"Genetic testing of language replacement hypothesis in Anatolia, Caucasus and Balkans

The region of the Anatolia represents an extremely important area with respect to ancient population migration and expansion, and the spread of the Caucasian, Semitic, Indo-European and Turkic languages, as well as the extinction of the local Anatolian languages. During the late Roman Period, prior to the Turkic conquest, the population of Anatolia had reached an estimated level of over 12 million people.[16][17][18] The extent to which gene flow from Central Asia has contributed to the current gene pool of the Turkish people, and the role of the 11th century invasion by Turkic peoples, has been the subject of several studies. These studies conclude that local Anatolian groups are the primary source of the present-day Turkish population.[19] DNA results suggests the lack of strong genetic relationship between the Mongols and the Turks despite the historical relationship of their languages.[20]

Anatolians do not significantly differ from other Mediterranean populations, indicating that while the Asian Turks carried out an invasion with cultural significance (language and religion), the genetic significance is only weakly detectable.[21] Recent genetic research has suggested the local Anatolian origins of the Turkic Asian peoples might have been slight.[22] These findings are consistent with a model in which the Turkic languages, originating in the Altai-Sayan region of Central Asia and northwestern Mongolia, were imposed on the indigenous peoples with relatively little genetic admixture, possible example of elite cultural dominance-driven linguistic replacement.[23] These observations also may be explained by Anatolia having the lowest migrant/resident ratio at the time of Turkic migrations. Analysis suggested that, genetically, Anatolians are more closely related also with Balkan populations than to the Central Asian populations.[24][25] Analogical results have been received in neighbouring Caucasus region by testing Armenian and Turkic speaking Azerbaijani populations, therefore representing language replacements, possibly via elite dominance involving primarily male migrants.[26] In conclusion, today the major DNA components in Anatolian population are shared with European and neighboring Near Eastern populations and contrast with only a minor share of haplogroups related to Central Asian, South Asian and African affinity, which supports the language replacement hypothesis in the region.[27]"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkification


So, are the Turkish immigrants to Germany "white" or not ?  If so, were the Byzantines in central Anatolia "white" or not ?  If a Greek marries a German, are the children "mongrels" ?  What about a German marrying an Armenian, a Persian, an Albanian, or a Maltese ?

I found these parts especially interesting and helpful for our purposes :

These studies conclude that local Anatolian groups are the primary source of the present-day Turkish population.[19] DNA results suggests the lack of strong genetic relationship between the Mongols and the Turks despite the historical relationship of their languages.

Likewise, during the time of the Byzantines, there was a concerted effort to Hellenise all of Anatolia, despite the fact that -- even then -- the primary genetic constituent of the Byzantine population in Anatolia derived from the local Anatolian peoples as well.  That is to say, the people of Anatolia are pretty much racially the same as they have been for the past 2,000 years.  These are the descendants of ancient Tyrhennians, Hittites, Hurrians, Armenians, Assyrians, Kurds, Greeks, and so forth, most of which are Indo-European.

"Anatolians do not significantly differ from other Mediterranean populations, indicating that while the Asian Turks carried out an invasion with cultural significance (language and religion), the genetic significance is only weakly detectable. Recent genetic research has suggested the local Anatolian origins of the Turkic Asian peoples might have been slight."

"These findings are consistent with a model in which the Turkic languages, originating in the Altai-Sayan region of Central Asia and northwestern Mongolia, were imposed on the indigenous peoples with relatively little genetic admixture, possible example of elite cultural dominance-driven linguistic replacement."

The "Turkic" Azerbaijani peoples are still the Cauacasian and Indo-Iranic race that they always have been as well, with little Turkic admixture :

"These observations also may be explained by Anatolia having the lowest migrant/resident ratio at the time of Turkic migrations. Analysis suggested that, genetically, Anatolians are more closely related also with Balkan populations than to the Central Asian populations. Analogical results have been received in neighbouring Caucasus region by testing Armenian and Turkic speaking Azerbaijani populations, therefore representing language replacements, possibly via elite dominance involving primarily male migrants. In conclusion, today the major DNA components in Anatolian population are shared with European and neighboring Near Eastern populations and contrast with only a minor share of haplogroups related to Central Asian, South Asian and African affinity, which supports the language replacement hypothesis in the region."

