.S., I'm doing my best to study the area of my ancestry in Greece: central Peloponnese. This area also has a tangled history, with invasions of Slavs, Franks, Albanians, Venetians, Ottomans, etc. The towns in the area not only have partial or total Slavic names, they also had Turkish names. There is no genetic study of which I am aware for the Peloponnesian interior. I feel that with the genetic tests I have taken--possible Y DNA Haplogroup I and the "Most Likely Estimate" of 98% Indo-European and 2% East Asian--I am single-handedly providing information for this area. This is something about which I have mixed feelings--frustration and hope.

What are the origins of central Peloponnesians? What are some of the key population groups that contributed to their genes? There is a trace of Vlach in this area, with the Vlahos surname and the town of Vlahokerasia. There is blondness here that could be attributed to central and northern Europeans. There are olive-skinned types that could be attributed to a southern Greek type found in Mani, Crete and Cyprus. There could also be some post-Neolithic gene flow from Anatolia, southwest Asia or southern Italy. I look forward to the day a genetic test will be available that will with a reasonable degree of confidence and proper interpretation be able to show us population subtypes.

[Andrea]

Hi, Artemisia,

Evharisto for the questions.

I am a Slovenian living in Austria in a part which was once upon a time also Slovenia (Koroshka if that name means anything to you). After the desintegration of the Habsburg Empire, it was given to Austria. Now the majority of inhabitants of Koroshka are of Slovenian ancestry but they are bilingual and a serious part of the population forgets the Slovenian language.

Yes I am a scholar, but in the field of Kinesiology (a science of human movements), however I read books on linguistics, history and archaeology a lot.

Concerning the domestic vs. foreign scholarship (under scholarship I understand the Human sciences) I think that it has to be unbiased (as any other science). However, the problem with Human sciences arises because the facts on which a conclusion has to be infered are not arguments by themselfs. They have to be interpreted in some larger context, which is yet unknown or partial. That context dependence is why archaeology or history for instance are not physics or chemistry. There the problem arises. The interpretation depends on how our mind is structured during our life (school, talks with our friends and colleagues...etc). It depends, I shall say, strongly, even on our emotional attitudes towards the conclusions that are about to be infered, which again depend on the social context in which we lived and learned.
Because of that, I think, the domestic scholarship is sometimes subject to missinterpretations (I do not say that it is always a missinterpretation). Very often, political currents are involved in it, as well as emotional attitudes towards some cultures. That is the danger of the process of forming conclusions in humanities.

Another point is how are historical, linguistic and other knowledges presented to the pupils and students. My opinion is that, if there are more explanations (concurent models) on some subject than all of them have to be mentioned and presented to them, not just one which is sometimes erroneously named as "mainstream" explanation. Even I think that the textbooks have to be yearly (or several times in a decade) updated on every topic, because we are withnessing fundamental paradigmathic changes in some areas of humanities.