Albanians

**safinator** · 07-29-2012, 10:16 AM

**Firefly** · 07-30-2012, 04:27 PM

Just a little thing I found:

The Geography of Recent Genetic Ancestry across Europe (July 2012)
"...The highest levels of IBD sharing are found in the Albanian-speaking individuals (from Albania and Kosovo), an increase in common ancestry deriving from the last 1,500 years. This suggests that a reasonable proportion of the ancestors of modern-day Albanian speakers are drawn from a relatively small, cohesive population that has persisted for at least the last 1,500 years. These individuals share similar numbers of common ancestors with nearby populations as do individuals in other parts of Europe, implying that the Albanian speakers have not been a particularly isolated population so much as a small one. Furthermore, our Greek samples (and to a lesser degree, the Macedonians) share much higher numbers of common ancestors with Albanian speakers than with other neighbors, possibly due to smaller effects of the Slavic expansion in these populations. The Albanian language is a Indo-European language without other close relatives (Hamp, 1966) that persisted through periods when neighboring languages were strongly influenced by Latin or Greek. The "origin" of modern-day Albanians is contentious; it is argued for instance that they are descended in large part from the Illyrians (Wilkes, 1996) who populated the eastern side of the Adriatic sea and part of modern-day Salento (Italy) during Roman times. Our results are certainly consistent with this view, including the fact that Italians share more common ancestors with Albanian speakers than with other populations..."
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1207.3815v1.pdf

Translation: Albanians speaking people today are pretty much the same people that populated Balkans as at least 1500 years ago.