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+--- Thread: Research Closed society in Greece successfully deters bulk of foreigners for 4,500 years (/thread-19759.html)
Closed society in Greece successfully deters bulk of foreigners for 4,500 years - C C - Feb 9, 2026
Remote Greek culture has been a genetic ‘island’ for 4500 years
https://www.science.org/content/article/remote-greek-culture-has-been-genetic-island-4500-years
INTRO: On southern Greece’s mountainous Mani Peninsula, a tightly clannish group of people known as Deep Maniots keep to themselves. Wary of outsiders, the isolated group maintains a distinctive society organized around male family lines, as well as a proud oral tradition claiming ties to medieval nobility.
A study published this week in Communications Biology suggests the Deep Maniots’ isolation goes way back, with most Deep Maniot men descending directly from Greek-speaking groups that lived in the area before the medieval period. Genetic analysis also reveals very limited intermixing from other populations, while showing that women of the culture often migrated to the Mani Peninsula from far-flung regions around the world.
“This idea of Mani as a distinct, rebellious people who preserved the Greek past is alive and well in the Greek imagination,” says Rebecca Seifried, an archaeologist and geospatial data expert at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who was not involved with the work. But “genetic isolation does not necessarily mean cultural isolation, and this study highlights that.”
One of the new study’s authors, Thanasis Kofinakos, is himself Deep Maniot. He grew up hearing about his people’s ancient origins. To test whether these oral traditions held any truth, Kofinakos, an independent genealogist, and his colleagues set out to learn where Deep Maniots come from.
Working with Leonidas-Romanos Davranoglou, a biologist at Tel Aviv University, the University of Oxford, and the University of Athens, he and colleagues compared Deep Maniot genomes with more than 1 million modern genomes and thousands of ancient genomes. The researchers focused on paternal and maternal lineages, looking at genes inherited on the Y chromosomes and from mitochondrial DNA respectively. Any overlap—or lack thereof—between Deep Maniot genomes and others from around the world would help determine the populations most closely related to the Deep Maniots.
The researchers found that Deep Maniots’ Y chromosomes did not match well with any modern population, supporting the idea that the group has remained more or less isolated since at least the Bronze Age more than 4000 years ago, based on genetic estimates of when these lineages last mixed with others. In contrast, the genomes of mainland Greeks show clear signs of intermarrying with other groups, such as the Slavs. “We show conclusively that Deep Maniots were somehow shielded from these migrations,” Davranoglou says. Maniots “provide us with a snapshot of what Greek genetics would have been prior to the medieval times.”
Why the group was so isolated remains an open question. Some historians theorize that Deep Maniots physically fought off outsiders, whereas others argue the harsh environment of the Mani Peninsula deterred migrants. However, outsiders clearly joined the society... (MORE - details)