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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 7, 2023

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This ignores the fact that there is little genetic or ethnic continuity between the 'Greeks' of 1600 BC (Minoans), the 'Greeks' of 300 BC ('Achaeans') and the modern 'Greeks'.

Minoans were pre-Indo-Europeans, who survived the invasions of the 3rd millennium BC, of mostly Neolithic Farmer/Anatolian extract.

The Achaeans were descendants of the Myceneans, who were themselves heavily diluted genetically, but still largely culturally, Indo-European. They were relatively genetically similar to the pre-IE population (i.e. Minoan-like) of Greece, with a minority admixture of Indo-European.

The modern Greeks (with the caveat that there is high variance between e.g. remote island populations and areas like Macedonia/Salonika) are descendants of those Achaean Greeks PLUS huge population exchanges in the Roman period (from Syria, from Africa, from Germania) AND large Slavic admixture in the Byzantine-Ottoman period.

In the classical period, similarly to India, Indo-European admixture decreased as you went south down the peninsula. If we think of Classical Greek ethnicity as essentially Indo-European culture sitting on top of a 1/3 Proto-Greek/IE, 2/3 Minoan-like genetic base, ironically modern Greeks are closest to the northern Mycenaeans- this is due to thousands of years of Slavic admixture (especially during the Middle Ages) increasing the IE/EHG/Steppe Herder genetics.

Picture looks something like:

Age 1, Minoan and Minoan-like 'Greeks': culturally Non-Indo-European, genetically mostly Neolithic farmer, non-Indo-European

Age 2, Mycenae->Classical Greece: culturally Indo-European, genetically 25% IE, 75% 'Minoan'

Modern Greeks: culturally Christian Orthodox/Southern European, genetically similar 33% IE/66% Non-IE

I don't think there is a ton of meaningful sense in which this is one ethnicity. The Greece of Aristotle has been wholly subsumed as a small part of the mixture of Slavs and Levantines and Anatolians, and the culture is gone. It was only really revived as a LARP by Philhellenes of the early 19th Century.