Οι Μινωίτες και οι
Μυκηναίοι
ήταν οι πρώτοι
προηγμένοι, εγγράμματοι
πολιτισμοί,
που εμφανίστηκαν
στην Ευρώπη
και ήταν Έλληνες
More than Myth:
Ancient DNA Reveals Roots
of 1st Greek Civilizations
By Megan Gannon
The Minoans and Mycenaeans were the first advanced, literate
civilizations to appear in Europe. They left archaeologists with a wealth of
material to pore over: palaces, golden jewelry, wall paintings, writing (some
of it still undeciphered) and, of course, burials, in what is today Greece.
Now, new research on Bronze Age skeletons could shed light on the
origins of the Minoan and Mycenaean people.
 |
| Μινωίτισσα χορεύτρια από τοιχογραφία 3.600 χρόνων! |
The study of ancient DNA suggests that there is genetic continuity between
the predecessors of these ancient cultures and Greeks today. The Minoan and
Mycenaean civilizations emerged from Aegean farming communities and gave rise
to the Greeks who built the Parthenon and developed democracy. The findings,
which were published online today (Aug. 2) in the journal Nature, also raise
some questions about prehistoric migrations that set the stage for the Bronze
Age.
ΠΕΡΙΣΣΟΤΕΡΑ για την ΜΙΝΩΙΚΗ ΚΡΗΤΗ, ΕΔΩ.
First Greek civilizations
The Minoans and Mycenaeans have intrigued archaeologists from the early
days of the discipline.
 |
| Η αρχαία ελληνική γραφή, γνωστή ως Γραμμική Β. |
German businessman and archaeology pioneer Heinrich Schliemann set out
in the 1870s to find the real-life remains of the heroic-era Homer described in
"The Odyssey" and "The Iliad."He uncovered gold-rich tombs
in the city of Mycenae, and since then, dozens more Mycenaean sites have been
studied across mainland Greece and the Aegean Islands. The civilization, which
lasted from about 1600 B.C. to 1100 B.C., produced the earliest written form of
the Greek language. [10 Beasts & Dragons: How Reality Made Myth]
Just a few decades after Schliemann's exploits, British archaeologist
Sir Arthur Evans revealed the ruins of a monumental, fresco-filled palace on
the Greek island of Crete that predated the Mycenaeans. He called this culture
"Minoan" after the mythical King Minos who ruled over Crete and
occasionally sacrificed young Athenians to the labyrinth-dwelling half-man, half-bull
Minotaur. The Minoans thrived on the island between 2700 B.C. and the mid-1400s
B.C., when the Thera volcanic eruption on Santorini in the southern Aegean Sea
may have triggered the culture’s collapse. Minoan script and hieroglyphs remain
untranslated, but the language is thought to be very different from Greek.
Finding their roots
Because of some iconographic similarities with Egyptian art, Evans
thought that the Minoans might have come from North Africa. In the century that
followed, others proposed theories about how the Minoans and the Mycenaeans
came about, wondering how much these cultures owed to other great civilizations
in Mesopotamia and Egypt, said study leader Iosif Lazaridis, a geneticist at
Harvard Medical School. "These theories have been difficult to test, but
with ancient DNA, it is possible to say something about the origins of the
people," Lazaridis told Live Science.
Lazaridis and his colleagues looked at ancient DNA samples from 19 sets
of human remains that had been found at Bronze Age tombs and burial sites in
the Aegeanregion. The researchers sequenced those ancient genomes and checked
the DNA against a database of 332 other ancient genomes and thousands of
genomes of present-day humans.
Genetically, the Minoans and Mycenaeans had the most in common with
early Neolithic farmers from Greece and Turkey, the researchers found. The
genomes of the Minoans and the Mycenaeans were also similar to those of modern
Greek populations and to each other — for the most part.
The study found that the Minoans and Mycenaeans got some of their DNA
from populations farther east, from places like the Caucasus (the area between
the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea) and Iran. However, only the Mycenaeans
seemed to have some "northern" ancestry, which the authors speculate
could represent the vestiges of a massive prehistoric migration of nomadic
herders from the Eurasian steppe that eventually made it to mainland Greece but
not Crete. Lazaridis was involved in a previous ancient-DNA study that pointed
to such a migration as the potential source of Indo-European languages (a
category that includes Greek).
John Bintliff, an archaeologist at Leiden University in the Netherlands
who was not involved in the study, said some of the findings resonate with
current ideas on the Minoans and Mycenaeans. For example, the fact that the
Mycenaeans spoke Greek but the Minoans spoke a different, still untranslated
tongue "has long suggested that the mainland and Crete were subjected to
different streams of farming migrants," Bintliff told Live Science.
However, Bintliff cautioned against looking for big historic events in
gene diffusion.
"The supposed 'nomad invasion' has been a long-researched issue in
European prehistory, and was originally tied to innovations in weaponry and burial
customs," Bintliff said. "After decades of investigation, however,
most prehistorians in Eastern to Western Europe disagreed with any major
arrival of new people …Gene flow can occur presumably through individual
smaller-scale migration of a peaceful kind, through commerce and the movement
of artisans and other specialists."
Lazaridis said further research could potentially help scientists
understand how these "eastern" and "northern" types of
ancestry got in the DNA of Bronze Age Greeks, whether by trickling in slowly
from neighboring regions over thousands of years, or bysudden big migrations.
SOURCE-ΠΗΓΗ: Live Science, August
03, 2017. ΑΡΧΕΙΟΝ ΠΟΛΙΤΙΣΜΟΥ, 4.8.2017.
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