Geneticists found that the heroes of ancient Greek mythology, as well as other representatives of the Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations, were related to the ancient inhabitants of Iran and Turkey, as well as to the inhabitants of the Russian Caspian steppes.
According to Johannes Krause of the German University of Tübingen, scientists sought to establish whether there were genetic differences between the Mycenaeans and Minoans, whether they were relatives, who were their ancestors, and whether modern Cretans and Greeks could be descendants of these ancient civilizations.
Hercules, Achilles and Hector, as well as other ancient Greek mythological heroes, belong to two mysterious ancient cultures, Mycenaean and Minoan, which existed on mainland Greece and Crete about 5-3 thousand years ago. Both the one and the other peoples disappeared without a trace after the Dorian tribes invaded their territory. As a result, their culture was almost completely destroyed, and the origin became a big mystery for scientists.
Scientists discovered the first traces of the Minoan civilization only at the beginning of the last century. Archaeologist from Britain Arthur Evans discovered the dead city of Knossos, which, according to experts, was the capital of ancient Crete. Over the next years, scientists managed to find traces of a mysterious civilization on the territory of the palaces of Knossos. These traces combined not only the features of the cultures of Libya and Egypt, but also Anatolia and the Balkans. All this led to disagreements among scientists-archaeologists, who were divided into adherents of "African" and "European" theories.
The problem also lies in the fact that scientists have not been able to decipher the writing of the Minoan civilization. For this reason, neither linguists nor historians have any idea of where the ancestors of ancient Greek mythology lived before their migration to Crete and Hellas and what ancient peoples were their closest relatives. All this has led to the fact that disputes over the origin of these peoples have continued for hundreds of years and, most likely, will not end for a long time.
The first significant step towards resolving these disputes was made by David Reich, Krause and other famous paleontologists. They managed to isolate and decipher the DNA of 19 Minoans and Mycenaeans. Their remains were found in Argolis, where Mycenae themselves were located, in the central regions of Crete, as well as on the modern coast of Asia Minor in the ruins of city-states.
After decoding the obtained DNA, the researchers conducted a comparative analysis of sets of small mutations from 300 other genomes of the inhabitants of ancient Asia Minor and Europe, as well as from the DNA of 2 thousand representatives of modern Crete and Greece. Thanks to this, scientists were able to identify the ancestors and descendants of the ancient Minoans and Mycenaeans, as well as to establish the changes that took place with the populations over a long time.
So, in particular, Krause, together with his colleagues, managed to establish that the Minoans and Mycenaeans were relatives - their ancestors moved from Iran and Anatolia to the territory of the future Hellas approximately simultaneously, about four thousand years ago.
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In new territories, they mingled with the local population that had inhabited Greece since the Neolithic. Then their fates took different paths. Reich and his colleagues speculated that the Minoans had a highly isolated lifestyle. This people only contacted the Mycenaeans. Due to this, their genome remained practically unchanged. In turn, the Mycenaeans over the entire history of their existence have experienced at least one mixing with other peoples, as a result of which they inherited about 13-18 percent of their DNA.
As Krause notes, Indo-European tribes, which, according to the data established by geneticists, lived in the Ukrainian and Russian steppes, near the shores of the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea, about 5-6 thousand years ago, can claim the role of these peoples. Another possible option is the invasion of northern rather than eastern tribes of gatherers and hunters.
According to the researchers, this once again refutes the very popular culturological hypothesis that the Mycenaeans and Minoans were relatives of the ancient Egyptian peoples and peoples of other countries who migrated to the Peloponnese and Crete by sea.
The most interesting thing is that the DNA of the inhabitants of ancient Greece proves that the drawings on the ancient Greek amphoras and the frescoes of the palaces of Knossos do not distort reality at all - the representatives of these civilizations really had dark eyes and hair, light skin, and typical "Greek" facial features.
Thus, the modern inhabitants of Greece can in fact claim to be the heirs of the first European civilization, since their DNA, according to the statements of Krause, Reich and their colleagues, contains traces of the genomes of the Minoans and Mycenaeans with small inclusions of other peoples, with whom, after the end of the so-called during the "golden age" the Greeks were in contact.