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The genes of Spartacus

180px-Spartacus_StatuePLoS GENETICS has finally published the paper which reported on the Iron Age Thracian ancient DNA results, Population Genomic Analysis of Ancient and Modern Genomes Yields New Insights into the Genetic Ancestry of the Tyrolean Iceman and the Genetic Structure of Europe. This seems to be a work which is an improvement on the margins, though it is adding solidity to a somewhat muddled picture of migrations and mixing in prehistory. It is important as the authors themselves admit that inferences from ancient DNA are constrained by the fact that we just don’t have that many samples. Basically everyone is attempting construct models predicated on the samples that we have, but that often leads us astray, even if the results themselves are trustworthy.

I should mention that the image above is of Spartacus, who was famously a Thracian. It is in Bulgaria, which covers part of ancient Thrace. But from the genetics that I’ve seen I’m rather sure now that the Slavic migrations had a very strong impact on Southeast Europe, and modern Bulgarians are far more “hunter-gatherer” than the ancient ones were. This points us to the complexity and nuance of historical-cultural memory. Bulgaria derives from the name of the Bulgars, who were Turkic. But modern Bulgarians speak a Slavic language, not ancient Thracian, and I think it is likely that they have at least as much exogenous Slavic ancestry as they do ancient Thracian (and by late antiquity in any case most people in Thrace were speaking Greek or Latin).

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