I would appreciate if somebody would try to answer the questions I posed on the first post.  These findings explain why all the Turks I came across in Turkey did not look like they came from Central Asia and why Turkish culture, for the most part, is Mediterranean and has very little, if any, influence from the customs and lifestyle of Central Asian steppe dwellers.

why Turkish culture, for the most part, is Mediterranean and has very little, if any, influence from the customs and lifestyle of Central Asian steppe dwellers.

that is more of mixing of cultures over the many 1000's of yrs, why its easier in some ways today to relate to Turks, say, then Saudi's or more remote peoples. Most Persians are highly literate and developed.......

Turks seem more militant despite their size of the time of conquest, like the Mongols, never very large in numbers, but highly efficient.....others either joined with them or subjected and vassals.....or killed off (Khan good at that)

old, and secular, forum site talking about both Turks, race and dating. read only first page, so careful, all...

http://www.topix.com/forum/world/turkey/T3JQRAGN4O807GGLE

Quote from: PereJoseph

I would not want to be in the room with many Greek Orthodox when it is suggested that many of their women married Mohammedans after the Turkish conquest of Anatolia, but that is what the evidence indicates !

most of modern day Turkey was Christian by 600 AD, esp western and even central Turkey....

Yes, Cappadocia and Cilicia were very Christian prior to the Mohammedan invasions, as was ancient Armenia (as opposed to the current Armenian Republic, which is further northeast than the traditional Armenian Highland).  Yet, the Greek city-states -- Smyrna, Ephesus, Halicarnassus, Pergamon, Nicaea -- were far to the west, within the orbit of the Aegean Sea.  As far as I know, there was never a large scale eastern migration on the part of the Anatolian Greeks into central and eastern Anatolia, at east not in such a way that the native populations were displaced or replaced.  Thus, that Central Anatolians today are virtually unchanged genetically from their Central Anatolian ancestors thousands of years ago should not surprise us.  From Constantinople, the Greek Roman Emperors attempted to Hellenise all of the Anatolians -- indeed, they succeeded for the most part in spreading the Greek language and culture eastward, meanwhile absorbing the autochthonous Anatolians into their western cities.  That being said, native-born Cappadocians with Greek names were not genetically Greek in the way, say, the Spartans or Thebans were.

Now, states say 99% Muslim, esp factoring in with the Armenian h0Ɩ0cαųst and a lot of Greeks leaving in 1920's, ahead of Young Turks (a Masonic group).

But the Armenians in the Armenian Highland remained mostly Christian, thus the need for Atatürk to murder and execute hundreds of thousands of them and relocate them via a forced march to the East if he were to successfully create a homogenous Turkish nation-state.  The genetic studies were done on contemporary assimilated Turks, though, and it found that, for the most part, they had very low levels of Central Asian DNA, less than 9% in general.  Otherwise the test would not be relevant.

so, intermariage, apostasy highly likely....also, mixing asians via Genghis Khan, Kurds,etc.....

I don't see how that logically follows.  The massacres of Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks happened at a very late date in the timeline of the Turkish régimes in Anatolia.  An easier explanation is that those populations were simply unassimilated because they were loyal to their religious and ethnic heritages, whereas the rest of the population was assimilated, sometimes through intermarriage with Mohammedans -- whether they be Turkic genetically or Iranic people who were adopted into the Turkish army -- but mostly through apostasy as a means of social advancement.  In fact, based on the genetic results, apostasy and intermarriage are the most likely explanation for the presence of a mere <9% occurrence of Central Asian haplotypes.

most Turks I have know, have a white appearance, though more Med., like Lebanese......

