Are the Greeks "still" Indo-European? Were they ever?

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. 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.

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).

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.'"

Update: In fact, new research is suggesting that much of the "Neolithic" ancestry in Greece represents gene flow from after the Neolithic.

Have the Greeks changed since antiquity?

Of course. The old aristocracy, responsible for much of the greatness of ancient Greece, certainly no longer exists. That, in itself, is a big enough change. Even the peasants have changed, though the exact degree to which the Greek goatherd of today is descended from the ancient Greek goatherd is an open question.

Everyone knows about the major Slavic and Albanian influxes into Greece. 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. 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)

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.

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. 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; 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. Richards et al. (2002) find a "very high frequency (~20%) of recent gene flow" in eastern Mediterranean Europe.

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. Angel also believes that in Classical times, Athens absorbed a large population of slaves and metics.

Pete Sampras. So, have the Greeks "changed since antiquity"? You tell me. (Note that while Sampras is apparently a quarter Jewish, I am assured by certain Greeks that he is entirely modern Greek in appearance.)

Obviously, the Greek gene pool has received a great deal of outside input, which makes sense, based on Greece's location and history. Angel tries to stress the continuity of the Athenian people, but it's hard to see what's so continuous about an originally Mediterranean population which today is brachycephalic and largely Alpine, 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.

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:

    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. 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. . .

    "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)

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. Since Classical times, Greece has received even more outside genetic input and has become even more blended. If this is the key to greatness, why has Greece been going downhill since the Classical age?

Murphy (1941) takes a similar view to Angel's, but acknowledges another factor:

    . . . which can be deduced from Darwin's work in general and which later researches have brought more into the light. It appears that the human racial crossings which produce the most marked instances of efflorescence in genius and ability, take place among the varieties which are comparatively akin to each other and that, on the contrary, where the varieties which hybridize are distant from each other in type . . . there is a deficiency in the production of superior ability.

Murphy mentions "conquering hordes . . . from the Eurasian steppes" settling the Fertile Crescent and "creating a highly developed civilization"; and he mentions a process "'seen in ancient Greece or the Florentine Renaissance; first a migration of peoples (immigration of strong, warlike races), then, for centuries, a relative intellectual calm, and, finally, a period of abundant genius.'" It's not clear why those events should be explained in terms of blending of racial types, rather than in say, the blending of cultures, the imposition of important elements of the invading cultures on the new lands, or the acquisition by the "warlike races" of resources which allow them to fulfill their innate potential. Murphy does suggest that "mingling of the successive waves of immigrants" may be more important than "the crossing of the invading people with aborigines".

It would certainly seem that the composition of the immigrants is of key importance, regardless of whether or not "hybrid vigor" plays some role. These periods of greatness were invariably followed by periods of decline or mediocrity, accompanied by continuing or increased blending of racial elements. 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". 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).

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. 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.

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. On the other hand, it may well be that only the elite classes in ancient Greece were exceptionally intelligent. And, when the elites died out or were absorbed by the much more numerous masses, the intellectual power of Greece was dissipated.

Negroids in ancient Greece

RM claims:

    "There’s no evidence that blacks were at all present in Ancient Greece"

The above statement is blatantly false.

In his book Race, John R. Baker writes that:

    Evans provides a few pictures of persons showing Negrid characters, and suggests that 'partly negroized elements' may have been brought to Crete as captives. (517)

(Before you afrocentrists get your hopes up, know that Baker makes clear: "No one has ever suggested, on evidence either from skulls or pictures, that any non-Europid people participated in the origin or development of Cretan civilization.")

An Ethiopian living in Greece in the 1st century A.D. "Memnon, Ethiopian favorite of Sophist Herodes Atticus"

The presence of Negroid or partially-Negroid types in Greece is confirmed by cranial evidence. J.L. Angel reports:

    In my own skeletal samples from Greece I note apparent negroid nose and mouth traits in two of fourteen Early Neolithic (sixth millenium B.C.), only two or three more among 364 from fifth to second millenium B.C., one among 113 Early Iron Age, one or two among 233 Classic and Hellenistic skeletons, but four clear Negroids (all from one area of Early Christian Corinth) among ninety-five Roman period, two among eighty-five Medieval, and of course ten among fifty-two Turkish period Greeks, yet none among 202 of Romantic (nineteenth century) date.

