[HN Gopher] Balkan genomes trace the rise/fall of Roman Empire's...
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Balkan genomes trace the rise/fall of Roman Empire's frontier,
migrations
Author : wglb
Score : 79 points
Date : 2023-12-08 04:48 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (phys.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (phys.org)
| nixass wrote:
| Balkans are such a historical cultural melting point it's no
| wonder why major world conflicts started there and reason why
| conflicts are far from over in that region (looking at you
| Serbia)
| simion314 wrote:
| I am not sure what you mean by "started", the region was at the
| intersection of big empires that fought each other and the
| people there were caught in the middle trying to survive by
| chosing the least worse of the empires.
|
| I would say the conflicts are started in the capitals of the
| big empires/powers.
| bojan wrote:
| There is an extremely nationalist and warmongering rethoric
| coming from official Belgrade for decades now. I don't see
| how foreign capitals have anything to do with that.
| simion314 wrote:
| I was referring at the past history.
|
| That history causes the feelings Seribans have, I can see
| why they are frustrated, but I agree politicians usually
| use this to gain more votes instead of finding a way to
| look forward.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't start nationalistic flamewars on HN.
|
| I realize the OP has some overlap with inflammatory content but
| that's not a reason to start flamewars, it's a reason _not_ to
| start them.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| ardit33 wrote:
| Nothing new here. Basically the genetics, matches the historical
| accounts. We know (by historical accounts) that the slavic
| immigration started in the end of the 6th century, after the
| death of Justinian the Great, where the successors lost
| territories and few battles and could properly defend the
| frontier. (avar wars).
|
| Also, after the Justinian plague (541-549 AD) a lot of the local
| population was decimated, hence the new slavic arrivals found it
| easier/space to move to the country side (initially as a trickle
| of immigration in the late 6th century, then eventually as
| settlers/invaders later in the early 7th century).
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| No, the genetic factor itself is something new here, and
| interesting even to this reader with an academic background in
| a related field. Florin Curta (a very respected scholar
| overall) has held out against the mainstream view of a Slavic
| migration into the Balkans on the basis of a supposed lack of
| archaeological evidence. So, I suspect that many scholars, as
| soon as they learn of this news about the ancient DNA, will
| immediately think "Hmm, I wonder what Curta has to say to
| that."
| gumballindie wrote:
| > such as a woman of Eastern European descent buried in a high
| imperial cemetery
|
| Now there's an east european race?
|
| > people attracted by the wealth Rome invested in its frontier
| zone
|
| Are they saying people crossed the border to find jobs? Perhaps
| illegally?
|
| Who pays for such nonsense?
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| The article didn't say "race" at all. Its wording tries to
| simplify, for a mass audience, the research that found at this
| Balkan site DNA that is mainly associated with sites in the
| east of Europe. Across archaeology and linguistics, there has
| been an archaeogenetics revolution in the last 15 years or so
| that enables tracing historical migrations like never before.
|
| I don't know why you think "attracted to the wealth Rome
| invested in its frontier zone" is a wording that implies
| jobseekers. It can obviously mean opportunities for pillaging,
| which peoples of the Eurasian steppe did for centuries. It can
| mean making use of convenient infrastructure left behind when
| the Roman military retreated from certain holdings.
| gumballindie wrote:
| > archaeogenetics revolution in the last 15 years
|
| Unfortunately none of that is passed on to said audience, as
| can been in comments that claim ancient europe followed
| burial or genetic patterns aligned with a cold war era
| political classification of the region.
|
| It would be comical if not tragic that we actually fund
| people producing such "research". I am less and less
| surprised that some think we can replace them with chat bots
| given how low quality the output is.
| ZunarJ5 wrote:
| This is an incredibly ignorant take. Tracing these lineages
| has implications on everything from climate, geography,
| history, politics etc.
| gumballindie wrote:
| Yup, and this "research" mis traces it. A low quality
| piece aimed at ignorant readers that project their's
| upstream.
| jWhick wrote:
| 100% agree with this.
