Post by Hellenas on Dec 4, 2010 8:32:42 GMT -5
Are the Greeks "still" Indo-European? Were they ever?
www.white-history.com/refuting_rm/7.html
Modern Greeks do not descend predominantly from Indo-Europeans. It is silly to talk about whether or not the Greeks are any longer Indo-European, since the people living within the geographic boundaries of Greece were at no time predominantly Indo-European by ancestry. However, the aristocracy of classical Greece would indeed have derived from Indo-Europeans.
Both ancient and modern Greeks have nothing to do with the imaginery "germanic-indo-europeans". The Greeks who came back to Greece after their extension to upper balkans, were of the same racial stock like the pelasgian Greeks, ancient Greek historians never said a word for the imaginery indo-europeans but they spoke of the "return of Heraclides", of Achaeans, Aeolians, Ionians and Dorians. The Aristocracy of the ancient Greeks for the most part was Mediterranean and Alpine not "nordic-barbarian".
Theories of origin of the Greeks:
The origins of mankind has always fascinated philosophers, scientists, and ordinary citizens. Specifically, the Greeks are interested to know the biological roots of our people in Europe. For the origin of the inhabitants of Greece have been three theories.
• The theory of Indo-European origin of the Greeks, based on linguistic analysis and comparisons with no archaeological or other evidence. Comparative linguists are the main supporters. Despite the wide dissemination, this theory is not based on solid sources, and must be rejected.
• The theory of indigenous, supported themselves by the ancient Greeks. The main exponent of this theory is Professor Colin Renfrew.
hellas2010.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=raceandanthropology&action=display&thread=2
John V. Day notes that:
Indo-Europeans often seem to have been small minorities in the countries they penetrated: the Celtic warrior-class in Ireland; the Roman patricians; the few Homeric heroes and the so-called pure Greeks; of later years; and the Aryans battling against the many natives in India.
The so-called pure Greeks were/are Mediterranean Greeks.
According to Peterson, the Greek aristocracy were seperated by caste-like stratification . . . from the freemen and slave classes among whom the genetic influence of the autochthonous 'Pelasgian' population may have predominated; (Peterson 1974).
There was no racial difference between the Greek aristocracy and the indigenous Pelasgians, both were for the most part Mediterranean/Alpine and was indigenous.
Also keep in mind, Greeks have 28% Near Eastern HG9 and 28% North African HG21. Much of this ancestry may date from the Neolithic, but it is curious that RM doesn't interpret this data to mean Greeks are 56% Hamito-Semitic and therefore very much less than pure European. As Day (2002) says: Genetically, Greek and Yugoslav populations are among the least typically 'European.
Greeks do not have much Near Eastern genes as well as North African genes that is abscent from Greece. All Europeans have some Near Eastern genes, so what? Greeks of course have nothing to do with hammito-semites or Near Easterns, the vast majority of the Greeks are pure Europeans.
hellas2010.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=raceandanthropology&action=display&thread=2&page=1
Update: In fact, new research is suggesting that much of the Neolithic ancestry in Greece represents gene flow from after the Neolithic.
You say so, prove it.
Greek Aristoi
Demosthenes (c. 386-322 B.C.) "distinguished orator and Athenian patriot of the wealthy landowning Attic deme of Paeania."
Mediterranean.
Alkaios (c. 620-595 B.C.) "a member of the Aeolic nobility."
Mediterranean-Alpine.
Xenophon (c. 430-354 B.C.) "the member of a minor aristocratic Athenian family."
Mediterranean-Alpine.
Thucydides (c. 460-400 B.C.), "Historian and general of noble Attic blood on his father's side and aristocratic Thracian blood through his mother."
Mediterranean.
Euripides (c. 480-406 B.C.) "scion of a Salamis landowning family." Euripides "had a fair and freckled complexion."
Mediterranean-Dinaric.
Socrates (c. 469-399 B.C.) Not a member of the aristocracy. Stone cutter son of a sculptor and a midwife. Middle class. Alpine racial type.
Alpine. The most intelligent Greek ever. The greatest man of classical Athens. A martyr of philosophy.
None of them is nordic.
Members of aristocratic families are vastly overrepresented among notable Greeks of the classical period. Thus, when discussing the racial type of ancient Greeks, it is important to consider the racial type of the aristocracy. From the point of view of physical anthropology the ethnic complexity of Greek society during the first millennium B.C. prohibits any attempt at a generalized statement of physical type based upon statistical averages of data derived from the available skeletal material. Substantial caste-like stratification, accompanied by relatively strict principles of caste endogamy separated the Indo-European-derived Eupatrids from the freemen and slave classes among whom the genetic influence of the autochthonous 'Pelasgian' population may have predominated. (Peterson 1974)
The racial type of indigenous Pelasgians, of Eupatrids, freemen and of slave classes was the same. The rest are your theories.
Peterson notes that IE languages eventually came to be spoken by racially and genetically diverse peoples, but he suggests: In the course of some five or six millennia of expansion and conquest, an expanding IE upper caste may undoubtedly have preserved a high degree of genetic continuity (Pearson, 1974), while simply superimposing itself upon the autochthonous populations. Those who brought Indo-European speech into the newly-colonized territories became a ruling warrior nobility, as testified by the connotation 'noble' for arya in India and Persia, ariothez, in Greece (hence our 'aristocracy') and aire among the Celtic peoples. Indeed, the evidence-indicates that to a greater or lesser extent the invading arya, art, or aire maintained strict principles of endogamy in the choice of their official wives, and although in many areas they appear to have made a disproportionately high contribution to the gene pool of the indigenous population through the practice of keeping large numbers of concubines, they differed from the Uralic and Semitic peoples in their refusal to grant the illegitimate offspring of such marriages the social status of the father. Thus so far as legitimate offspring were concerned, in aristocratic Greek society, as in most early historic I.E. societies, the strict endogamy of the conquering classes was evidenced by the admission that 'we choose our wives like we choose our horses: by the lengths of their pedigrees' — and the high respect in which the Greeks held their horses is well known!
Indo-europeans never came in Greece because they didn't existed and the Aristocracy was of the similar racial type as the rest of Greeks. There never was an imajinery nordic Aristocracy.
Probably what you call "Indo-Europeans" were the Greek-Aryans at the time when they occupied the Balkan peninsula(Haimos):
dienekes.awardspace.com/articles/ieorigins/
According to Peterson:
The fact that the immigrant Indo-Europeans had a clear-cut conception of what they regarded as their own distinctive and characteristic physiognomy — which would have been preserved and even accentuated by close inbreeding — is amply evidenced by Greek literature. Thus in the Odyssey (XII, 222) we undersland that the disguised Athena was described as being 'delicate ol countenance such as are the sons of kings', whereas in the Iliad (II, 216) Thersites, of autochthonous origin, is described as 'ill-formed and warped of head'. . . .
Keep using the imaginery poetry of Homeros for describing the Greeks as a race.
Coon mentions:
Villains, comical characters, satyrs, centaurs, giants, and all unpleasant people and those not to be admired, are often shown in sculpture and in vase painting as broad-faced, snub-nosed, and heavily bearded. Socrates, who belonged to this type, was maliciously compared to a satyr. This type may still be found its Greece, and is an ordinary Alpine. In the early skeletal, remains it is represented by some of the brachycephalic crania.
Socrates, son of a sculptor and a midwife, was not an aristocrat.
The fact that his physical type was scorned by the aristocracy suggests that aristocrats were not Alpines, certainly not unmixed Alpines. Coon also notes that:" The racial type to which Socrates belonged is today the most important; racial type in Greece.
Now you will compare Socrates to the classical Aristocracy? Who is more important, a simple Aristocrat or a Philosopher?
Peterson suggests:
The Greeks shown above and right, descendants of ancient aristocratic families, illustrate Indo-European features.
Mediterranean and Alpine-Mediterranean features for the most part. That is what illustrate.
Needless to say, today you're more likely to see people who resemble the above in England or Sweden than in Greece.
You are more likely to see people who resemble them among Greeks as well. Swedish people have nothing to do with Mediterraneans, as for England, some of them are Mediterraneans.