Exactly, though I would make the caveat that "white" is a rather meaningless term that does not tell us very much about somebody.

ofr all intents, out of 3 established races, would list them as white...

It seems that there are many more than only three established races.  I would say that the Turks are, if genetics and culture are any indicator of race, at the very least as Indo-European as the Sicilians.

..though not "pure" or to level of racial purity like Nordics

"Racial purity" in what sense ?

Quote from: PereJoseph

why Turkish culture, for the most part, is Mediterranean and has very little, if any, influence from the customs and lifestyle of Central Asian steppe dwellers.

that is more of mixing of cultures over the many 1000's of yrs, why its easier in some ways today to relate to Turks, say, then Saudi's or more remote peoples. Most Persians are highly literate and developed.......

Well, the Persians are an ancient Indo-European people just as much as Norwegians are Indo-European, though the latter are younger than the Persians, so I don't see why they would be considered "remote."  In any case, there was never any widespread migration of Turks from Central Asia into Anatolia.  They assembled an elite military aristocracy under the headship of beys and sultans, though the majority of their soldiers were taken from local populations.  That is to say, hardly any Turkic women and children and infrastructure made the journey from the steppe near the Altaic mountains to the Bosphorus, nor even into Iran.

When the Turks arrived, they simply employed the local engineers and craftsmen to copy the infrastructure and architecture of the Greeks and other peoples nearby.  Meanwhile, most people continued to live in the fashion they always had, minus the changes made for Mohammedanism, of course.  But there was no Turkish architecture or city-planning or restaurant style or whatever, since the Turkic military elite derived from nomadic horsemen who never had any of these things.  That is to say, the House of Osman simply placed themselves atop a pre-existing edifice, much like the Mohammedan Caliphate did in Spain and North Africa and the Middle East.  The Arabian tribesmen who followed Mohammed did not have vast city-states, craftsmen, and engineering, either; they, too, were able to take advantage of the technical and urban accomplishments of the conquered, contributing very little themselves to the culture and means of the societies that followed thereafter.

Turks seem more militant despite their size of the time of conquest, like the Mongols, never very large in numbers, but highly efficient.....others either joined with them or subjected and vassals.....or killed off (Khan good at that)

Exactly.

For the purposes of the restoration of the entire Mediterranean to Christendom, then, it is clear that the problem is chiefly religious and cultural and economic -- it is not racial now, nor was it racial five hundred, one thousand, fifteen hundred, or two thousand years ago.  Through only a little bit of Latin and Greek colonisation (as a means of spreading Roman culture) and a monopoly of force maintained by hereditary monarchs anointed by the Church, our missionaries could be sent forth, and Mohammedanism could be eradicated rather quickly.  The illusion of an iron curtain of a monolithic Islam married to the domination of ethnically-proud Arabs is just that.  Even in North Africa, roughly one quarter to one third of the population still speak Berber, and the majority of the people are not Arabs at all.  Mohammedanism, despite all of its power and its threats to Christendom over the past fifteen hundred years, has only an incredibly fragile grasp over the Mediterranean and Central Asia.

Furthermore, during the Late Roman Empire, Syrian Christian merchants from their port at Sidon were the major source of Western European imports, whereas textiles from what is now Belgium were sent to the East from Marseille (which, by the way, was racially very Greek and North African back then, as now, despite being Gallo-Roman in culture).  The historian Henri Pirenne discusses how the the Merovingian Kingdom of the Franks and the Late Roman Empire, especially in Constantinople, were becoming more and more culturally oritentalised through exposure and trade with Syria, Anatolia, Armenia, and -- especially -- Persia/Iran.  

