No Romans below the Jireček

This came almost a week back, so - why not post now: the Late Antique Balkans, as geneticists see them. As ever, pots ain't people... pots are language, DNA is people.

Some of it, we already knew. During the AD 250-550 side of Late Antiquity, the Balkans got migrants with mixed ancestry from Northern Europe and the Pontic-Kazakh steppe. That'll be the [East German] Goths and [Ossetic-Aryan] Alans, respectively. After the 400s we should be seeing Huns; but maybe we are seeing Huns, buried in the Alan signatures.

After AD 600, which the EurekaAlert is stupidly marking shortly after the fall of the Western Roman Empire (unless we are talking the post-Raptor Lombard invasion of the Justinianic Italia): major influx of individuals from Eastern Europe. And that's... that. What we are calling "Bulgaria" and general "Yugoslavia" - and to be honest "Hungary" - is now, in genetic fact, yugo-Slavic. And so the region stays, neglecting some irruptions, mostly cultural, from Magyars and from proper Germans and such.

One point I'd thought I'd known was the Avars - absent from this study. Other studies put a full-on Mongol population abutting the Slavic-era Balkans. [SEXO 4/30/24: They didn't take wives from Pannonia; maybe they didn't rape in the Balkans.] Either way, the Avar signature is gone now. If they were nobles I must assume they preceded the Magyar nobility into the netherworld. Basil II - like the Horde after him - slew fighters, sparing taxpaying farmers. The farmers kept being Slavs (or even slaves), speaking Slavic and sometimes Romanian. The Avars didn't even pass their language to their serfs, as the Magyars would.

The paper mentions a different surprise, from the actual Antiquity of the Principate. Actual Romans didn't venture into the Balkans; instead, they came from eastern Anatolia. Those people would have spoken some kind of Christian Ionic or maybe leftover Phrygian.

Which leads me to ponder the famed Jireček Line, still in place today separating old Albanian plus Romanian; from Greece, Macedonia, and Bulgaria. I'd thought that the Dacian / Dalmatian north was Latin - still basically is, despite (Catholic) Croats shifting to Slavic. Did the research simply fail to sample north-Balkan sites? Are Bucharest, BudaPest, and Zagreb not Balkan?