Coon affirms:
. . . one is impressed, after looking at the portrait busts of Athenians, and the clay masks of Spartans, with their resemblance to present-day western Europeans. This resemblance becomes less marked in the art of the Byzantines, however, where modern near Eastern faces are more frequent; but the Byzantines lived mostly outside of Greece.
That is a mistake of C.Coon, ancient Greeks for the most part were Mediterraneans, the Spaniards for an example who are western Europeans do not look like ancient Greeks(only the Atlanto-Mediterraneans of Spain who according to C.Coon came from Asia Minor). C.Coon said that because he was a western European and he wanted to connect ancient Athenians and Spartans to western Europeans for obvious reasons. Let's just mention that 80 million of Americans have Greek genes, that is what I heard once. The Byzantines from the other hand were more original Mediterraneans(unmixed), while the Greeks of mainland Greece were mixed somehow with Alpine and some Dinaric elements. He also falls on contradiction when he says that: "It is inaccurate to say that the modern Greeks are different physically from the ancient Greeks; such a statement is based on an ignorance of the Greek ethnic character"."it is my personal reaction to the living Greeks that their continuity with their ancestors of the ancient world is remarkable, rather than the opposite", "The modern inhabitants of Greece itself differ surprisingly little from their classical predecessors.". Also J. Lawrence Angel had to say,"Racial continuity in Greece is striking.", "The similarity between the modern skeletal material and the ancient Greek is amazing.".
Angel (1945) confirms the presence of Nordic-Iranian types among the Iron age invaders of Greece, and their continuation as a minority in Athens into Classical times.
They always were an insignificant minority and they were not "nordic" but NORDIC-IRANIAN.
His data also suggest the presence of Corded Nordic and Nordic-Alpine types among the earlier, Bronze age invaders,
The few who came here, from Danube mostly, were just a very minority, the most of them were Corded Nordic as I have read.
and Angel mentions a Late Helladic Nordic-Iranian Mycenaean Athenian, who without much doubt . . . was a warrior. Nordic-Iranian types were present in Athens even into Late Hellenistic times.
Nordic-Iranian not nordic.
The lower strata of citizens likely would have been of autochthonous (rather than Indo-European) origin.
Upper and lower strata of citizens were of similar racial stock. Indo-Europeans never existed in fact and they never reached Greece.
The aristocracy were a small, isolated segment of the population, and many aristocratic families practiced cremation well into the Classical period; (Peterson 1974), severely limiting the usefulness of skeletal evidence in discussing the racial type of the aristocracy. But the evidence mentioned above is consistent with the idea that Nordic types would have been greatly overrepresented in the aristocracy, just as portraits suggest they were.
They were not, you confuse Nordic-Iranian and Meditewrranean-nordic type with the pure nordic type.
Incidentally, the practice of cremation is itself a clue. . . . cremation . . . was associated with pastoral-nomadic Nordic populations, for whom the soul might roam free in death as in life. Thus, the introduction of cremation into Greece was taken by many scholars as indicating the arrival of a new Nordic and nomadic population . . . (Hall 1997, 116)
This is untrue, the Greeks didn't need the pastoral-nomadic Nordics to teach them the cremation.
Whether cremation was introduced by some unknown, generalized ;'northern elements, or specifically by Dorian descendants of the cremation-practising Urnfield populations who occupied Illyria and Bosnia in the Late Bronze Age; (Hall 1997, 116-117), it is clear that cremation as practiced by the Greek aristocracy had its origin among Nordics.
No, the Greek Aristocracy was never Nordic and we did not take cremation from the barbarian nordics. Also the Dorian Greeks have nothing to do with nordics.
Pigmentation
Mosaics from Pella, Macedonia (4th c. BC), illustrating Hellenic pigmentation.
Illustrating the pigmentation of the few blond haired ancient Macedonians. The Hellenic pigmentation is only the standart Mediterranean pigmentation.
Coon observes that "blondism among the Greeks is mostly Nordic in origin".
Probably North Pontic Mediterranean, not nordic-barbarian.
Original Hellenic features may have persisted longer in Macedonia than in other parts of the Greek world, but there is reason to believe such features would have been largely preserved throughout the Greek aristocracy into relatively late times.
Original Hellenic features are the Mediterranean features and the Macedonians Aristocracy was not "nordic".
As for pigmentation, Coon (1939) tells us:
Greek literature and Greek art furnish an abundance of evidence as to the pigmentation and the characteristic facial features of the ancient inhabitants of Hellas. The Olympian gods, ancestors of the semi-heroes, were for the most part blond, with ivory shins and golden hair.
Where he saw that? Both semi-heros and the Olympian Gods represented as Mediterraneans never as "nordic", with dark hair and eyes and if one was "blond", or light brown haired, or light eyed this doesn't mean he was a nordic but light haired or light eyed Mediterranean, did you ever heard of the light haired & light eyed northern Pontic Mediterraneans?
Athene was gray eyed. Poseidon, however, was black haired [Note: Poseidon was derived from a pre-IE Mediterranean deity]. These gods were little different if we may believe Homer, from their descendants the heroes, most of whom were white limbed and golden haired.
Athena in fact described as a Mediterranean with blue eyes(some Greeks have blue eyes) but they never saw her, it's just fantasy. Where did you find that Poseidon was a pre-pseudo-IE Mediterranean deity that is still a question. Homeros never said that the Gods and the Heros were golden haired, he only said that, for some few Gods and Heros, just to hold the attention of his readers, 'cause the blond colour sound more strange and exotic, anyway his descriptions based in fantasy not in reality. Homeros never saw the heros or the Gods... besides that he was blind.
Day (2002) finds that:
Useful information about real rather than fictional Greeks comes from Polemon, the second most important Greek writer on physiognomy, who wrote as late as the second century A.D. Polemon explains that the pure Greek of his time has fair skin and red hair, and resembles the man inclined to literature and philosophy, who has fair skin and fairish hair. Polemon may have drawn these ideas from Pseudo-Aristotle, the most important Greek physiognomist, who in his third century B.C. Physiognomica declares that the most perfect male type is the lion with its fair mane.
Now you will use lions, tigers, snakes and other wild animals to describing the colours of the Greeks? Probably Polemon was fair skinned and light haired and he said that, obviously, for personal reasons. Greeks never looked like that. Why don't you use all other Greek writers who say that the Greeks had Mediterranean colours?
According to Angel, Nordic-Iranians were tall and muscular, strong-necked, and probably included tawny-haired blue- or green-eyed blonds as well as brunets.
I liked that, "as well as brunets".
Angel also mentions the noteworthy resemblances of this type to Anglo-Saxons and the partial northwestern relations of this Greek type.
Angel must knew that Nordic-Iranians in ancient Greece were an insignificant minority, same goes for Mediterranean-nordic and the Alpine-nordic racial type (all those nordic elements were Hellenized elements by the original Hellenes who were of the Mediterranean racial stock). I will not speak of the resemblances between Nordic-Iranians and anglo-saxon nordics, they are different types anyway.
Modern Greeks are overwhelmingly dark-haired and rarely fair-skinned.
You are a liar, C.Coon: "About half of them have brunet-white or light brown skin color, the rest the usual pinkish-white of central and northern Europe;". The light brown skin colour is not natural as a lot have sun-tanned skin colour.
Have the Greeks changed since antiquity?
Of course.
According to the anthropologists, they haven't change.
Ancient vs. Modern: Dienekes Pontikos thinks these images are somehow equivalent. In fact, he's implied he believes the ancient Greek depicted here is swarthier than the modern Greek. Personally, I don't consider a sun tan to be the same thing as obvious non-European ancestry.
Who told you that the first image is "sun-tanned", perhaps he is not and the modern Greek of course looks whiter, as the first image shows a man who has dark brown skin colour, we are not blind. There are some few Greeks with Arab admixture but who cares anyway.
The old aristocracy, responsible for much of the greatness of ancient Greece, certainly no longer exists.
What the Aristocracy did? The Aristocracy just involved in politics not science or art.
That, in itself, is a big enough change. Even the peasants have changed,
You say so.
though the exact degree to which the Greek goatherd of today is descended from the ancient Greek goatherd is an open question.
For nordicists like you, not for scientists and anthropologists, for those, they came from the Greek antiquity.
Everyone knows about the major Slavic and Albanian influxes into Greece.
