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Cypriot archaeology is a rather interesting field where among others researchers from my country have contributed. In later times studies of ancient (and modern) Cypriote DNA has started to complete the picture of ancient Cyprus and fill in the gaps.
One can read a short treatise of the research about Ancient Cyprus and the peoples who lived there in this article by Swedish archaeologist Marie-Louise Winbladh. I have actually met her during my time as a student.
Her article addresses some questions about the origins of the Cypriots and the different cultures and peoples which have affected the composition of the islands population and the cultural development there.
It also addresses the political dimension of research on Cyprus with both Greek and Turkish national feelings involved.
Winbladh, Marie-Louise 2020: The Origins of The Cypriots. With Scientific Data of Archaeology and Genetics
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^ Some of those papers were reviewed in other threads. I think there may be somewhat of a misunderstanding. I never said the Cypriotes were African per say but that they may very well have received African influence.
Geologically Cyprus lies directly in the tectonic border between the African and Anatolian plates.
We know that the earliest Cypriote culture was Neolithic and was part of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B Culture stemming from the Levant.
These PPNB settlers may very well be the direct ancestors of the people the ancient Greeks called 'Eteo-Cypriote' or 'True Cypriotes' as opposed to later immigrants. The first paper you cited explains how the PPNB people represent one of a bifurcated or two-way immigration of farmers into Europe.
The first of the later immigrants were the Phoenicians who not surprisingly were not that distantly related.
It was during this time of Phoenician expansion that the cult of Aphrodite was introduced to Greece since most scholars agree Aphrodite was essentially the West Semitic goddess Astarte who may very well be based on an original Eteo-Cypriote goddess since Cyprus was hailed as the birthplace of Aphrodite/Astarte.
After the Phoenicians came Greek colonists, the first of which were the Achaeans at the end of the Bronze Age followed by the Arcadians during Classical and Hellenic times.
What the Greeks and Phoenicians have in common is their Neolithic 'First-Farmer' ancestry though the former has more European hunter-gatherer. This explains the intermediate position many Cypriotes have autosomally which Razib Khan touches on this here: They're all Greeks to me (part 2): Farmers, Minoans, Mycenaeans and Slavs
Toward the end of the Iron Age the Eteo-Cretans disappear as a distinct people and were either Phoenicianized or Hellenized becoming Lebanese or Greek Cypriotes. It was only by Islamic times that they received Arabic and later Turkish influence.
The problem however is that people forget that the PPN people who are in turn derived from Natufians have African genetic affinities which tend to get obfuscated under monikers like PPNB or EEF.
We still see hints of this African ancestry today in their Y chromosome profiles which show E1b1b clades E-M78 and E-M123...
as well as mitochondrial lineages like R0, N1, M1, and a few L clades.
In fact the first paper you cite (Fernandez et al. 2014) shows a significant frequency of L2a.
So again, while these people may not exactly be 'African' they do have African admixture the same way peoples in the western Mediterranean show African admixture via Iberomarusians.
Archeopteryx Member # 23193
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I never said there were no African markers in Cyprus. I just wanted to open a separate thread about Cyprus since the island has an interesting history, both archaeologically and genetically much due to it´s geographical location close to Asia, Europe and Africa. With such location influences from all these places are to be expected. Also it can be interesting to ponder on how the Island in it´s turn influenced peoples and cultures in its surroundings.
The Cypriots are a mix of different groups who came to the island at different times: Anatolians, Mycenaeans, Phoenicians, later Greeks, Romans, Ottomans and others. There is also relatedness with other South Europeans.
The genetic landscape of todays Cypriots is further complicated by later influx of peoples during the Ottoman empire. So many immigrations during so long time seems to complicate the Cypriot genetics. But with more aDNA it will be possible to go into more detail about when different markers arrived to the island and what impact they made.
quote:Regarding Turkish speaking Cypriots, there is further “evidence of recent (past few centuries) genetic contribution from mainland Turkey and the presence of minor Eastern Eurasian and North African paternal ancestry.” This is due to a population influx from Anatolia and other Ottoman regions in the South Caucasus, Central Asia, and North Africa to Cyprus during Ottoman rule.