Frank Snowden has researched the presence of blacks in the ancient Greece from the standpoint of art and literature. His findings include:

    Both the literary and archaeological evidence points to a not infrequent crossing between blacks and whites. Nothing in the observations on such unions, whether marriage or concubinage, resembles certain modern strictures on racial mixture.

    Of course one reason for the color bar which recently existed in the West was the belief that it was race mixing which led to the collapse of Greek, Roman, and other civilizations. . . .

    No laws in the Greco-Roman world prohibited unions of blacks and whites. Ethiopian blood was interfused with that of Greeks and Romans. No Greek or Roman author condemned such racial mixture. . . . The scientists Aristotle and Pliny, like Plutarch, commented as scientists on the physical appearance of those born of black-white racial mixture but included nothing resembling certain modern strictures on miscegenation. . . . It is safe to assume, therefore, that in course of time many Ethiopians were assimilated into a predominantly white population. (Blacks in Antiquity, 193-195)

With respect to the number of blacks in ancient Greece, Snowden states:

    Even though we cannot state, in the manner of modern sociologists and historians,the ratio of Blacks to Whites in either Greece or Italy, we can say that Ethiopians were by no means few or rare sights and that their presence, whatever their numbers, constituted no color problem. (Blacks in Antiquity, 186)

Most slaves in Greece were Caucasoid. But, since slaves were a large fraction of the population, even if blacks made up a small minority of slaves many may have been present. A Greek source gives a figure of 400,000 slaves in Attica in 317 BC, compared to 21,000 adult male citizens and 10,000 adult male metics (resident aliens). While modern authors recognize that the 400,000 figure "must be wrong" (Webster 1973, 41), it seems that all Athenians who could afford to owned slaves, and some owned up to 1,000. In the end, Webster estimates that slaves made up roughly a third of the population of Athens (62,000 out of a total population of 186,000 -- personally, I think this may be an underestimate). If one third of the remaining population consisted of metics, that means that less than half the inhabitants of Athens were citizens.

Negroid admixture in Greece

Considering the foregoing, it should come as no surprise that Richards et al. (2000) detected Ethiopian mtDNA haplogroup M1 in Greece. Additionally, sub-Saharan Y-chromosome haplogroup A (most common among Khoisians and Ethiopians) was found in an individual from Mitilini (Di Giacomo et al. in press). Other sub-Saharan haplogroups are found in Greece's neighbors. Note, Greece remains relatively little studied with respect to population genetics. The few relevant studies that have been done have fairly small sample sizes. It's too early to say much about levels of sub-Saharan mtDNA markers compared to other countries in Europe. In any event, exact levels of recent sub-Saharan mtDNA and Y-chromosome markers aren't all that relevant, since larger amounts of Negroid genes may have entered Greece via Negroid-admixed, E3b-carrying North African males.

E3b, the most common Y-chromosome haplogroup in Greece, "probably originated in eastern Africa" (Semino et al. 2004). It has been proposed that the most frequent E3b subclade in Greece, E-M78, which accounts for nearly half of Peloponnesian Y-chromosomes (Cruciani et al. 2004), originated in Somalia (Sanchez et al. 2003). Bearing in mind the above, it is perhaps not so surprising that the much maligned study "HLA Genes in Macedonians and the sub-Saharan Origin of the Greeks" independently reported a genetic connection between Ethiopians and Greeks (Arnaiz-Villena et al. 2001).

In addition to ancient admixture, some Negroid admixture may have accrued to Greece during Ottoman times. Buxton and Rice (1931) mention that "in Cyprus there is a greater proportion of platyrrhiny among the lower classes than in other social strata, but this is perhaps due to the importation of negro slaves by the Turks." Angel (1945) mentions a "Turkish period skeleton" from Athens, "which is unquestionably the remains of a Negroid individual, though possibly with very slight white admixture." Interestingly, 4.3% of Y-chromosomes in a sample of Turkish Cypriots are sub-Saharan (Cruciani et al. 2004; values for Greek Cypriots aren't reported).