Slav-speaking Balkanians(mostly Mediterraneans) and Arvanites(mostly Mediterraneans & Alpines) were a very minority, they didn't change us because we were the vast majority, most of them assimilated. We mixed them, not they us.
As Paul Theroux puts it:
The Greeks had not taken very much interest in their past until Europeans became enthusiastic discoverers and diggers of their ruins.
The Greeks back then had other problems, freedom for an example and poverty, but they always considered their selves as descendants of the ancient Greeks as well.
And why should they have cared? The Greeks were not Greek, but rather the illiterate descendants of Slavs and Albanian fishermen, who spoke a debased Greek dialect and had little interest in the broken columns and temples except as places to graze their sheep. (Pillars of Hercules, 315-316)
A big Bravo to Paul Theroux..."The Greeks were not Greek", the Greeks were Greeks as well, they spoke Greek and they had Greek traditions. The Slav-speaking Balkanians and the Arvanites you talking about were a small minority that assimilated and disappeared. Besides the fact that the Arvanites were mostly Mediterraneans racially and C.Coon connected them to the Greeks as well.
Given the movement of large numbers of Greeks into Anatolia during the Byzantine era, and the movements of Albanians and Slavs into Greece, it is always possible that a given Turk has as much or more classical Greek ancestry as a given modern Greek. And, there is always the strong possibility of a Turkic contribution to the Greek gene pool.
Untrue, the minorities you talking about were very small to change anyone. As for the Turkic contribution to the Greek gene pool, western Turks for the most part are turkified ancient Hellenes in fact. Also you must know that when you say "turkic" you mean mongoloid.
There has been gene flow into Greece from from Negroids and Mongoloids (see below), the extent of which is not easy to quantify at this time.
Untrue. Negroids never existed in Greece and the number of mongoloids is completly insignificant.
However, absorption of genes from the Near East and North Africa likely happened on a much larger scale than the absorption of non-Caucasoid genes;
Untrue. According to the geneticists Near Eastern genes to the Greeks is not much. The Near Easterns from the other hand are between two worlds, the European and the Arab world. Again they are mixed with us and other Europeans. Greeks for the most part are Europeans, you like it or you don't like it.
and this recent non-European Caucasoid admixture may be more significant than non-Caucasoid admixture when discussing changes in the racial character of the Greek nation.
The non-Caucasoid or mongoloid admixture in Greece is insignificant. Also we don't have negroids in Greece.
Richards et al. (2002) find a very high frequency (~20%) of recent gene flow in eastern Mediterranean Europe. The Near Easterners form a clear group, distinct from Europeans.
Wrong, they are almost half Europeans or even more, see Lebanon for an example.
The central and eastern Mediterranean populations of Europe, along with southeastern Europe, although positioned more closely to the other European populations, also show affinities with the Near East, but western Mediterranean Europe clusters with central and northern Europe. . . .
It's because Near Easterns have a lot of south-Eastern European genes.
The southeast-northwest clines in classical marker frequencies have been interpreted, by comparison with radiocarbon evidence, as representing a substantial demic diffusion of Near Eastern farming communities into Europe in the early Neolithic period (Sokal et al. 1991; Cavalli-Sforza et al. 1994).
Their numbers were insignificant as well.
Angel (1945) sees evidence of an immigration trend, continuing from Roman times through Byzantine times and later, that brought Mediterranean, Eastern Alpine, and Armenoid elements [from the Near East, one presumes] by sea, and [Slavic speaking, in Byzantine times] Alpine and Dinaric elements from the north.
The Armenoid elements to the Greek population are very small, as for the other elements, they were few and assimilated.
Angel also believes that in Classical times, Athens absorbed a large population of slaves and metics.
The Metics of Athens were 100% Greek racially, from other Greek city-states and the biggest part of the slaves were Greeks too, few were from non-Greek nations.
Obviously, the Greek gene pool has received a great deal of outside input, which makes sense, based on Greece's location and history.
You say so, obviously.
Angel tries to stress the continuity of the Athenian people,
He is an Anthropologist not a nordicist like you.
but it's hard to see what's so continuous about an originally Mediterranean population
The statues, show for the population of Ancient Athens a Mediterranean-Alpine mix, not a Mediterranean.
which today is brachycephalic and largely Alpine,
Ancient Greek Mediterraneans of the classical period for the most part were brachycephals, like modern Greeks are and this have nothing to do with Alpines.
and in which an important minority racial element of earlier times has essentially disappeared. It should be understood that when Angel speaks of continuity, he merely means that racial change in Greece is gradual, rather than sharp. In this sense, one could just as easily stress the racial continuity of Arabs as they gradually absorbed large numbers of sub-Saharan slaves.
You say so not the scientific world. You are wrong. According to Angel: "Racial continuity in Greece is striking."
Aris Poulianos
www.aee.gr/english/4greeks_origin/greeks_origin.html
Grecocentric anthropologist Aris Poulianos makes stronger claims than Angel about Greek continuity, insisting on the incessant biological continuity of the Greeks all through the historic and prehistoric epochs, which refer at least to the Mesolithic and Upper Palaeolithic periods (15.000-30.000 years). Poulianos's work is discredited by statements such as: . . . continuity is . . . proved by the comparison of measurements of the contemporary inhabitants with those of the ancient skulls of Greece, which statistically show no differences . . .
He knows what he talking about, learn from him you nordicists.
As Angel's work shows -- and as common sense dictates -- the racial composition of Greece has changed quite markedly over time;
The change is only in quantity and numbers. According to Angel: "Racial continuity in Greece is striking."
and the genetic evidence proves that significant Neolithic and later gene flow has occured in Greece.
Neolithic is just a period it doesn't mean "middle Eastern", it has to do with neolithic northern Europeans too. Later gene flow never occured in Greece, at least in great numbers.
If Poulianos is unable to detect differences between ancient and modern Greeks, his techniques are flawed.
You say so, you are not a scientist like he is, you are a simple nordicist. There are not differences between ancient and modern Greeks as well.
Poulianos's credibility is further undermined by his bizarre assertions concerning linguistics.
His credibility and assertions concerning linguistics are just fine.
We must indirectly admit that [the Sarakatsanees] also have the most ancient language, because their ancestors always spoke..and spoke only Greek for the last tenths of thousand years..50, 60, 70, perhaps even 100.
Their Greek dialect(language) cames from the pre-history as well.
On the contrary, the Indoeuropean theory only covers the last four thousand years. But even before the Indoeuropeans, didn't the inhabitants of this country speak for so many thousands of years? Aren't the living Sarakatsanees the proof today? Needless to say, no mainstream Western scholar would support Poulianos's linguistic theories.
So what, he is free to say his opinion as a scientist that he is. Same goes for Greeks, no Greek-patriot will ever accept your "indo-germanic" theories.
However, Poulianos's work was warmly received in the Soviet Union. This is unsurprising: Poulianos did his doctoral dissertation at the University of Moscow;
He also studied anthropology in America as well. "Aris Poulianos studied biology at the City University of New York between 1948 and 1952."
and with his fantasies of Greek-speaking Neanderthals,
They were, you like it or you don't like it. Perhaps they didn't spoke Greek but they used many proto-Greek words.
Poulianos is simply taking Soviet-style theories of ethnogenesis to their ridiculous extreme.
He also studied anthropology in America, so why he don't take SIONIST-JEWISH-AMERICAN & NORDICIST theories to their ridiculous extreme.
In the final analysis, Poulianos is a crank,
And you are anti-scientific and a nordicist who attack scientists.
of little interest to anyone but Greek nationalists and Stalinist archaeologists. A page promoting The Origin of the Greeks is able to report that hundreds of Eastern bloc state scientists fully agreed with the scientific views of Mr. Aris. Poulianos, underlining the seriousness of the research, but the only Western scientist they can cite as having supported him is J.L. Angel. While it's true that Angel penned a perhaps under-critical review of Poulianos's book in AJPA, this friend of Poulianos nevertheless found The Origin of the Hellenes to be an unsystematic work, which omits half the relevant literature, tends to overvalue speculations based on small samples and leaves a number of loose ends. On a positive note, Angel believes Poulianos's use of slang and everyday Greek instead of stuffy scientific language should help to popularize anthropology in Greece, in spite of three or four quotations from Stalin, Marx, and Engels.