(Winbladh 2020, p 63)
According to the paper from 2014 above, the heritage from the first Cypriots can still be seen in todays Cypriots
quote:Moreover, the observed genetic affinities between the PPNB samples and the modern populations of Cyprus and Crete seem to suggest that the Neolithic was first introduced into Europe through pioneer seafaring colonization.
quote:However, strong genetic affinities at different levels of comparison could be detected with the islands of Cyprus and Crete, pointing out at a survival of ancient Neolithic genetic stock in these populations probably through endogamy and geographic isolation.
Interesting is also that Cypriot genetics in its turn seem to have spread outside Cyprus itself, so it seems that Cyprus both received and gave genetic influences during different times
quote:that using ‘Cypriot DNA’ pattern, the researchers were able to determine Cypriot DNA in other ethnic groups. The DNA of Hungarian people, for instance, contains a majority of Polish and Lithuanian markers but also a substantial amount of Cypriot DNA -almost 20%- in those scanned. Similarly, Romanian DNA contains mostly Lithuanian DNA, but almost equal amounts of Greek DNA and Cypriot DNA. The Turkish test subjects were found to have 11% Greek DNA, 9.9% Armenian, 8.5% Iranian, and 6.2% Cypriot. Armenians were detected to have predominantly Iranian, followed by Cypriot and Syrian markers. Greek speaking Cypriots generally consider themselves to be “Greek blooded”, and in the tests done on Cypriots, Greek markers accounted for around 23% of the DNA. The biggest DNA contributors to the Greek genome, according to the study, were Polish 30%, followed by Italian, Iranian, Jordanian and Syrian. Apart from Greek DNA markers, Cypriots showed signs of Iranian, Italians much as 20%- Sicilian, Armenian, Syrian, Georgian, Saudi and Palestinian markers.
(Winbladh, 2020: p 63)
Archeopteryx Member # 23193
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One can also notice that Cyprus has among the oldest preserved farmer villages like the Klimonas
quote:The oldest agricultural settlement ever found on a Mediterranean island has been discovered in Cyprus by a team of French archaeologists involving CNRS, the National Museum of Natural History, INRAP, EHESS and the University of Toulouse. Previously it was believed that, due to the island's geographic isolation, the first Neolithic farming societies did not reach Cyprus until a thousand years after the birth of agriculture in the Middle East (ca. 9500 to 9400 BCE). However, the discovery of Klimonas, a village that dates from nearly 9000 years before Christ, proves that early cultivators migrated to Cyprus from the Middle Eastern continent shortly after the emergence of agriculture there, bringing with them wheat as well as dogs and cats.
quote:Abstract Early Neolithic sedentary villagers started cultivating wild cereals in the Near East 11,500 y ago [Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA)]. Recent discoveries indicated that Cyprus was frequented by Late PPNA people, but the earliest evidence until now for both the use of cereals and Neolithic villages on the island dates to 10,400 y ago. Here we present the recent archaeological excavation at Klimonas, which demonstrates that established villagers were living on Cyprus between 11,100 and 10,600 y ago. Villagers had stone artifacts and buildings (including a remarkable 10-m diameter communal building) that were similar to those found on Late PPNA sites on the mainland. Cereals were introduced from the Levant, and meat was obtained by hunting the only ungulate living on the island, a small indigenous Cypriot wild boar. Cats and small domestic dogs were brought from the mainland. This colonization suggests well-developed maritime capabilities by the PPNA period, but also that migration from the mainland may have occurred shortly after the beginning of agriculture. The transition from hunting-gathering to food production is a major step in the history of humanity and the biosphere (1, 2). Humans begun to cultivate morphologically wild cereals and pulses over a wide area in the Near East by ∼11.5 cal kyBP (thousands of calibrated radiocarbon years before present), a period known as the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA) (3–7). Early cultivators lived in small villages and continued to hunt and gather in the wild (8–10). By 10.5–9 cal kyBP, during the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB), villages increased in size, and the subsistence strategy developed into an established mixed agropastoral economy based on domesticated crops and animals (sheep, goat, pig, and cattle) (11–13). Previous research indicates that the first farmers settled Cyprus