Unraveling Roman Mobility: Archaeogenomic Insights from Anatolia to the Italian Peninsula

[arxaiogenetiki.blogspot]

This is what I'm getting at. This "Eastern" pull was just further progressive Anatolian genetic influence. There was also a simultaneous increase of EHG ancestry which corresponds to influence from the northern or north east Balkans, which should not be ignored as well. The differential input of both of these ancestries will likely create a north/south cline once we have more northern Greek samples to compare against our southern Greeks for these same time periods.

I think it's pretty much guaranteed given the profiles we have for Mycenaeans and Thracians, and the "Mycenaeanization" of the north as time went by (instead of the opposite). We might also see mixed Yamnaya & CWC steppe ancestry in the northern parts instead of just Yamnaya in Mycenaeans.

Speaking of which, I'm not sure that ancestry is from the Balkans based on the samples we got so far. Technically it makes sense, since Balkanic (Greek, Albanian, Armenian, Phrygian etc - Olander ed. 2022) is found in the Balkans but so far steppe ancestry in Balkanic samples is neither pure Yamnaya (which Mycenaeans have, a 1:10 Yamnaya:Minoan-like) nor actually from Yamnaya but closer to CWC and Bell Beaker. (Both Clemente et al 2021 and Skourtanioti et al 2023 show such pulls). I'm talking from anything up to Romania and Hungary down to the two Logkas samples. I guess the only viable vector from the Balkans are those early Yamnaya samples but then they have to be connected to not just Mycenaeans (they're pretty far off so far, not even geographically within Greece) but also all other Balkanic speakers, at least at some point. Then it's the chronological issue of language splits... bit complicated. Anyway my point is that we don't exactly know where this EHG ancestry is yet (although we know what it is - Yamnaya-like).

Back to Mycenaeans: autosomally, I doubt they have as much as 50% in their West Asian pull. The increase in CHG/Iran (to stabilize it back up to where it was in Minoans) corresponds more with a 20-30% at most after admixture with a steppe-carrying source. Or before - if we assume that Helladics was a secondary input from the East, which then was lowered due to 5-15% Yamnaya ancestry added later, it would still be around 20-30% at most. Don't forget that the "foundation" ancestry of Mycenaeans already had ~20% CHG/Iran itself, if this was brought down by the Yamnaya ancestry it would be to around 15% (since Yamnaya ancestry would have been 10-20% initially), and then going back up to ~20%. A +5% increase from Anatolia which we know harbored ~40% CHG/Iran ancestry means roughly 10-15% extra ancestry from there.

IBD will probably help a lot here although some of its calls will be due to shared Helladic-like ancestry with nearby populations (one of the Logkas samples actually does have a bit of this ancestry while the other doesn't).