A lot non-Greek anthropologists and a lot non-Stalinist archaeologists have praise him as well.
An example: "The skull has been dated to be at least 700,000 years old by two German scientists, anthropologist E. Breitinger and palaeontologist O. Sickenberg. Poulianos has claimed that this discovery renders the Indo-European theory obsolete.". Also when you read something concerning Anthropology you must listen first to the local Anthropologists and scientists, than listening to your own selves and your imaginery western pseudo-theories.
en.nikaria.gr/pages/Aris_Poulianos.html
Incidentally, one of Poulianos's chief aims seems to have been to refute Fallmerayer's theory that modern Greeks are mostly descended from Slavs and Albanians.
They are not. The slav-speaking Balkanians(Mostly Mediterraneans) and Arvanites(mostly Mediterraneans & Alpines) didn't mixed the Greeks, as the Greeks were the vast majotity and those the very minority.
However:
The same study indicated that the Albanian-speaking, Slav-speaking (Monte Negro included) as well as Valaches (Vlachi) of the greater Macedonian region.
Scopjan not "Macedonian", learn history.
are in their majority also autochthonous and therefore the influences from abroad mainly concerns the adoption of the chronologically younger languages, which are in use today. If this is the case, then it seems Poulianos can prove nothing about the degree to which Byzantine-era Slavic-speakers contributed to the modern Greek population.
Those Slavic-speaking Balkanians were not Slavs racially, they assimilated and dissapeared as well.
Whether or not these Slavic-speakers had predominantly autochthonous origins in the Balkans is irrelevant.
It is not irrelevant, they were for the most part autochthonous.
They were still not the same people as the ancient Greeks.
They assimilated as well and their number was very small. The vast majority assimilated the small minority. Such things happened in ancient Greece all the time.
As well, looking at averages for the population as a whole obscures the fact that a disproportionate share of Greek contributions came from a numerically unimportant, genetically isolated, and racially distinct minority.
A number of them assimilated, but the greatest part of them still lives isolated in minorities. Especially Vlahs.
The source of classical Greek achievement
Angel mentions Blegen's model of fusion of diverse material, social, and even psychological elements to form the culture of Classical Athens. Blegen is correct that Athenian cultural achievement owed something to the fusion of cultures. But, the key elements that seperated Greek thought and achievement from those of earlier civilizations originated with the Indo-Europeans:
Indo-germanics never existed and nordic tribes never invated Greece as well. The achievements of classical Greece came from the ancient Greek people and their descendants, the modern Greeks, not from barbarian nordics who try to steal our history & culture.
While Egyptians and Babylonians collected a great deal of information about mathematics and astronomy and practiced impressive engineering on a grand scale, their sciences never had a really scientific basis. Their knowledge existed either as the lore collected by the priests or as the products of practical trial-and-error.
The civilizations of Egyptians and of Babylonians found by Greeks too. I can give you the names of many ancient Greek mathematicians and astronomers but there is not even one name of an Egyptian and Babylonian mathematician or astronomer.
Only the Indo-European Greeks actually systematized scientific and mathematical knowledge, and they were able to construct it into a system because the system itself was their concept of a Cosmic Order in which all events and phenomena were related through causality and its inexorable linkages of one event and phenomenon to another. . . .
Again and again with this pseudo-theory of the Indo-skandinavian barbarians.
It is no accident, wrote V. Gordon Childe, that the first great advances towards abstract natural science were made by the Aryan Greeks and the Hindus, not by the Babylonians or the Egyptians, despite their great material resources and their surprising progress in techniques – in astronomical observation for example. . . . (Clark 1996)
Thank you for calling ancient Greek Mediterraneans and Alpines as Aryans.
Inspired by Blegen's model of the fusion of cultures, Angel looks to blending of racial types as one of the real and probably indispensable little factors which help produce a great people and which underlie the whole history of civilization. What this theory ignores is the major role played by the endogamous aristocracy in Greek achievement.
The achievements of ancient Greeks didn't came from the Aristocracy but from its scientists and artists, the Aristocrats just involved in politics.
Since Classical times, Greece has received even more outside genetic input and has become even more blended.
Untrue. Greece didn't received even more outside genetic input and did not become even more blended, small minorities assimilate and disappear.
If this is the key to greatness, why has Greece been going downhill since the Classical age?
Because the Romans appeared in history, that's why. Did you ever heard of the Byzantine Empire? Who has been going downhill since the Classical age? No one. We also contributed to the Roman civilization as well, without Greeks there is not Roman Empire.
Murphy (1941) takes a similar view to Angel's, but acknowledges another factor:
Wave after wave of Alpines and Mediterraneans continued to arrive in Greece from Roman times onward. But blending with these new arrivals never produced an efflorescence.
You don't have any proofs that this ever happened, Alpines and Mediterraneans were indigenous in Greece, they didn't arrive from anywhere. On the contrary, they moved from Greece and arrived in other countries, as colonists too.
W.D. Hamilton's (1975) theory is preferrable to that of Angel:
The incursions of barbaric pastoralists seem to do civilizations less harm in the long run than one might expect. Indeed, two dark ages and renaissances in Europe suggest a recurring pattern in which a renaissance follows an incursion by about 800 years. It may even be suggested that certain genes or traditions of pastoralists revitalize the conquered people with an ingredient of progress which tends to die out in a large panmictic population for the reasons already discussed. I have in mind altruism itself, or the part of the altruism which is perhaps better described as self-sacrificial daring. By the time of the renaissance it may be that the mixing of genes and cultures (or of cultures alone if these are the only vehicles, which I doubt) has continued long enough to bring the old mercantile thoughtfulness and the infused daring into conjunction in a few individuals who then find courage for all kinds of inventive innovation against the resistance of established thought and practice. Often, however, the cost in fitness of such altruism and sublimated pugnacity to the individuals concerned is by no means metaphorical, and the benefits to fitness, such as they are, go to a mass of individuals whose genetic correlation with the innovator must be slight indeed. Thus civilization probably slowly reduces its altruism of all kinds, including the kinds needed for cultural creativity (see also Eshel 1972).
Renaissance born in Europe because Greeks of the Byzantine Empire(after the fall of Constantinoupolis) moved there and gave their lights on civilization. Without Greeks there is no renaissance.
The peak of Greek civilization was only reached after the ingredient of progress had been introduced by the Indo-European invaders. By the time complete mediocrity set in, the disproportionately Nordic and Indo-European-descended aristocracy had all but disappeared.
Wrong, the Greeks had many civilizations that reached the peak you talking about, before the cataclysms. We never needed the imaginery indo-europeans or the unexisted nordics in Greece to built our civilization. Also the peak of Greek Athenian civilization came from his leader, Perikles, who was a typical Mediterranean Greek, not from imaginery nordics.
Lundman agrees that:
The racial structure of the old historical European peoples - the Greeks, Romans, and Celts - has been treated at length in my book Geographische Anthropologie (1967). Certainly, these peoples had, at least in their upper social strata, stronger Nordic components than the present inhabitants of these lands.
Never, in the case of Greece there was just some assimilated elements in the form of Iranian-Nordic, Mediterranean-Nordic, and Alpine-Nordic. Pure Nordic types never existed, they always were an insignificant minority as well as the other nordic elements .
Roger Pearson (1991) has suggested the possibility that Europe has suffered a severe dysgenic decline over the past two thousand years. If this is true, Greece, which today has perhaps the lowest average IQ in Europe, may have been particularly hard hit.
Make dreams.
Greek IQ :
dienekes.110mb.com/articles/greekiq/
On the other hand, it may well be that only the elite classes in ancient Greece were exceptionally intelligent.
Yes, the lower classes where the poor Socrates and many other philosophers belonged were unindelligent and the only intelligent were the unexisted nordics. Nordics always were barbarians and you learnt everything about civilization from the Romans, and with their turn, they learnt everything concerning civilization by the Greeks as well.
And, when the elites died out or were absorbed by the much more numerous masses, the intellectual power of Greece was dissipated.
