Are Balkan Slavs Slavicized Romanians?

[vbnetkhio]

How would you otherwise explain that selecting SNPs to maximally differentiate between ethnicities results in a such surprising East-West, North-South map of populations?

The immediate implication of seeing East-West, North-South axes on a PCA map is that these selected SNPs are related to adaptations to geography/environment. Give me another explanation for such a precise mapping of PC1 and PC2 to geographical coordinates.

the algorithm just detects that in this spreadsheet the most numerous scale is pure Europeans > European/Asian admixed samples > pure Asians, and places them on PC1. with a different spreadsheet it would be different.

[ixulescu]

the algorithm just detects that in this spreadsheet the most numerous scale is pure Europeans > European/Asian admixed samples > pure Asians, and places them on PC1. with a different spreadsheet it would be different.

PCA only finds the orthogonal axes with the most variance in data.

If the axis with most variance corresponds to East-West coordinates it means that the largest differences among ethnicities occurs due to changes across land (which also happens to be the largest distance on land in straight line, from the Eastern tip of Asia to Western tip of Europe).

This is a bit surprising but also not particularly illuminating (considering how much time is spent on this forum discussing these plots )

[Daco Celtic]

People might disagree with about OP's topic now but I'm confident everyone will come to a consensus by page 75 of this thread in a typical display of Southeast European camaraderie

[vbnetkhio]

PCA only finds the orthogonal axes with the most variance in data.

exactly, an the most variance is in the European-Asian transitional ethnicities. if i deleted some of those, the PCs would change.

also, Europeans being left and Asians right is a coincidence. it mostly doesn't happen, and i have to flip the axes manually to make more sense.

[ixulescu]

exactly, an the most variance is in the European-Asian transitional ethnicities. if i deleted some of those, the PCs would change.

also, Europeans being left and Asians right is a coincidence. it mostly doesn't happen, and i have to flip the axes manually to make more sense.

that's an artifact of PCA, the rotation signs are random, read the Note section here:
https://www.rdocumentation.org/packa.../topics/prcomp

what's important is how nations are relative to one another, and if they still map to geographic coordinates (or any mirror/flip of them) the meaning remains the same (the largest variance between populations occurs across land distances).

[vbnetkhio]

what's important is how nations are relative to one another, and if they still map to geographic coordinates (or any mirror/flip of them) the meaning remains the same (the largest variance between populations occurs across land distances).

it often is so, but it's because 2 genetically distinct populations, which were isolated for a long time, at one point started mixing accross that land distance, and formed transitional populations.
not because they adapted to the local climate.

[ixulescu]

it often is so, but it's because 2 genetically distinct populations, which were isolated for a long time, at one point started mixing accross that land distance, and formed transitional populations.
not because they adapted to the local climate.

To get that consistent distribution across land like in that PCA plot would require that everyone would mix with everyone else, in reality this is not the case, many of the populations on that map are isolated. It might be true for Europeans though, that's probably why they're overlapping so much on that plot compared to other populations.

[Brás Garcia de Mascarenhas]

Slavicized Romanians is a paradox because modern Romanians have a significant Slavic input. A better example would be Slavsicized Albanians or Greeks because these two autochthonous populations have the least Slavic inpunt on average.

[artsi]

Only there is no such thing as a Slavic race. Slav speakers south of Danube are to a significant extent descending from autochthonous people that in part used to be Romance speakers called Vlachs.

[Wild North]

Some people in western Europe find it weird that there´s a Romance-Latin language spoken in the Balkans/Southeastern Europe.
But is it really that odd, the Romans/Latins colonized the Balkans centuries Before the Slavs.

But to the question, are the Balkan Slavs really slavicized "Romanians" ? Well perhaps mostly Bulgarians and North Macedonians are (partly) slavicized "Latins".

At linguistically; sure Romanian and Bulgarian/Macedonian are unrelated (although they both IE languages), there are som similarities, they both belong to the so called "Balkan sprachbund"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balkan_sprachbund

And about the Albanian language, som says that there are some similarities between Romanian and Albanian.

Is it that Albanian contain a lot of Latin/Romanian Words ? In an old map it is counted as a "Greco-Latin" language ?