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| Your posts here are so incoherent, it's not clear what you
| are complaining about. Is it the term "Eastern European"?
| That isn't a "Cold War-era classification" at all. The use
| of "Eastern European" in the archaeology and linguistics of
| the region goes back to the term _Osteuropa_ in the
| foundational 19th-century literature.
|
| If you lack any familiarity with this field enough to know
| that, then it would be wise to refrain from making
| pronouncements on the worthiness of this research. Also,
| the HN submission is a pop-sci article created by that
| university's PR, it is not the actual research. The actual
| research can be found in the mentioned journal.
| dang wrote:
| " _Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents._ "
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| Edit: we had to ask you this pretty recently:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37636566. If you'd please
| review the site guidelines and use HN as intended, we'd
| appreciate it.
| gumballindie wrote:
| My apologies, will take a break from commenting as to better
| understand the guidelines. However, it would be great if
| there was higher tolerance for calling content such as this
| out. The article at hand and research behind it do nothing
| more but to perpetuate a false image of east europe being a
| monobloc of cultures, ethnicities, and genetic structures.
| Defending that while censoring critique is far from ideal.
| tuzemec wrote:
| Not sure who was saying that the Balkans produce much more
| history than they can consume.
|
| Maybe Churchill?
| Ivovosk wrote:
| Don't know who it was but it's 100% true
| paganel wrote:
| I can also confirm this.
|
| I've driven by car from Bucharest to Methoni (at the South-
| Western tip of the Peloponnese) this past autumn and early on
| during the trip I started counting the battle-places I was
| passing by: Giurgiu and the 1812 war between Tsarist Russia
| and the Ottomans, Pleven and the 1878 war between the same
| Tsarist Russia and the Ottomans, driving down towards
| Thessaloniki I was thinking about the cemeteries of Western
| WW1 soldiers located nearby, I spent my night somewhere
| between Kozani and Ioannina, in Northern Greece, which had
| been a very active front in the Greek Civil War, next day I
| passed close to Missolonghi, passed on the magnificent bridge
| at Patras close to where the Lepanto battle had taken place,
| and then on to the Peloponnese and Methoni itself. But not
| before passing close to the ancient Old Navarino castle
| nearby Pylos, the same Pylos where the naval Battle of Pylos
| took place during the Peloponnesian War, shortly followed by
| the Battle of Sphacteria. And Methoni itself was the location
| of three battles [1] involving the Venetians and the
| Ottomans.
|
| And then, on my way back, I visited the exceptional Mystras
| Archeological Site [2], seeing Western Gothic architecture as
| a part of the Byzantine/East-Roman complex, in the middle of
| the Peloponnese, was really a very cool experience, highly
| recommend it.
|
| Btw, speaking of the Slavs and the Southern Peloponnese and
| Mystras, the nearby mountains had been inhabited by this
| Slavic tribe back in the day, the Melingoi [3], I hadn't know
| that before physically visiting those places
|
| > The Melingoi or Milingoi (Greek: Meliggoi) were a Slavic
| tribe that settled in the Peloponnese in southern Greece
| during the Middle Ages.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Modon
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystras
|
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melingoi
| avtolik wrote:
| Well, if we talk about battles, they seem to be very common
| in whole of Europe, according to this map:
| https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FAH3_cHXoAAgy22.jpg (taken from
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HK5OsDWYJmQ)
|
| Although I'm not sure if this isn't because Europe has more
| written history than the other places.
| paganel wrote:
| The other regions of Europe don't include that big of a
| timespan, from 400-500 BCE to the contemporary era. The
| only exception is the Italian peninsula and its Northern
| region (the Po Plain). That's what also made a guy like
| Byron to fight and die at Missolonghi, doing it on some
| desolate field in Northern France or present-day Belgium
| would have meant nothing for him.
| pvg wrote:
| Byron didn't fight there and died of disease, not combat.
| Gare wrote:
| It is misattributed, he never said that:
| https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Winston_Churchill#Misattribu...
| INTPenis wrote:
| This confirms what I already knew, as a millennial Croat. But I
| have some older relatives who could stand to read this.
| Unfortunately none of them can read english.
| foobarian wrote:
| Do you think so? It looks like it just confirms the "from the
| century 7th" narrative (actually pushes it earlier a century if
| anything!) :-)
| Gare wrote:
| They probably mean the part about Croats and Serbs being
| genetically almost the same. But this is also not something
| surprising to me.
| INTPenis wrote:
| Not the centuries specifically, more the fact that the whole
| region has always been, and still is, a melting pot of people
| from all surrounding regions.
|
| A lot of the older generation are trying to emphasize our
| differences and even make wild claims that I won't repeat
| here. Those borders were drawn by people who are very
| similar.