There never was a "nordic-barbarian-elite" in Greece. Also Aristotelis as a teacher of Alexander the great, gave birth to the Alexandrian Empire, after the supposed dissipated intellectual power of Greece.
www.white-history.com/refuting_rm/7.html
Modern Greeks do not descend predominantly from Indo-Europeans. It is silly to talk about whether or not the Greeks are any longer Indo-European, since the people living within the geographic boundaries of Greece were at no time predominantly Indo-European by ancestry. However, the aristocracy of classical Greece would indeed have derived from Indo-Europeans.
Both ancient and modern Greeks have nothing to do with the imaginery "germanic-indo-europeans". The Greeks who came back to Greece after their extension to upper balkans, were of the same racial stock like the pelasgian Greeks, ancient Greek historians never said a word for the imaginery indo-europeans but they spoke of the "return of Heraclides", of Achaeans, Aeolians, Ionians and Dorians. The Aristocracy of the ancient Greeks for the most part was Mediterranean and Alpine not "nordic-barbarian".
Theories of origin of the Greeks:
The origins of mankind has always fascinated philosophers, scientists, and ordinary citizens. Specifically, the Greeks are interested to know the biological roots of our people in Europe. For the origin of the inhabitants of Greece have been three theories.
• The theory of Indo-European origin of the Greeks, based on linguistic analysis and comparisons with no archaeological or other evidence. Comparative linguists are the main supporters. Despite the wide dissemination, this theory is not based on solid sources, and must be rejected.
• The theory of indigenous, supported themselves by the ancient Greeks. The main exponent of this theory is Professor Colin Renfrew.
hellas2010.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=raceandanthropology&action=display&thread=2
John V. Day notes that:
Indo-Europeans often seem to have been small minorities in the countries they penetrated: the Celtic warrior-class in Ireland; the Roman patricians; the few Homeric heroes and the so-called pure Greeks; of later years; and the Aryans battling against the many natives in India.
The so-called pure Greeks were/are Mediterranean Greeks.
According to Peterson, the Greek aristocracy were seperated by caste-like stratification . . . from the freemen and slave classes among whom the genetic influence of the autochthonous 'Pelasgian' population may have predominated; (Peterson 1974).
There was no racial difference between the Greek aristocracy and the indigenous Pelasgians, both were for the most part Mediterranean/Alpine and was indigenous.
Also keep in mind, Greeks have 28% Near Eastern HG9 and 28% North African HG21. Much of this ancestry may date from the Neolithic, but it is curious that RM doesn't interpret this data to mean Greeks are 56% Hamito-Semitic and therefore very much less than pure European. As Day (2002) says: Genetically, Greek and Yugoslav populations are among the least typically 'European.
Greeks do not have much Near Eastern genes as well as North African genes that is abscent from Greece. All Europeans have some Near Eastern genes, so what? Greeks of course have nothing to do with hammito-semites or Near Easterns, the vast majority of the Greeks are pure Europeans.
hellas2010.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=raceandanthropology&action=display&thread=2&page=1
Update: In fact, new research is suggesting that much of the Neolithic ancestry in Greece represents gene flow from after the Neolithic.
You say so, prove it.
Greek Aristoi
Demosthenes (c. 386-322 B.C.) "distinguished orator and Athenian patriot of the wealthy landowning Attic deme of Paeania."
Mediterranean.
Alkaios (c. 620-595 B.C.) "a member of the Aeolic nobility."
Mediterranean-Alpine.
Xenophon (c. 430-354 B.C.) "the member of a minor aristocratic Athenian family."
Mediterranean-Alpine.
Thucydides (c. 460-400 B.C.), "Historian and general of noble Attic blood on his father's side and aristocratic Thracian blood through his mother."
Mediterranean.
Euripides (c. 480-406 B.C.) "scion of a Salamis landowning family." Euripides "had a fair and freckled complexion."
Mediterranean-Dinaric.
Socrates (c. 469-399 B.C.) Not a member of the aristocracy. Stone cutter son of a sculptor and a midwife. Middle class. Alpine racial type.
Alpine. The most intelligent Greek ever. The greatest man of classical Athens. A martyr of philosophy.
None of them is nordic.
Members of aristocratic families are vastly overrepresented among notable Greeks of the classical period. Thus, when discussing the racial type of ancient Greeks, it is important to consider the racial type of the aristocracy. From the point of view of physical anthropology the ethnic complexity of Greek society during the first millennium B.C. prohibits any attempt at a generalized statement of physical type based upon statistical averages of data derived from the available skeletal material. Substantial caste-like stratification, accompanied by relatively strict principles of caste endogamy separated the Indo-European-derived Eupatrids from the freemen and slave classes among whom the genetic influence of the autochthonous 'Pelasgian' population may have predominated. (Peterson 1974)
The racial type of indigenous Pelasgians, of Eupatrids, freemen and of slave classes was the same. The rest are your theories.
Peterson notes that IE languages eventually came to be spoken by racially and genetically diverse peoples, but he suggests: In the course of some five or six millennia of expansion and conquest, an expanding IE upper caste may undoubtedly have preserved a high degree of genetic continuity (Pearson, 1974), while simply superimposing itself upon the autochthonous populations. Those who brought Indo-European speech into the newly-colonized territories became a ruling warrior nobility, as testified by the connotation 'noble' for arya in India and Persia, ariothez, in Greece (hence our 'aristocracy') and aire among the Celtic peoples. Indeed, the evidence-indicates that to a greater or lesser extent the invading arya, art, or aire maintained strict principles of endogamy in the choice of their official wives, and although in many areas they appear to have made a disproportionately high contribution to the gene pool of the indigenous population through the practice of keeping large numbers of concubines, they differed from the Uralic and Semitic peoples in their refusal to grant the illegitimate offspring of such marriages the social status of the father. Thus so far as legitimate offspring were concerned, in aristocratic Greek society, as in most early historic I.E. societies, the strict endogamy of the conquering classes was evidenced by the admission that 'we choose our wives like we choose our horses: by the lengths of their pedigrees' — and the high respect in which the Greeks held their horses is well known!
Indo-europeans never came in Greece because they didn't existed and the Aristocracy was of the similar racial type as the rest of Greeks. There never was an imajinery nordic Aristocracy.
Probably what you call "Indo-Europeans" were the Greek-Aryans at the time when they occupied the Balkan peninsula(Haimos):
dienekes.awardspace.com/articles/ieorigins/
According to Peterson:
The fact that the immigrant Indo-Europeans had a clear-cut conception of what they regarded as their own distinctive and characteristic physiognomy — which would have been preserved and even accentuated by close inbreeding — is amply evidenced by Greek literature. Thus in the Odyssey (XII, 222) we undersland that the disguised Athena was described as being 'delicate ol countenance such as are the sons of kings', whereas in the Iliad (II, 216) Thersites, of autochthonous origin, is described as 'ill-formed and warped of head'. . . .
Keep using the imaginery poetry of Homeros for describing the Greeks as a race.
Coon mentions:
Villains, comical characters, satyrs, centaurs, giants, and all unpleasant people and those not to be admired, are often shown in sculpture and in vase painting as broad-faced, snub-nosed, and heavily bearded. Socrates, who belonged to this type, was maliciously compared to a satyr. This type may still be found its Greece, and is an ordinary Alpine. In the early skeletal, remains it is represented by some of the brachycephalic crania.
Socrates, son of a sculptor and a midwife, was not an aristocrat.
The fact that his physical type was scorned by the aristocracy suggests that aristocrats were not Alpines, certainly not unmixed Alpines. Coon also notes that:" The racial type to which Socrates belonged is today the most important; racial type in Greece.
Now you will compare Socrates to the classical Aristocracy? Who is more important, a simple Aristocrat or a Philosopher?
Peterson suggests:
The Greeks shown above and right, descendants of ancient aristocratic families, illustrate Indo-European features.
Mediterranean and Alpine-Mediterranean features for the most part. That is what illustrate.
Needless to say, today you're more likely to see people who resemble the above in England or Sweden than in Greece.
You are more likely to see people who resemble them among Greeks as well. Swedish people have nothing to do with Mediterraneans, as for England, some of them are Mediterraneans.
Coon affirms:
. . . one is impressed, after looking at the portrait busts of Athenians, and the clay masks of Spartans, with their resemblance to present-day western Europeans. This resemblance becomes less marked in the art of the Byzantines, however, where modern near Eastern faces are more frequent; but the Byzantines lived mostly outside of Greece.
