Greeks are close to Jews, and Lebanese are far from Arabs

Monday, August 21st, 2017

Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Pierre Zalloua share some recent genetic discoveries that neither Antisemitic Nordic Supremacists nor Arab Nationalists will like:

1) Greeks were close to Jews, as the “Aryan” theory is genetically bogus & 2) Lebanese (both Christian and Moslem) are very far from being Arabs (the historical accounts of Arab migrations to Lebanon are fiction).

Comments

  1. Graham says:

    I’ve been following some of the latest with interest, which, IIRC, amounts to:

    Egyptians today have about 17% (?) peninsular Arab and some SSA, which for the most part they lacked in ancient times. However, they remain mostly the descendants of the ancients. [I'm curious if there is anything different about the Copts at this point or if the whole population is so well-founded on the ancient roots that the Copts do not stand out at all.]

    The ancient Egyptians were mostly European/Mediterranean First Farmer stock, in common with the whole Med littoral including Berbers, Libyans, Levantines, presumably many of the earlier Anatolians, Minoans &Myceneans mostly as well [and the last 2 demonstrated mostly to be the same people], and with the Sardinians the most similar people today.

    Or something like that. I hope I got that close.

    Between the latest papers, Taleb, and some Razib Khan, I am under the impression that First Farmer stock was not genocided by the Indo-European/Yamnaya whatevers coming in so much as overlain to differing degrees depending on things like the geography.

    I’m pretty OK with all that information.

    Glad the Egyptians and Lebanese have their historical depth and national mythos so well substantiated.

    Don’t really bother about the Greeks. I don’t immediately recall- Hitler famously thought Himmler was an idiot when he went on and on about the ancient Germans when ‘the Greeks already had an advanced culture’ but I don’t know what Hitler thought the Greeks were. Did even he think they were “Nordics”?

    Looking at the whole matter of admixture events in Europe, I am also wondering what Gimbutas got right and wrong, and to what degree modern knowledge can map onto the simpler conception of older anthropology that divided Europeans into overlapping Mediterranean, Alpine and Nordic subcategories. That maps more onto the Mediterranean data than a focus on “Indo-European” ethnolinguistic subgroups does. Apropos of the earlier para, I wonder if Hitler knew he was an Alpine, not a Nordic? Presumably.

    Also curious if anybody has answered the question of the Basques, who have the language isolate but so far as I know whose genetic lineage has not been confirmed to this latest standard. Or I missed it, or as so closely linked to Spain and France perhaps they are no longer as easy to tease apart as the Sardinians.

    OK. For now my mental map of Europe is IE overlays to varying degrees over a First Farmer population, with the latter demonstrating kinship to Med littoral peoples. Sounds good. Hope that’s layman-close.

    Off to read “The Hyborian Age” now, for the only other source that treats human demographics in quite this way.

  2. Graham says:

    Needless to say I’m not submitting all that to the tender eyes of Razib Khan or Nassim Taleb, though I’d be curious.

  3. Gaikokumaniakku says:

    Taleb has written a very weak argument. I don’t believe he understands the main citation.

    Does he expect us to believe there were never any blond ancient Greeks? For an encore, he will doubtless explain how “golden-haired Apollo” is a mistranslation of “coal-black haired Apollo” and how all those statues of ancient Greeks depict Lebanese people.

  4. Alrenous says:

    The ancient Greek race no longer exists. It was miscegenated out of existence by the 1400s.

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