Ancient DNA analysis reveals Minoan and Mycenaean origins

[rangerrebew]

Ancient DNA analysis reveals Minoan and Mycenaean origins
August 2, 2017

The Minoans were a literate Bronze Age civilization that flourished thousands of years ago (one woman shown dancing, in a fresco fragment that dates from 1600-1450 BCE). Credit: Wikipedia/Photo by Wolfgang Sauber is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0

An analysis of ancient DNA has revealed that Ancient Minoans and Mycenaens were genetically similar with both peoples descending from early Neolithic farmers.

They likely migrated from Anatolia to Greece and Crete thousands of years prior to the Bronze Age. Modern Greeks, in turn, are largely descendants of the Mycenaeans, the study found.


Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-08-civilizations-greece-revealing-stories-science.html#jCp

[SunkenCiv]

There's not much there, here.  The Minoans (the modern name) were in Greece and Anatolia, as well as the Aegean Islands, and based on place names, were also all over Cyprus, the Balkans and Italy, right up into the northern end of the Adriatic.  The Mycenaeans were culturally different -- how else are the remains from which the DNA was extracted differentiated? -- and archaeologically supplanted the Minoans, and their Linear B writing -- which was used to record Greek, and had already been associated with the Mycenaeans since it was first deciphered -- was based on the Linear A, which has yet to be deciphered in any way acceptable to a consensus of scholars.  It's not a stretch to assume that the conquerors absorbed / merged with the conquered, and spoken Greek won out:

[snip] The researchers analyzed tooth DNA from the remains of 19 ancient individuals who could be definitively identified by archaeological evidence as Minoans of Crete, Mycenaeans of mainland Greece, and people who lived in southwestern Anatolia... They compared the Minoan and Mycenaean genomes to each other and to more than 330 other ancient genomes and over 2,600 genomes of present-day humans from around the world... "Minoans, Mycenaeans, and modern Greeks also had some ancestry related to the ancient people of the Caucasus, Armenia, and Iran. This finding suggests that some migration occurred in the Aegean and southwestern Anatolia from further east after the time of the earliest farmers," said Lazaridis... Mycenaeans traced an additional minor component of their ancestry to ancient inhabitants of Eastern Europe and northern Eurasia... In broad strokes, the new study shows that there was genetic continuity in the Aegean from the time of the first farmers to present-day Greece, but not in isolation. The peoples of the Greek mainland had some admixture with Ancient North Eurasians and peoples of the Eastern European steppe both before and after the time of the Minoans and Mycenaeans, which may provide the missing link between Greek speakers and their linguistic relatives elsewhere in Europe and Asia. [/snip]