Dacians - Legacy

Legacy

See also: Daco-Romanian, Daco-Romanian continuity, Dacia in art, and Dacia in fiction

In 2004, a study of mitochondrial DNA polymorphism was performed on the skeletal remains of Thracians from south-eastern Romania dating from the Bronze Age and Iron Age. MtDNA were compared with several modern mtDNA sequences from five present-day European populations. The results reflect a genetic similarity between the old Thracian individuals and the modern south-east European populations.. The Thracian individuals show informative point mutations in 7np (nucleotide position), the Romanian, Greek and Albanian individuals in 7np, and the Bulgarian individuals in only 5np out of 12 most informative nucleotide positions presented in the study. As concerns the frequency of point mutations in the 12 nucleotide positions, the Italian individuals show the highest mutation frequency with 12.5%, followed by the Thracian individuals with 8.3%, the Albanian individuals with 7.5%, the Romanian and Greek individuals with 6.25%, and the Bulgarian individuals with only 4.6%.. Computing the frequency of common point mutations of the present-day European population with the Thracian population has indicated that the Italians (7.9%), the Albanians (6.3%) and the Greeks (5.8%) have a bias of closer genetic kinship with the Thracian individuals than the Romanian and Bulgarian individuals (only 4.2%). The study concluded that, "so far it can be supposed that the old Thracian populations contributed to the modern Romanian genetic pool. More mtDNA sequences from Thracian individuals are needed in order to perform a complex objective statistical analysis."