That is a mistake of C.Coon, ancient Greeks for the most part were Mediterraneans, the Spaniards for an example who are western Europeans do not look like ancient Greeks(only the Atlanto-Mediterraneans of Spain who according to C.Coon came from Asia Minor). C.Coon said that because he was a western European and he wanted to connect ancient Athenians and Spartans to western Europeans for obvious reasons. Let's just mention that 80 million of Americans have Greek genes, that is what I heard once. The Byzantines from the other hand were more original Mediterraneans(unmixed), while the Greeks of mainland Greece were mixed somehow with Alpine and some Dinaric elements. He also falls on contradiction when he says that: "It is inaccurate to say that the modern Greeks are different physically from the ancient Greeks; such a statement is based on an ignorance of the Greek ethnic character"."it is my personal reaction to the living Greeks that their continuity with their ancestors of the ancient world is remarkable, rather than the opposite", "The modern inhabitants of Greece itself differ surprisingly little from their classical predecessors.". Also J. Lawrence Angel had to say,"Racial continuity in Greece is striking.", "The similarity between the modern skeletal material and the ancient Greek is amazing.".
Angel (1945) confirms the presence of Nordic-Iranian types among the Iron age invaders of Greece, and their continuation as a minority in Athens into Classical times.
They always were an insignificant minority and they were not "nordic" but NORDIC-IRANIAN.
His data also suggest the presence of Corded Nordic and Nordic-Alpine types among the earlier, Bronze age invaders,
The few who came here, from Danube mostly, were just a very minority, the most of them were Corded Nordic as I have read.
and Angel mentions a Late Helladic Nordic-Iranian Mycenaean Athenian, who without much doubt . . . was a warrior. Nordic-Iranian types were present in Athens even into Late Hellenistic times.
Nordic-Iranian not nordic.
The lower strata of citizens likely would have been of autochthonous (rather than Indo-European) origin.
Upper and lower strata of citizens were of similar racial stock. Indo-Europeans never existed in fact and they never reached Greece.
The aristocracy were a small, isolated segment of the population, and many aristocratic families practiced cremation well into the Classical period; (Peterson 1974), severely limiting the usefulness of skeletal evidence in discussing the racial type of the aristocracy. But the evidence mentioned above is consistent with the idea that Nordic types would have been greatly overrepresented in the aristocracy, just as portraits suggest they were.
They were not, you confuse Nordic-Iranian and Meditewrranean-nordic type with the pure nordic type.
Incidentally, the practice of cremation is itself a clue. . . . cremation . . . was associated with pastoral-nomadic Nordic populations, for whom the soul might roam free in death as in life. Thus, the introduction of cremation into Greece was taken by many scholars as indicating the arrival of a new Nordic and nomadic population . . . (Hall 1997, 116)
This is untrue, the Greeks didn't need the pastoral-nomadic Nordics to teach them the cremation.
Whether cremation was introduced by some unknown, generalized ;'northern elements, or specifically by Dorian descendants of the cremation-practising Urnfield populations who occupied Illyria and Bosnia in the Late Bronze Age; (Hall 1997, 116-117), it is clear that cremation as practiced by the Greek aristocracy had its origin among Nordics.
No, the Greek Aristocracy was never Nordic and we did not take cremation from the barbarian nordics. Also the Dorian Greeks have nothing to do with nordics.
Pigmentation
Mosaics from Pella, Macedonia (4th c. BC), illustrating Hellenic pigmentation.
Illustrating the pigmentation of the few blond haired ancient Macedonians. The Hellenic pigmentation is only the standart Mediterranean pigmentation.
Coon observes that "blondism among the Greeks is mostly Nordic in origin".
Probably North Pontic Mediterranean, not nordic-barbarian.
Original Hellenic features may have persisted longer in Macedonia than in other parts of the Greek world, but there is reason to believe such features would have been largely preserved throughout the Greek aristocracy into relatively late times.
Original Hellenic features are the Mediterranean features and the Macedonians Aristocracy was not "nordic".
As for pigmentation, Coon (1939) tells us:
Greek literature and Greek art furnish an abundance of evidence as to the pigmentation and the characteristic facial features of the ancient inhabitants of Hellas. The Olympian gods, ancestors of the semi-heroes, were for the most part blond, with ivory shins and golden hair.
Where he saw that? Both semi-heros and the Olympian Gods represented as Mediterraneans never as "nordic", with dark hair and eyes and if one was "blond", or light brown haired, or light eyed this doesn't mean he was a nordic but light haired or light eyed Mediterranean, did you ever heard of the light haired & light eyed northern Pontic Mediterraneans?
Athene was gray eyed. Poseidon, however, was black haired [Note: Poseidon was derived from a pre-IE Mediterranean deity]. These gods were little different if we may believe Homer, from their descendants the heroes, most of whom were white limbed and golden haired.
Athena in fact described as a Mediterranean with blue eyes(some Greeks have blue eyes) but they never saw her, it's just fantasy. Where did you find that Poseidon was a pre-pseudo-IE Mediterranean deity that is still a question. Homeros never said that the Gods and the Heros were golden haired, he only said that, for some few Gods and Heros, just to hold the attention of his readers, 'cause the blond colour sound more strange and exotic, anyway his descriptions based in fantasy not in reality. Homeros never saw the heros or the Gods... besides that he was blind.
Day (2002) finds that:
Useful information about real rather than fictional Greeks comes from Polemon, the second most important Greek writer on physiognomy, who wrote as late as the second century A.D. Polemon explains that the pure Greek of his time has fair skin and red hair, and resembles the man inclined to literature and philosophy, who has fair skin and fairish hair. Polemon may have drawn these ideas from Pseudo-Aristotle, the most important Greek physiognomist, who in his third century B.C. Physiognomica declares that the most perfect male type is the lion with its fair mane.
Now you will use lions, tigers, snakes and other wild animals to describing the colours of the Greeks? Probably Polemon was fair skinned and light haired and he said that, obviously, for personal reasons. Greeks never looked like that. Why don't you use all other Greek writers who say that the Greeks had Mediterranean colours?
According to Angel, Nordic-Iranians were tall and muscular, strong-necked, and probably included tawny-haired blue- or green-eyed blonds as well as brunets.
I liked that, "as well as brunets".
Angel also mentions the noteworthy resemblances of this type to Anglo-Saxons and the partial northwestern relations of this Greek type.
Angel must knew that Nordic-Iranians in ancient Greece were an insignificant minority, same goes for Mediterranean-nordic and the Alpine-nordic racial type (all those nordic elements were Hellenized elements by the original Hellenes who were of the Mediterranean racial stock). I will not speak of the resemblances between Nordic-Iranians and anglo-saxon nordics, they are different types anyway.
Modern Greeks are overwhelmingly dark-haired and rarely fair-skinned.
You are a liar, C.Coon: "About half of them have brunet-white or light brown skin color, the rest the usual pinkish-white of central and northern Europe;". The light brown skin colour is not natural as a lot have sun-tanned skin colour.
Have the Greeks changed since antiquity?
Of course.
According to the anthropologists, they haven't change.
Ancient vs. Modern: Dienekes Pontikos thinks these images are somehow equivalent. In fact, he's implied he believes the ancient Greek depicted here is swarthier than the modern Greek. Personally, I don't consider a sun tan to be the same thing as obvious non-European ancestry.
Who told you that the first image is "sun-tanned", perhaps he is not and the modern Greek of course looks whiter, as the first image shows a man who has dark brown skin colour, we are not blind. There are some few Greeks with Arab admixture but who cares anyway.
The old aristocracy, responsible for much of the greatness of ancient Greece, certainly no longer exists.
What the Aristocracy did? The Aristocracy just involved in politics not science or art.
That, in itself, is a big enough change. Even the peasants have changed,
You say so.
though the exact degree to which the Greek goatherd of today is descended from the ancient Greek goatherd is an open question.
For nordicists like you, not for scientists and anthropologists, for those, they came from the Greek antiquity.
Everyone knows about the major Slavic and Albanian influxes into Greece.
