2022: The Southern Arc

In August of 2022, Josef Lazardis, Songül Alpaslan-Roodenberg and a large group of researchers including noted American geneticist David Reich released a set of three papers regarding a genetic continuum they refer to as The Southern Arc.

The Southern Arc refers to a swath of territory stretching from the Baklans, Greece, Anatolia, Armenia and Mesopotamia and Levant.  The papers released DNA from 727 individuals from this region allowing researchers to draw some very new and intriguing conclusions with implications for Neolithic, Bronze Age, Iron Age, and Classical Era migrations in and out of this region.  Of note were one G-M3302 sample from Byzantine era Stratonikeia off of the Aegean in Southwest Turkey.  This sample is placed on Y-Full at G-FTB39527

Josef Lazardis, Songül Alpaslan-Roodenberg et al. accomplish this by breaking up their research results into three papers:

-Ancient DNA from Mesopotamia suggests distinct Pre-Potter and Pottery Neolithic migrations into Anatolia

-The genetic history of the Southern Arc: A bridge between West Asia and Europe

Key data shows evidence for a Proto-Indo-Anatolian group present in Armenia and Eastern Turkey may have been the ancestral population responsible for the Anatolian language family and the Proto-Indo-European language family.  The paper suggests that individuals carrying Caucasus, Levantine, and Anatolian Neolithic DNA crossed into the Pontic Steppe possibly bringing an early form of the PIE language with them. Meanwhile, the ancestors of the Hittites, Luwians, and Palaic peoples eventually migrated westward from easter Anatolia spreading their own branch of the language family.

-A genetic probe into the ancient and medieval history of Southern Europe and West Asia

Key data shows that Anatolian immigrants contributed to a huge genetic shift in the population of Italy in the Roman Imperial Era.  Data regarding ancient samples from Greek colonies in Asia Minor and Pontic regions indicated Greeks mixed with the indigenous populations there in contrast to the far flung Spanish colony of Empúries where Greek colonists seemed to "segregate themselves socially and reproductively."

The era of Greek colonization

"Although we do not yet have rich sampling of the peoples of the Greek colonial world, systematic sampling of diverse Greek colonies spread over the Mediterranean and Black Sea coasts would make it possible to systematically test for evidence of specific metropolis-colony connections and document the extent to which migration, admixture with local populations, and genetic heterogeneity played a role in Greek colonization."

"...we do not find Mycenaean-like individuals either at first millennium BCE Greek colony sites, such as Halicarnassus (modern Bodrum), or Amisos (modern Samsun) in the Aegean and Black Sea regions, respectively. This pattern is qualitatively different from that at Empúries in Iberia and is consistent with the account of Herodotus that early Greek colonists of Anatolia married indigenous Carian women of Anatolia when they first settled there (Hdt. 1.146). It is also reminiscent of the marriages of Alexander himself and his companions with local women of the conquered Persian Empire (Arr. An. 7.4.4ff). Clearly, Greeks segregated themselves socially and reproductively from nonGreeks in some parts of the Greek world and not in others; an important topic for future research is to identify the factors that correlated with Greeks mixing with peoples from local communities."

The Anatolian origins of the population of the Roman-Byzantine Empire

"A paleogenomic time transect of the city of Rome in Central Italy (28) identified an ancestry shift toward the Near East during the Imperial period (27 BCE to 300 CE) but was unable to localize the origin of the migrants driving this phenomenon."

"[We]....found that the Italian and Anatolian individuals clustered together with those of preRoman Anatolia, whereas pre-Imperial people around the city of Rome were systematically different. This suggests that the Roman Empire in both its shorter-lived western part and the longer-lasting eastern centered on Anatolia had a diverse but similar population plausibly drawn, to a substantial extent, from Anatolian pre-Imperial sources"

"...although the Roman Republic prevailed in its existential military struggle against the Anatolians.....the final incorporation of Anatolia into the Roman Empire and the increased connectivity that ensued may have set the stage for the very same Anatolians to become the demographic engine of Imperial Rome itself. This recreated, in historical time, the mythical journey of Aeneas and his Trojan exiles from Anatolia to the shores of Italy."