Mongoloid admixture in Greece

In addition to Negroid admixture, there is clear genetic evidence for Mongoloid admixture in Greece. In a sample of 118 Greeks, "HpaI morph 1 [a Mongoloid marker] was detected for the first time in a European sample" (Astrinidis 1994).

3% of Greek Y-chromosomes belong to HG26, a haplogroup which is found at high frequencies in some Mongoloid populations. However, the presence of HG26 is not -- as Dienekes once claimed -- proof of Mongoloid ancestry, since HG26 is defined by a very old mutation (HG26 is ancestral to the common European haplogroup HG1). The original bearers of HG26 were most likely either Caucasoid, or of a racial type ancestral to both Caucasoids and Mongoloids. Regardless, many Asian steppe populations belong predominantly to Y-chromosome haplogroups which are also found in Europe (HG26, HG1), making it difficult to assess the male Mongoloid contribution in Greece with the data we currently have. I expect that further study will demonstrate Central Asian ancestry in Greece, as has already been demonstrated in nearby countries.

Mongoloid and Central Asian mtDNA and Y markers are present on the Croatian island Hvar.

    Worthy of note is the finding of considerable frequency of haplogroup P*(xM173) in the population of the island of Hvar. According to Wells et al this lineage displays maximum in Central Asia while being rare in Europe, Middle East and East Asia. Its presence in Hvar recapitulates our finding of mtDNA haplogroup F on the island of Hvar and in mainland Croatian population that is virtually absent in Europe but, again, common in populations from Central and Eastern Asia. There are several possibilities for the occurrence of the ancestral lineage of M173. One is the well-documented alliance of Avars (a Mongol people) and Slavs (Croatians) that followed Avar arrival to the eastern Adriatic in 6th century AD. The other is the expansion of the Ottoman Empire from the 16th to 18th century AD when refugees from the western Balkan frequently immigrated to the islands. Lastly, the ancient Silk Road linking China with western Asia and Europe could be a possible path of P(xM173) lineage, too. Any of these migratory patterns could have introduced this mutation to the investigated population. (Barac et al. 2003)

Paleolithic European HG1 is marked with the M173 mutation. As noted above, P*(xM173) is found in Croatia, indicating the presence of Central Asian genes in the Balkans. It would be interesting to see what proportion of the HG1 in Greece is marked with M173, but I'm not aware of any studies which have reported this data.

In Anatolia, "[t]he most reliable estimates suggest roughly 30% Central Asian admixture for both mitochondrial and Y-chromosome loci" (Di Benedetto et al. 2001). Since there is no strong genetic barrier seperating Greece and Anatolia (see, for example, Simoni et al. 1999), there is no reason to believe modern Greeks have been shielded from the significant Central Asian input in their neighbors.

It should be obvious from history and geography that Greeks have more Mongoloid ancestry than, e.g., Germans; just as Hungarians no doubt have more Mongoloid admixture than western Europeans, so to do Greeks. And Greeks certainly have vastly more Mongoloid admixture than the British. See below for examples of Greek celebrities with obvious Mongoloid admixture.

Photographs of Greeks

Some of the "Greek" celebrities RM has posted are probably not fully Greek by ancestry. For example, Bob Costas' full name is "Robert Quinlan Costas". Unless someone can think of a better reason why a "Greek" would have an Irish surname for a middle name, I'll take this piece of evidence to mean Costas is probably half-Irish. It is hard to confirm whether or not the other Greek-Americans RM has posted are of full Greek ancestry. For example, I've heard that Alexi Lalas is only half-Greek.

Typical Greeks:

Corina Stergiaou (left), "a very typical Greek woman", says Dienekes; Pete Sampras (right), "looks entirely Greek", according to Pontian Greek and amateur anthropologist Dienekes Pontikos.

Greek students:

Ethnic Greeks enrolled at UK and US universities.

Some Greek celebrities with visible Mongoloid ancestry:

L-R: Ioanna Soulioti; Marios Fragkoulis; Yanna Lyberi

More Greeks with apparent non-European ancestry:

L-R: Vana Barba (Negroid strain?); K. Dmitris Tsatsos (Hither Asiatic); Unknown (Orientalid strain?)

In the interest of bandwidth, I'll leave it at that. Though, if I wished to, I could list a dozen genuinely non-European-looking Greeks for every "Hamito-Semitic" Briton RM has posted.

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