Trade stopped after the Mohammedan conquest, which essentially shut down the Mediterranean, which before was a highway of exchange between the Christians that lined it on every coast.  Then the Latin and Celtic and Germanic synthesis we know as the Early Middle Ages succeeded that world, after Charlemagne re-united the disparate tribes and patrician families under his military aristocracy.  During the Crusades, the Mediterranean once again fulfilled its ancient function from a mere five centuries before, the cultural legacy of which we see in the Levantine elements of the great Gothic (i.e., French) cathedrals and which can be heard in the songs of the troubadours and trouvères.  This, the cultural world of the High Middle Ages, the high-water mark of the integral Social Reign of Our Lord Jesus Christ, was ended by the growth of the middle classes, whose decadence first manifested itself in the luxury of their feasts and games and can be witnessed in the so-called Flamboyant Gothic style.  After the loss of Constantinople and Jerusalem and Acre, as well as the rise to prominence of jurists and the burghers in the towns, the Renaissance soon followed.  And the Enlightenment, which is nothing if not the cultural and religious legacy of the rise of Northern Europe in England and Germany, is just the logical consequence of Catholics becoming too lukewarm.  We were no longer fighting for Our Lord in order to bring the reign of His adorable Heart to all the nations in order to save the greatest number of souls; we lost focus and, in our pride, fought instead for our city life, our self-images as sophisticated people, our own luxury, and entertainment, etc.

In any case, we are not so far away from the world of a single, coherent Roman Empire -- and the organic cultural fusion of all the Indo-European and Mediterranean peoples under the banners of Our Lord -- as we might now think.  The cultural and ethnic framework is all there.  The powder keg of the great restoration only needs the necessary spark.  Rome still stands, Jerusalem still stands, the peoples of the Mediterranean are the same as they ever were, just under different kinds of apostasy -- one coming from the North, the other from the Southeast.  Indeed, if we study the evidence enough, we should be able to see that the more things have changed, the more they have also stayed the same.

The people of North Africa are, likewise, roughly the same as they were before the Mohammedan conquest :

"The presence of the Arabic language and dialects is due to the spread of Islam and to the immigration of some Arab tribes to the region centuries ago. A Berber person is not necessarily only someone who happens to speak Berber. The Berber identity is usually wider than language and ethnicity, and encompasses the entire history and geography of North Africa. Berbers are not a homogeneous ethnic group and they encompass a range of phenotypes, cultures and ancestries. The unifying forces for the Berber people could be their Berber language, belonging to the Berber homeland, or a collective identification with the Berber heritage and history.

Linguistically speaking, there are some 25 to 35 million Berber-language speakers in North Africa. But if we consider the fact that all inhabitants of Mediterranean North Africa (except for Egypt) are essentially ethnic Berbers, the sum total of Berbers could be estimated to be 100 million."

"The Maghreb today is home to large Arabized Berber populations. Berber form the major and largest indigenous ancestry in the Maghreb... the Semitic ethnic presence in the region is mainly due to the Phoenicians and Arab Bedouin Hilallians migratory movements (3rd century BC and 11th century, respectively) which mixed in. However, the majority of Arabized Berbers claim an Arab heritage, which is particularly in Morocco and Algeria, a consequence of the Arab nationalism of the early 20th century."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berbers#Contemporary_demographics


I suspect the same is the case amongst Libyans and Egyptians.  That is to say, most of the "Arab League" is not really Arab.  The prestige of Arab in Mohammedan countries obviously derives from the reverence the Mohammedans have for the Koran and for their false prophet.  But there were simply not enough ethnic Arabs for all of the Berbers and Egyptians to be displaced or to become essentially Arab racially and ethnically, much like how there were simply not enough Turkic invaders to displace the native Azeri, Anatolian, and Balkan populations.  If the Mohammedan conquests were reversed, then, and the Greeks and Latins were sent out to rule and to mix with the local elites organically, the Mohammedan façade could be torn down with relative ease, just like the Renaissance façade of the beautiful Gothic Duomo of Milan was removed and the glorious mediaeval beauty of that cathedral was restored.

There have been studies and wish knew now where, who,etc-but remember back in 1994, was in a summer college English class. Instructor at this public college noted that studies indicate that most language can be traced to the area of eastern Turkey and Caucus..thought, interesting, since that is where Noah's Ark is located......
Likely as people spread out, language naturally changed, but would not be surprised.