Turks: Greek or Armenian?
A new paper on Turkey, The genetic structure of the Turkish population reveals high levels of variation and admixture: We delineated the fine-scale genetic structure of the Turkish population by […]
Turks are Anatolian under the hood, somewhat more Greek than Armenian
My post, Are Turks Armenians Under The Hood?, attracted a little bit of controversy. The main criticism, which was a valid one, is that I did not sample Anatolian Greeks. A reader passed on three Anatolian Greek samples. I also added a Cypriot data set. To my mild surprise, the Anatolian Greeks and Cypriots cluster […]
The sons of the wolf
When I am not feeling well I often watch Netflix, since my brain really operates at a lower level (passive, consumptive). Curiously I was recommended a Turkish series about the father of Osman (the founder of the Ottoman dynasty), Ertuğrul. I only watched a little bit of it, but it reminded me of the mini-series […]
Revenge of the herders
Let me make something explicit: I believe that the model outlined in First Farmers is too simple, and that extant patters of linguistic and genetic variation need to accept the likelihood of multiple population reorganizations across vast swaths of Eur…
Pathan parahistory
Mughal Emperor Akbar
In Strange Parallels Victor Lieberman made a reference to “Turkicized Pathans.” The very term has been gnawing at me. To get some sense of the context, Lieberman was sketching out the impact of Islamic civilization u…
Are Turks acculturated Armenians?
To the left you see a zoom in of a PCA which Dienekes produced for a post, Structure in West Asian Indo-European groups. The focus of the post is the peculiar genetic relationship of Kurds, an Iranian-speaking people, with Iranians proper, as well as Armenians (Indo-European) and Turks (not Indo-European). As you can see in […]
Of Iran, Turan, and Turks
There’s a new paper out in The European Journal of Human Genetics which is of great interest because it surveys the genetic and linguistic affinities of two dozen ethno-linguistic groups from the three Central Asian nations of Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. This is what the Greeks referred to as Transoxiana, and the Persians as […]