during the Early PPNB, beginning ∼10.4 cal kyBP (14, 15), bringing with them domestic cereals, pulses, goat, cattle, sheep, and pig to the island (SI Appendix, SI Text S1) (14, 16, 17). Before these settlements, the only known human presence on Cyprus was limited to the small Aetokremnos rock shelter occupied by fisher-trappers dating to 12.5 cal kyBP (18). Recently, three sites dated to ∼11.1–10.6 cal kyBP have been discovered (19–22). The extensive excavations at one of these sites, Klimonas (SI Appendix, Figs. S1 and S2), unearthed plant remains, abundant animal bones, thousands of artifacts, and the remains of several buildings, including one communal structure. These finds reveal previously unknown aspects of the social and economic organization of the inhabitants of Cyprus at this early date. Our analyses of these finds combined with a series of 11 radiocarbon dates demonstrate that Cyprus was settled by Neolithic villagers several centuries earlier than suspected, a phenomenon that has far-reaching implications for a fuller understanding of the Neolithic Revolution in the Near East. The inhabitants of Klimonas cultivated a primitive wheat introduced from the mainland and hunted the only large mammal living on the island—namely, an extinct species of wild boar. The occupation at Klimonas coincides with a period on the mainland when agriculture was still becoming established; it shows that at this time human groups in the eastern Mediterranean could be highly mobile and participated in complex exchange systems. These groups also had the capacity to adapt to new environments with a low density of food animals. The findings from Cyprus reveal unsuspected sea-faring capabilities and provide unique information regarding the beginnings of plant and animal domestication, including that of dogs and cats.
Archeopteryx Member # 23193
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Interesting are also the finds at Akrotiri Aetekremnos of traces of foragers who can have preceeded the first agriculturalists on Cyprus. There is a debate if these early foragers may have contributed to the extinction of animals like pygmy hippos and pygmy elephants.
quote:Abstract All fossil terrestrial mammal sites on the island of Cyprus are dated from the Late Pleistocene period and consist almost exclusively of the remains of two terrestrial mammals, pygmy hippopotamus (Phanourios minutus) and pygmy elephant (Elephas cypriotes). Two theories exist on the arrival of these species on Cyprus. The first is that they arrived by a land bridge. This took place during the Pliocene about five to six million years ago when the Mediterranean sea was sealed at both ends due to tectonic movements and its water evaporated creating a land bridge. However, there are no fossils dating from the Pliocene The second theory is that they arrived under circumstances described by the Island Sweepstakes model. The latter theory refers to cases in which animals may venture far from the coast, reach an isolated island from which they cannot return and are forced to settle there. We reject the possibility that the Late Pleistocene mammals of Cyprus arrived by a land bridge, because during the Pleistocene such a bridge never existed. The cause of extinction of the earlier Cypriot endemic large mammals remain unclear. The discovery at the site of Akrotiri Aetokremnos of the above pygmy mammal forms together with human artefacts was interpreted by some researchers as proof of a human role in the extinction of these mammals. Others rejected this view. We review the facts about this discovery and we believe that humans did play a role in the final extinction of these species.
One can wonder if and how these early foragers were related to later immigrants.
Djehuti Member # 6698
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^ Speaking of mammals, recall from elsewhere that while the domesticated cat Felis silvestris lybica is derived from the African wild cat F. lybica, the earliest evidence of cat domestication is found in the Neolithic Levant as well as Cyprus.
Early Origin for the Purrfect Pet A newly discovered cat skeleton unearthed in southern Cyprus has pushed back the date of our first cat companions by more than 5000 years. The complete cat skeleton was next to a 9500-year-old human burial, suggesting that the feline was tame.
As for the people themselves, the indigenous people are derived from the Levant Neolithic related to the Natufians whose autosomal study in the Schueneman & Krause 2017 paper was discussed here.
As you can see, the difference between the Levant Neolithic folk and the Natufians is the former has a much higher percentage of Anatolian ancestry.
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