DNA links between Blacks and Greeks

Greeks clearly related to Africans on some DNA markers according to 3 recent DNA studies

Study #1

HLA genes in Macedonians and the sub-Saharan origin of the Greeks
A. Arnaiz-Villena, K. Dimitroski, A. Pacho, J. Moscoso, E. Gómez-Casado, et. al
Tissue Antigens (2001) Volume 57, Issue 2 , Pages118 - 127

sub-Saharan affinities of the Greeks

From abstract:
"1) Macedonians belong to the "older" Mediterranean substratum, like Iberians (including Basques), North Africans, Italians, French, Cretans, Jews, Lebanese, Turks (Anatolians), Armenians and Iranians, 2) Macedonians are not related with geographically close Greeks, who do not belong to the "older" Mediterranenan substratum, 3) Greeks are found to have a substantial relatedness to sub-Saharan (Ethiopian) people, which separate them from other Mediterranean groups. Both Greeks and Ethiopians share quasi-specific DRB1 alleles.. Genetic distances are closer between Greeks and Ethiopian/sub-Saharan groups than to any other Mediterranean group and finally Greeks cluster with Ethiopians/sub-Saharans in both neighbour joining dendrograms and correspondence analyses. The time period when these relationships might have occurred was ancient but uncertain and might be related to the displacement of Egyptian-Ethiopian people living in pharaonic Egypt."

Study #2

From:
"Population genetic relationships between Mediterranean populations determined by HLA allele distribution--a historic perspective." 
A. Arnaiz-Villena , E. Gomez-Casado,  J. Martinez-Laso. 
Tissue Antigens, Volume 60, Number 2, August 2002, pp 111-121(11)

QUOTES:

"HLA genomics shows that: 1) Greeks share an important part of their genetic pool with sub-Saharan Africans (Ethiopians and West Africans) also supported by Chr 7 Markers. The gene flow from Black Africa to Greece may have occurred in Pharaonic times or when Saharan people emigrated after the present hyperarid conditions were established (5000 years BC)... some of the Negroid populations may have migrated (16, 19, 31) towards present-day Greece . This could have occurred when arid Saharan conditions became established and large-scale migrations occurred in all directions from the desert. In this case, the more ancient Greek Pelasgian substratum would come from a Negroid stock.(2)" 

"Other Negroid genes have also been found in Greeks. They are the only Caucasoid population who bears cystic fibrosis mutations typical of Black Africans (Chromosome 7). See Dork, et al. In Am. J. Hum. Genet, 1998: 63: 656-682."

Study #3

"HLA genes in Southern Tunisians (Ghannouch area) and their relationship with other Mediterraneans."
European Journal Medical Genetics. 2006 Jan-Feb;49(1):43-56. 
A, Hmida S, Kaabi H, Dridi A, Jridi A, El Gaa l ed A, Boukef K. 

QUOTES:

"South Tunisian HLA gene profile has studied for the first time. HLA-A, -B, -DRB1 and -DQB1 allele frequencies of Ghannouch have been compared with those of neighboring populations, other Mediterraneans and Sub-Saharans. Their relatedness has been tested by genetic distances, Neighbor-Joining dendrograms and correspondence analyses. Our HLA data show that both southern from Ghannouch and northern Tunisians are of a Berber substratum in spite of the successive incursions (particularly, the 7th-8th century A.D. Arab invasion) occurred in Tunisia. It is also the case of other North Africans and Iberians. This present study confirms the relatedness of Greeks to Sub-Saharan populations. This suggests that there was an admixture between the Greeks and Sub-Saharans probably during Pharaonic period or after natural catastrophes (dryness) occurred in Sahara."