| Swizec wrote:
| My favorite funfact from high school history class in Slovenia is
| that the reason we have such good records of how Slavs migrated
| into the area is that we can track when churches stopped sending
| regular reports back to Rome. Slavs come into the area, sack the
| church, church goes dark.
|
| It's a shame early Slavs didn't have writing. When we got
| Christianized later, it destroyed much of our older culture and
| it would be cool to know more about those roots. We know the
| eastern slavs had vampires and werewolves, did we? We know old
| folk tales mention faeries and kings sleeping in caves for
| centuries and even the Greek Argonauts, but it's all very
| fragmented. It would be nice to know more.
|
| A lot of our (Slovenian, probably Croatian) folk tales mix with
| even older tales from the celts who used to live in the area.
| It's all very fascinating and largely lost because first the
| Romanization of the Celts and later the Christianization of the
| Slavs were both quite aggressive.
|
| Another funfact: The oldest wooden wheel was found in my home
| town -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ljubljana_Marshes_Wheel
| seydor wrote:
| they talk about the fall of roman empire, but the empire
| continued in constantinople
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| At that point was it an Empire, or simply a Kingdom with the
| King called an Emperor?
| seydor wrote:
| Empire
| leiaru13 wrote:
| The amount of division in the Balkans -- especially in the last
| 20-30 years -- has never made much sense to me, given how close
| culturally and ethnically most of the population is. This only
| confirms that the fragmentation of the region is driven more from
| the creation of 'national myths' than on genetic differences
| between different groups of people.
| Swizec wrote:
| > This only confirms that the fragmentation of the region is
| driven more from the creation of 'national myths' than on
| genetic differences
|
| Always has been. You think there was such a thing as "French" a
| thousand years ago? Are people from Munich really that
| different than Vienna? Do folks in Geneva really differ deeply
| from people in Lyon?
|
| Europe is _very small_. From Kyev, capital of Ukraine, to
| Ljubljana, capital of Slovenia, it's about the same distance as
| San Francisco to Los Angeles. Yet it crosses 3 countries.
|
| Kings and governments come and go, but the people stay. My
| great grandma, for example, lived in 4 different countries
| without leaving her village.
| pxeboot wrote:
| > Europe is very small.
|
| For another US reference point: the entire European Union is
| about the same size as Alaska.
| pvg wrote:
| https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=area+of+alaska+vs+area
| +...
|
| EU is a lot bigger than Alaska and there's a lot of Europe
| it doesn't cover.
| fhars wrote:
| In Mercator projection?
| pvg wrote:
| _Kyev, capital of Ukraine, to Ljubljana, capital of Slovenia,
| it's about the same distance as San Francisco to Los
| Angeles._
|
| One is a bit over 500 km and the other is about 1300 km. It's
| not meaningfully 'about the same distance'. It's an enourmous
| distance to hit only three European countries, though, you
| can do this in much less time/distance driving around nearby
| Trieste or Bratislava.
| Swizec wrote:
| Huh you're right. Maybe I was remembering border to border
| air distance. Was looking this up a few years ago when
| friends were asking how far Ukraine was from my family.
|
| Here's a more fun context instead: after college I went on
| a roadtrip and covered 13 countries in about 4000 miles.
| pvg wrote:
| You started some sort of Europeshrinking conspiracy here,
| check out the sibling comment that's off by a similar
| factor but for area.
| hammock wrote:
| Doesn't have to be large groups to be different groups. That
| seems like a fallacious argument.
|
| Empirically/anecdotally I bet quite a few people could with
| 90%+ accuracy pick a (third-generation) Iberian vs Frank vs
| Polack vs Scandi out of a lineup just by physical features
|
| Alternatively take a reasonably deep look at American (North
| or South) indigenous tribal societies- the empirical history
| is thinner there but similar conclusions
| SenAnder wrote:
| Europe may be small, yet there are measurable genetic
| differences between its peoples:
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2735096/
|
| Looking at a larger, but still relatively closely connected
| region, magnifies those differences further:
| https://site.nevgen.org/2020/05/05/autosomal-pca-charts-
| of-e...
| Nthringas wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divide_and_rule
|
| if governance were a technical field (which it is)
|
| that idea would be like a theorem
|
| the remaining puzzle is who is really "ruling" the balkans?
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(page generated 2023-12-09 23:01 UTC)