What DNA Has Revealed About the Origins of Crete’s Minoans

Ancient DNA shows that the Minoans of Bronze Age Crete were not refugees from Egypt or Libya, as was once proposed. A 2013 study of maternal-line DNA found they were closest to Neolithic and modern European populations, especially present-day Cretans. A larger 2017 genome study added detail: most Minoan ancestry came from early farmers whose forebears had moved from Anatolia into the Aegean thousands of years earlier, with a smaller share related to peoples of the Caucasus and Iran. Both studies point to the same core answer: Minoan civilisation grew out of the island's own long-settled population.

Who were the Minoans?

The Minoans built Europe's first palace-based civilisation on Crete. Their culture emerged from the island's Neolithic communities around 3100 BC, and the first great palaces, such as Knossos, Phaistos and Malia, appeared shortly after 2000 BC. They were skilled sailors and traders, painted vivid frescoes and wrote in a script known as Linear A, which has still not been deciphered. Because their language is unknown, so is the name they used for themselves.

The word “Minoan” is modern. The British archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans, who began excavating Knossos in 1900, popularised it, borrowing the name of King Minos, the legendary ruler who in Greek myth kept the Minotaur in a labyrinth beneath his palace.

Minoan power faded after a series of destructions around 1450 BC. Mycenaean Greeks from the mainland then took control of Knossos, and their early Greek, written in Linear B, became the language of administration.

The old debate about Minoan origins

Evans found it hard to believe that such a sophisticated culture had developed on Crete by itself. He suggested that its founders were refugees from the Nile Delta who had fled when a southern king conquered northern Egypt about 5,000 years ago. He pointed to similarities between Egyptian and Minoan art, and to round tombs in southern Crete that resembled tombs built in ancient Libya.

Other scholars favoured origins in Anatolia (modern Turkey), Syria or the Levant. Without direct evidence from the people themselves, the argument went round in circles for a century, driven by pottery styles, burial customs and artistic parallels.

The 2013 mitochondrial DNA study

In 2013 a team including Jeffery Hughey and George Stamatoyannopoulos of the University of Washington published the first genetic test of the question in Nature Communications. They took samples from skeletons in the Ayios Charalambos cave on the Lassithi Plateau in east-central Crete, a burial site used for centuries. Of 69 individuals tested, 37 produced reliable results. Most of the remains date to around 3,700 years ago, the Middle Minoan period.

The team studied mitochondrial DNA, which sits in the cell's energy-producing structures and passes almost unchanged from mother to child. They compared the frequency of different maternal lineages, called haplogroups, with data from 135 modern and ancient populations.

The result ruled out a North African origin. The Minoans showed little genetic affinity with Egyptians, Libyans or Sudanese, or with populations of the Arabian Peninsula. They were closest to Neolithic and modern Europeans, and especially to people living on the Lassithi Plateau today. The authors concluded that the civilisation developed locally, from descendants of farmers who had reached the island around 9,000 years ago.

Speaking to BBC News at the time, Stamatoyannopoulos stressed that local origins did not mean isolation: “We need to see the Mediterranean as a pool, not as a group of isolated nations.”

What whole-genome studies added

Mitochondrial DNA traces only the maternal line, so it captures a small part of anyone's ancestry. In August 2017 a study in Nature led by Iosif Lazaridis and David Reich analysed genome-wide data from 19 ancient people, including ten Minoans and four Mycenaeans.

It found that the two groups were genetically very similar but not identical. At least three-quarters of Minoan ancestry came from early Neolithic farmers, whose ancestors had migrated from Anatolia into Greece and the Aegean long before the Bronze Age. Both groups also carried ancestry related to ancient peoples of the Caucasus and Iran. The Mycenaeans, unlike the Minoans, also carried a minor extra component linked to ancient populations of eastern Europe and northern Eurasia.

A follow-up analysis in 2022 put the early-farmer share of Minoan ancestry at roughly 71–77 percent and the Caucasus-related share at about 17–19 percent. Modern Greeks were found to descend largely from these Bronze Age populations.

Do the two studies contradict each other?

Not really. Headlines in 2013 said the Minoans were “Europeans”, while 2017 coverage said they came “from Anatolia”, which sounds like the opposite. In fact both describe the same deep history. The Neolithic farmers who first settled Greece and much of Europe had themselves come from Anatolia around 9,000 years ago. The 2013 study showed that the Minoans belonged to that European farming population; the 2017 study traced where those farmers had originally come from and detected later additions from further east.

What neither study supports is the old idea of a sudden Bronze Age migration from Egypt or Libya that brought civilisation ready-made to Crete.

Common misconceptions

“The Minoans were Egyptian.” Genetics does not support this. Contacts with Egypt were real, through trade and shared artistic ideas, but the people were local.
“DNA proves the Minoans spoke Greek.” Genes and language are separate. Linear A is still unread, and the Minoan language appears not to have been Greek.
“Modern Cretans are unrelated to the Minoans.” Both studies found a strong link between Bronze Age Cretans and people living in Greece and Crete today.
“A few skeletons settle everything.” Sample sizes are still small. Future studies of more sites and periods will refine the picture.

Why the Minoan DNA story matters

The research is a good example of how ancient DNA has changed archaeology. Questions that once depended on judging pottery and art styles can now be tested directly. In the Minoan case, the evidence supports a civilisation that grew from long-established island communities while trading and exchanging ideas across the eastern Mediterranean. Visitors to Knossos or the Heraklion Archaeological Museum today are looking at the achievement of people whose descendants still live on Crete.

Sources: Hughey et al., “A European population in Minoan Bronze Age Crete”, Nature Communications 4, 1861 (2013); Minoan civilization (Wikipedia, genetics and chronology); Sci.News, 4 August 2017, on Lazaridis et al., Nature. The original version of this story was published by Pappas Post.

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