New Evidence Supports Modern Greeks Having DNA of Ancient Mycenaeans

GreekReporter.com ^ | June 22, 2020 | Stavros Anastasiou

[SunkenCiv]

New emerging DNA evidence suggests that living Greeks are indeed descendants of the ancient Mycenaeans, who ruled mainland Greece and the Aegean Sea from 1,600 BC to 1,200 BC.

The proof comes from a study in which scientists analyzed the genes from the teeth of 19 people across various archaeological sites within mainland Greece and Mycenae. A total of 1.2 million letters of genetic code were compared to those of 334 people across the world.

Genetic information was also compiled from a group of thirty modern Greek individuals in order to compare it to the ancient genomes. This allowed researchers to effectively plot how individuals were related to one another.

One aspect that was revealed in the study was how the Mycenaeans themselves were closely related to the Minoan civilization, which flourished on the island of Crete from 2,000 BC to 1,400 BC.

Both cultures were shown to carry genes for brown hair and brown eyes, characteristics that are reflected on their frescoes and pottery, despite having different languages.

Fresco of a Mycenaean Woman depicted with dark hair and eyes.

According to Harvard population geneticist Iosif Lazaridis, any difference between the two civilizations suggests that a second wave of people came to mainland Greece from Eastern Europe, yet were unable to reach the island of Crete — and in time they became known as the Mycenaeans.

After comparing the DNA of modern Greeks to ancient Mycenaeans, a genetic overlap was discovered that suggests that these ancient Bronze Age civilizations laid the genetic groundwork for later peoples.

[SunkenCiv]

Some of the ash landed on Greenland and back in the 1980s someone calculated from Greenland ice cores that the ash dated to 1628 B.C. I think there is some quibbling about the exact date but definitely there was an eruption during the Bronze Age.

There's a topic about those Greenland ice cores, in short, there's no trace of Thera in there, the deposits are possibly from Aniakchak (erupted in Alaska). There's also no trace of a match for a mid-2nd millennium "super-eruption" in any of the other proxy sources. The Thera supereruption just simply didn't happen.

Even when, during the respective Thera Conferences, individual scientists had pointed out that the magnitude and significance of the Thera eruption must be estimated as less than previously thought, the conferences acted to strengthen the original hypothesis. The individual experts believed that the arguments advanced by their colleagues were sound, and that the facts of a natural catastrophe were not in doubt... All three factors reflect a fantasy world rather than cool detachment, which is why it so difficult to refute the theory with rational arguments.

Eberhard Zangger, "The Future of the Past: Archaeology in the 21st Century", pp 49-50.

[metesky]

You are a treasure, sir.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks metesky!