Slav-speaking Balkanians(mostly Mediterraneans) and Arvanites(mostly Mediterraneans & Alpines) were a very minority, they didn't change us because we were the vast majority, most of them assimilated. We mixed them, not they us.
As Paul Theroux puts it:
The Greeks had not taken very much interest in their past until Europeans became enthusiastic discoverers and diggers of their ruins.
The Greeks back then had other problems, freedom for an example and poverty, but they always considered their selves as descendants of the ancient Greeks as well.
And why should they have cared? The Greeks were not Greek, but rather the illiterate descendants of Slavs and Albanian fishermen, who spoke a debased Greek dialect and had little interest in the broken columns and temples except as places to graze their sheep. (Pillars of Hercules, 315-316)
A big Bravo to Paul Theroux..."The Greeks were not Greek", the Greeks were Greeks as well, they spoke Greek and they had Greek traditions. The Slav-speaking Balkanians and the Arvanites you talking about were a small minority that assimilated and disappeared. Besides the fact that the Arvanites were mostly Mediterraneans racially and C.Coon connected them to the Greeks as well.
Given the movement of large numbers of Greeks into Anatolia during the Byzantine era, and the movements of Albanians and Slavs into Greece, it is always possible that a given Turk has as much or more classical Greek ancestry as a given modern Greek. And, there is always the strong possibility of a Turkic contribution to the Greek gene pool.
Untrue, the minorities you talking about were very small to change anyone. As for the Turkic contribution to the Greek gene pool, western Turks for the most part are turkified ancient Hellenes in fact. Also you must know that when you say "turkic" you mean mongoloid.
There has been gene flow into Greece from from Negroids and Mongoloids (see below), the extent of which is not easy to quantify at this time.
Untrue. Negroids never existed in Greece and the number of mongoloids is completly insignificant.
However, absorption of genes from the Near East and North Africa likely happened on a much larger scale than the absorption of non-Caucasoid genes;
Untrue. According to the geneticists Near Eastern genes to the Greeks is not much. The Near Easterns from the other hand are between two worlds, the European and the Arab world. Again they are mixed with us and other Europeans. Greeks for the most part are Europeans, you like it or you don't like it.
and this recent non-European Caucasoid admixture may be more significant than non-Caucasoid admixture when discussing changes in the racial character of the Greek nation.
The non-Caucasoid or mongoloid admixture in Greece is insignificant. Also we don't have negroids in Greece.
Richards et al. (2002) find a very high frequency (~20%) of recent gene flow in eastern Mediterranean Europe. The Near Easterners form a clear group, distinct from Europeans.
Wrong, they are almost half Europeans or even more, see Lebanon for an example.
The central and eastern Mediterranean populations of Europe, along with southeastern Europe, although positioned more closely to the other European populations, also show affinities with the Near East, but western Mediterranean Europe clusters with central and northern Europe. . . .
It's because Near Easterns have a lot of south-Eastern European genes.
The southeast-northwest clines in classical marker frequencies have been interpreted, by comparison with radiocarbon evidence, as representing a substantial demic diffusion of Near Eastern farming communities into Europe in the early Neolithic period (Sokal et al. 1991; Cavalli-Sforza et al. 1994).
Their numbers were insignificant as well.
Angel (1945) sees evidence of an immigration trend, continuing from Roman times through Byzantine times and later, that brought Mediterranean, Eastern Alpine, and Armenoid elements [from the Near East, one presumes] by sea, and [Slavic speaking, in Byzantine times] Alpine and Dinaric elements from the north.
The Armenoid elements to the Greek population are very small, as for the other elements, they were few and assimilated.
Angel also believes that in Classical times, Athens absorbed a large population of slaves and metics.
The Metics of Athens were 100% Greek racially, from other Greek city-states and the biggest part of the slaves were Greeks too, few were from non-Greek nations.
Obviously, the Greek gene pool has received a great deal of outside input, which makes sense, based on Greece's location and history.
You say so, obviously.
Angel tries to stress the continuity of the Athenian people,
He is an Anthropologist not a nordicist like you.
but it's hard to see what's so continuous about an originally Mediterranean population
The statues, show for the population of Ancient Athens a Mediterranean-Alpine mix, not a Mediterranean.
which today is brachycephalic and largely Alpine,
Ancient Greek Mediterraneans of the classical period for the most part were brachycephals, like modern Greeks are and this have nothing to do with Alpines.
and in which an important minority racial element of earlier times has essentially disappeared. It should be understood that when Angel speaks of continuity, he merely means that racial change in Greece is gradual, rather than sharp. In this sense, one could just as easily stress the racial continuity of Arabs as they gradually absorbed large numbers of sub-Saharan slaves.
You say so not the scientific world. You are wrong. According to Angel: "Racial continuity in Greece is striking."
Aris Poulianos
www.aee.gr/english/4greeks_origin/greeks_origin.html
Grecocentric anthropologist Aris Poulianos makes stronger claims than Angel about Greek continuity, insisting on the incessant biological continuity of the Greeks all through the historic and prehistoric epochs, which refer at least to the Mesolithic and Upper Palaeolithic periods (15.000-30.000 years). Poulianos's work is discredited by statements such as: . . . continuity is . . . proved by the comparison of measurements of the contemporary inhabitants with those of the ancient skulls of Greece, which statistically show no differences . . .
He knows what he talking about, learn from him you nordicists.
As Angel's work shows -- and as common sense dictates -- the racial composition of Greece has changed quite markedly over time;
The change is only in quantity and numbers. According to Angel: "Racial continuity in Greece is striking."
and the genetic evidence proves that significant Neolithic and later gene flow has occured in Greece.
Neolithic is just a period it doesn't mean "middle Eastern", it has to do with neolithic northern Europeans too. Later gene flow never occured in Greece, at least in great numbers.
If Poulianos is unable to detect differences between ancient and modern Greeks, his techniques are flawed.
You say so, you are not a scientist like he is, you are a simple nordicist. There are not differences between ancient and modern Greeks as well.
Poulianos's credibility is further undermined by his bizarre assertions concerning linguistics.
His credibility and assertions concerning linguistics are just fine.
We must indirectly admit that [the Sarakatsanees] also have the most ancient language, because their ancestors always spoke..and spoke only Greek for the last tenths of thousand years..50, 60, 70, perhaps even 100.
Their Greek dialect(language) cames from the pre-history as well.
On the contrary, the Indoeuropean theory only covers the last four thousand years. But even before the Indoeuropeans, didn't the inhabitants of this country speak for so many thousands of years? Aren't the living Sarakatsanees the proof today? Needless to say, no mainstream Western scholar would support Poulianos's linguistic theories.
So what, he is free to say his opinion as a scientist that he is. Same goes for Greeks, no Greek-patriot will ever accept your "indo-germanic" theories.
However, Poulianos's work was warmly received in the Soviet Union. This is unsurprising: Poulianos did his doctoral dissertation at the University of Moscow;
He also studied anthropology in America as well. "Aris Poulianos studied biology at the City University of New York between 1948 and 1952."
and with his fantasies of Greek-speaking Neanderthals,
They were, you like it or you don't like it. Perhaps they didn't spoke Greek but they used many proto-Greek words.
Poulianos is simply taking Soviet-style theories of ethnogenesis to their ridiculous extreme.
He also studied anthropology in America, so why he don't take SIONIST-JEWISH-AMERICAN & NORDICIST theories to their ridiculous extreme.
In the final analysis, Poulianos is a crank,
And you are anti-scientific and a nordicist who attack scientists.
of little interest to anyone but Greek nationalists and Stalinist archaeologists. A page promoting The Origin of the Greeks is able to report that hundreds of Eastern bloc state scientists fully agreed with the scientific views of Mr. Aris. Poulianos, underlining the seriousness of the research, but the only Western scientist they can cite as having supported him is J.L. Angel. While it's true that Angel penned a perhaps under-critical review of Poulianos's book in AJPA, this friend of Poulianos nevertheless found The Origin of the Hellenes to be an unsystematic work, which omits half the relevant literature, tends to overvalue speculations based on small samples and leaves a number of loose ends. On a positive note, Angel believes Poulianos's use of slang and everyday Greek instead of stuffy scientific language should help to popularize anthropology in Greece, in spite of three or four quotations from Stalin, Marx, and Engels.