Older anthropological research- Anthropologists, studying old remains of Greeks, sometimes found sub-Saharan-like individuals:

J. Lawrence Angel, in American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 74, No. 1/2 (Feb. - Apr., 1972) [review of Frank Snowden's "Blacks in Antiquity" book] reports:

Quote:
In my own skeletal samples from Greece I note apparent negroid nose and mouth traits in two of fourteen Early Neolithic (sixth millenium B.C.), only two or three more among 364 from fifth to second millenium B.C., one among 113 Early Iron Age, one or two among 233 Classic and Hellenistic skeletons, but four clear Negroids (all from one area of Early Christian Corinth) among ninety-five Roman period, two among eighty-five Medieval, and of course ten among fifty-two Turkish period Greeks, yet none among 202 of Romantic (nineteenth century) date.


Quote from Biological Relations of Egyptians and Eastern Mediterranean Populations during pre-dynastic and Dynastic Times, Journal of Human Evolution, 1972 (1) pp. 307-313:

Quote:
"Against this background of disease, movement and pedomorphic reduction off body size one can identify Negroid (Ethiopic or Bushmanoid?) traits of nose and prognathism appearing in Natufian latest hunters (McCown, 1939) and in Anatolian and Macedonian first farmers (Angel, 1972), probably from Nubia via the predecesors of the Badarians and Tasians [. . .]"


Frank Snowden, who passed away in 2007 at age 96, had researched the presence of blacks in the ancient Greece from the standpoint of art and literature. His findings include:

Quote:
Both the literary and archaeological evidence points to a not infrequent crossing between blacks and whites. Nothing in the observations on such unions, whether marriage or concubinage, resembles certain modern strictures on racial mixture.

Of course one reason for the color bar which recently existed in the West was the belief that it was race mixing which led to the collapse of Greek, Roman, and other civilizations. . . .

No laws in the Greco-Roman world prohibited unions of blacks and whites. Ethiopian blood was interfused with that of Greeks and Romans. No Greek or Roman author condemned such racial mixture. . . . The scientists Aristotle and Pliny, like Plutarch, commented as scientists on the physical appearance of those born of black-white racial mixture but included nothing resembling certain modern strictures on miscegenation. . . . It is safe to assume, therefore, that in course of time many Ethiopians were assimilated into a predominantly white population. (Blacks in Antiquity, 193-195)


With respect to the number of blacks in ancient Greece, Snowden states: Quote:
Even though we cannot state, in the manner of modern sociologists and historians,the ratio of Blacks to Whites in either Greece or Italy, we can say that Ethiopians were by no means few or rare sights and that their presence, whatever their numbers, constituted no color problem. (Blacks in Antiquity, 186)

Snowden also mentions: Quote:
Black-white sexual relations were never the cause of great emotional crises and many blacks were physically assimilated into the predominantly white populations of the Mediterranean world.

...the number of references to Ethiopians in Greek literature of the fifth century BC, on the appearance of mulatto children following the presence of blacks in Greece in the army of Xerxes, and on the many artistic representations of the mid- and late-fifth century BC reflecting this anthropological evolution.

Other DNA studies using different African populations than Arnaiz-Villena found the same clustering of Africans. Egyptians, grouped closer with other Africans like Mandenka, and Moroccans, than with Europeans.

Petlichkovski et. al. High-resolution typing of HLA-DRB1 locus in the Macedonian population. Tissue Antigens. 2004 Oct;64(4):486-91.

"A phylogenetic tree constructed on the basis of the high-resolution data deriving from other populations revealed the clustering of Macedonians together with other Balkan populations (Greeks, Croats, Turks and Romanians) and Sardinians, close to another "European" cluster consisting of the Italian, French, Danish, Polish and Spanish populations. The included African populations grouped on the opposite side of the tree..."

"As expected, the included African populations (Moroccans, Egyptians, Mandenka, and Algerians) were grouped on the opposite side of the tree... Bearing in mind the differences in the allele frequencies in the Macedonians in our study and those in the study of Arnaiz-Villena et al., we believe that the discordance of the observations in both the studies investigating the HLA polymorphism is probably due to the selection of different subject populations."