The Minoan civilization in Crete, the Hellenic civilization in mainland Greece and the Cycladic civilization on the Aegean islands, despite their differences in burial customs, architecture and art, had genetic similarities during the early Bronze Age about 5,000 years ago.
This is the finding of a new international scientific study of ancient DNA analysis of the region by Greek and foreign researchers, which sheds more light on the origins of the first major Bronze Age civilizations in Europe, the role of migrations and the emergence of Indo-European languages.
This is the first study that «read» (sequenced) complete genomes from skeletons found at various archaeological sites in the Aegean and the wider Greek area, specifically four from the Early Bronze Age and two from the Middle Bronze Age.
The mitochondrial genomes of 11 other early Bronze Age individuals were also analysed. The analysis of all these genomes allowed scientists to carry out demographic and statistical analyses and draw conclusions about the histories of the ancient populations of the region. Reading ancient DNA is a very difficult task due to the deterioration of such old biological material.
The researchers, led by Professor Christina Papageorgopoulou of the Laboratory of Natural Anthropology of the Department of History and Ethnology of the Democritus University of Thrace and Anna-Sappho Malaspina of the Department of Computational Biology of the University of Lausanne and the Swiss Bioinformatics Institute, who published the paper in the biology journal Cell, concluded that the first civilisations that built monumental palaces and urban centres in Europe are more genetically homogeneous than expected.
The findings, according to the researchers, are important because they suggest that important innovations such as the development of urban centres, the use of metals and intensive trade, which occurred during the transition from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age, were not only due to mass migration from the East to the Aegean, as was the prevailing view, but also to the cultural continuity of the local agricultural Neolithic populations of the Aegean. The Early Bronze Age populations of the Aegean, based on the palaeogenetic data, seem to have been shaped to a relatively small extent by migrations from the east.
On the other hand, the study found that by the Middle Bronze Age 4,000 to 4,600 years ago, individuals from the North Aegean had significant genetic differences compared to those in the Early Bronze Age. These people had about half (50%) of their ancestry in common with people from the Pontic-Caspian Steppe, a large geographical area that stretched between the Danube and Ural rivers and north of the Black Sea.
Also, based on genetic findings, today's Greeks are quite similar genetically to those populations of the North Aegean of 2,000 BC.
The study estimates that the migratory waves from the great steppe north of the Aegean shaped today's Greece. All these possible migratory waves, according to the researchers, preceded the emergence of the earliest form of the Greek language, thus supporting theories about the emergence of the Proto-Greek language and the evolution of Indo-European languages either in Anatolia or in the Pontus-Caspian steppe.
Many other Greek researchers from the Ephorates of Antiquities of Kozani and Florina, as well as the Universities of Democritus, Aristotle and the Aegean participated in the new study.
