When Georgia was Iberia

I'll inject a couple of articles on Iberia before it was Georgia (or Gruziya SSR). First is an attempt to link the languages to genetics. Then, uh, came a bioarxiv of the genetics. The Kartvel before the Horse, maybe.

Svan split off in Time Immemorial, like "7641 BP" which, in myyy daaay, coïncides with the Black Sea Flood. Roughly. The paper seems legit excepting its claim that IndoEuropean started in the Zagros or Alborz. I feel like that's the exact wrong side of the isthmus.

I'm more interested in Late Antiquity naturally. We are told of an influx of Huns, with their skull deformations. The locals had some deformation too. But they deformed their skulls differently. Also: is there Hunnic (Yeneseyan) or Avar (Mongol) influence in the languages? Not seeing it. Alan (Ossetic) is assuredly here, and Turkish of course (it's blown out a lot of old Laz, now preserved in Mingrel), but not Hun nor Avar.

The genetics are noting less Greek than we'd expect of Lazica, famously tied with Trebizond and Crimean-Greek trade. What does turn up, after Christianity AD 400s, is Near Eastern and Anatolian influx. These were by then calling themselves "Romans", not Greeks. Trabzon/Pontic ByzanGreek survives to this day.

One event of some import was in the AD 600s-700s, when the Iberians migrated down the river and split the Laz from the Mingrels. Iberian "Old Georgian" then became the language of literacy. I guess Roman-era Lazica never was literate on her own. Their elites - even when Christian - simply communicated in Greek or, later, Armenian.

BACKDATE 9/23