engleski

Linguistic and cultural diversity of the ancient illyrians reflected in modern genetic variances

The investigation presented is an interdisciplinary attempt of tracing ethnical boundaries of the peoples known to the ancient world as Illyrians inhabiting the north-western Balkans during the first millennium BC, and their possible substratum effects in shaping modern ethnic distributions. The regional variation of "Illyrian" tribes was assessed through the interrelationship of linguistic and archeologically evidenced cultural areas and their relationship to the patterns of modern Balkan allele frequencies. The linguistic boundaries were determined using the spatial distribution of the only traces of the Illyrian language conserved in onomastics (400 names). The linguistic distances were calculated between thus defined onomastic areas and correlated with the data on "cultural complexes" based on cultural (archeologically defined) traits characteristic for particular tribal areas. The statistically significant correlation between the two sets of data indicated a considerable population heterogeneity suggesting that the term Illyrian subsumes a number of more specific ethnic groups and should be used only as historical-geographic concept. Linguistic and "cultural data" matrices were then correlated with an overall genetic distance (Nei) matrix constructed from classical genetic markers analyzed in current populations of different regions of the so-called Illyrian province. The correlation of genetic matrix with linguistic and cultural data matrices shows that patterns of modern Balkan allele frequencies to a considerable extent still reflect the prehistoric ethnic and hence genetic diversity of these early European populations. These findings have major implications for whether we expect to find linguistic substratum effects and what degree of biological-genetic admixture we expect to find as a consequence of more recent population spreads in the region.

anthropology; linguistic and cultural diversity; ancient Illyrians

nije evidentirano