A lot non-Greek anthropologists and a lot non-Stalinist archaeologists have praise him as well.
An example: "The skull has been dated to be at least 700,000 years old by two German scientists, anthropologist E. Breitinger and palaeontologist O. Sickenberg. Poulianos has claimed that this discovery renders the Indo-European theory obsolete.". Also when you read something concerning Anthropology you must listen first to the local Anthropologists and scientists, than listening to your own selves and your imaginery western pseudo-theories.
en.nikaria.gr/pages/Aris_Poulianos.html
Incidentally, one of Poulianos's chief aims seems to have been to refute Fallmerayer's theory that modern Greeks are mostly descended from Slavs and Albanians.
They are not. The slav-speaking Balkanians(Mostly Mediterraneans) and Arvanites(mostly Mediterraneans & Alpines) didn't mixed the Greeks, as the Greeks were the vast majotity and those the very minority.
However:
The same study indicated that the Albanian-speaking, Slav-speaking (Monte Negro included) as well as Valaches (Vlachi) of the greater Macedonian region.
Scopjan not "Macedonian", learn history.
are in their majority also autochthonous and therefore the influences from abroad mainly concerns the adoption of the chronologically younger languages, which are in use today. If this is the case, then it seems Poulianos can prove nothing about the degree to which Byzantine-era Slavic-speakers contributed to the modern Greek population.
Those Slavic-speaking Balkanians were not Slavs racially, they assimilated and dissapeared as well.
Whether or not these Slavic-speakers had predominantly autochthonous origins in the Balkans is irrelevant.
It is not irrelevant, they were for the most part autochthonous.
They were still not the same people as the ancient Greeks.
They assimilated as well and their number was very small. The vast majority assimilated the small minority. Such things happened in ancient Greece all the time.
As well, looking at averages for the population as a whole obscures the fact that a disproportionate share of Greek contributions came from a numerically unimportant, genetically isolated, and racially distinct minority.
A number of them assimilated, but the greatest part of them still lives isolated in minorities. Especially Vlahs.
The source of classical Greek achievement
Angel mentions Blegen's model of fusion of diverse material, social, and even psychological elements to form the culture of Classical Athens. Blegen is correct that Athenian cultural achievement owed something to the fusion of cultures. But, the key elements that seperated Greek thought and achievement from those of earlier civilizations originated with the Indo-Europeans:
Indo-germanics never existed and nordic tribes never invated Greece as well. The achievements of classical Greece came from the ancient Greek people and their descendants, the modern Greeks, not from barbarian nordics who try to steal our history & culture.
While Egyptians and Babylonians collected a great deal of information about mathematics and astronomy and practiced impressive engineering on a grand scale, their sciences never had a really scientific basis. Their knowledge existed either as the lore collected by the priests or as the products of practical trial-and-error.
The civilizations of Egyptians and of Babylonians found by Greeks too. I can give you the names of many ancient Greek mathematicians and astronomers but there is not even one name of an Egyptian and Babylonian mathematician or astronomer.
Only the Indo-European Greeks actually systematized scientific and mathematical knowledge, and they were able to construct it into a system because the system itself was their concept of a Cosmic Order in which all events and phenomena were related through causality and its inexorable linkages of one event and phenomenon to another. . . .
Again and again with this pseudo-theory of the Indo-skandinavian barbarians.
It is no accident, wrote V. Gordon Childe, that the first great advances towards abstract natural science were made by the Aryan Greeks and the Hindus, not by the Babylonians or the Egyptians, despite their great material resources and their surprising progress in techniques – in astronomical observation for example. . . . (Clark 1996)
Thank you for calling ancient Greek Mediterraneans and Alpines as Aryans.
Inspired by Blegen's model of the fusion of cultures, Angel looks to blending of racial types as one of the real and probably indispensable little factors which help produce a great people and which underlie the whole history of civilization. What this theory ignores is the major role played by the endogamous aristocracy in Greek achievement.
The achievements of ancient Greeks didn't came from the Aristocracy but from its scientists and artists, the Aristocrats just involved in politics.
Since Classical times, Greece has received even more outside genetic input and has become even more blended.
Untrue. Greece didn't received even more outside genetic input and did not become even more blended, small minorities assimilate and disappear.
If this is the key to greatness, why has Greece been going downhill since the Classical age?
Because the Romans appeared in history, that's why. Did you ever heard of the Byzantine Empire? Who has been going downhill since the Classical age? No one. We also contributed to the Roman civilization as well, without Greeks there is not Roman Empire.
Murphy (1941) takes a similar view to Angel's, but acknowledges another factor:
Wave after wave of Alpines and Mediterraneans continued to arrive in Greece from Roman times onward. But blending with these new arrivals never produced an efflorescence.
You don't have any proofs that this ever happened, Alpines and Mediterraneans were indigenous in Greece, they didn't arrive from anywhere. On the contrary, they moved from Greece and arrived in other countries, as colonists too.
W.D. Hamilton's (1975) theory is preferrable to that of Angel:
The incursions of barbaric pastoralists seem to do civilizations less harm in the long run than one might expect. Indeed, two dark ages and renaissances in Europe suggest a recurring pattern in which a renaissance follows an incursion by about 800 years. It may even be suggested that certain genes or traditions of pastoralists revitalize the conquered people with an ingredient of progress which tends to die out in a large panmictic population for the reasons already discussed. I have in mind altruism itself, or the part of the altruism which is perhaps better described as self-sacrificial daring. By the time of the renaissance it may be that the mixing of genes and cultures (or of cultures alone if these are the only vehicles, which I doubt) has continued long enough to bring the old mercantile thoughtfulness and the infused daring into conjunction in a few individuals who then find courage for all kinds of inventive innovation against the resistance of established thought and practice. Often, however, the cost in fitness of such altruism and sublimated pugnacity to the individuals concerned is by no means metaphorical, and the benefits to fitness, such as they are, go to a mass of individuals whose genetic correlation with the innovator must be slight indeed. Thus civilization probably slowly reduces its altruism of all kinds, including the kinds needed for cultural creativity (see also Eshel 1972).
Renaissance born in Europe because Greeks of the Byzantine Empire(after the fall of Constantinoupolis) moved there and gave their lights on civilization. Without Greeks there is no renaissance.
The peak of Greek civilization was only reached after the ingredient of progress had been introduced by the Indo-European invaders. By the time complete mediocrity set in, the disproportionately Nordic and Indo-European-descended aristocracy had all but disappeared.
Wrong, the Greeks had many civilizations that reached the peak you talking about, before the cataclysms. We never needed the imaginery indo-europeans or the unexisted nordics in Greece to built our civilization. Also the peak of Greek Athenian civilization came from his leader, Perikles, who was a typical Mediterranean Greek, not from imaginery nordics.
Lundman agrees that:
The racial structure of the old historical European peoples - the Greeks, Romans, and Celts - has been treated at length in my book Geographische Anthropologie (1967). Certainly, these peoples had, at least in their upper social strata, stronger Nordic components than the present inhabitants of these lands.
Never, in the case of Greece there was just some assimilated elements in the form of Iranian-Nordic, Mediterranean-Nordic, and Alpine-Nordic. Pure Nordic types never existed, they always were an insignificant minority as well as the other nordic elements .
Roger Pearson (1991) has suggested the possibility that Europe has suffered a severe dysgenic decline over the past two thousand years. If this is true, Greece, which today has perhaps the lowest average IQ in Europe, may have been particularly hard hit.
Make dreams.
Greek IQ :
dienekes.110mb.com/articles/greekiq/
On the other hand, it may well be that only the elite classes in ancient Greece were exceptionally intelligent.
Yes, the lower classes where the poor Socrates and many other philosophers belonged were unindelligent and the only intelligent were the unexisted nordics. Nordics always were barbarians and you learnt everything about civilization from the Romans, and with their turn, they learnt everything concerning civilization by the Greeks as well.
And, when the elites died out or were absorbed by the much more numerous masses, the intellectual power of Greece was dissipated.
There never was a "nordic-barbarian-elite" in Greece. Also Aristotelis as a teacher of Alexander the great, gave birth to the Alexandrian Empire, after the supposed dissipated intellectual power of Greece.