[Verginius Rufus]

But who were the Mycenaeans? They spoke an early form of Greek, as the Linear B tablets show. Greek is an Indo-European language--the ancestral language was probably spoken in the area north of the Black Sea and brought to Greece and elsewhere. But the indigenous population was not exterminated. There are many place names of pre-Greek origin which were still used in classical times (Athens, Corinth, Tiryns, Knossos, Parnassus, and many others) as well as many loan words of pre-Greek origin (labyrinthos, terebinthos, erebinthos, glossa/glotta, thalassa/thalatta, melissa, etc.). In Herodotus' time there were still a few places where "Pelasgian" speakers spoke a non-Greek language, perhaps the descendants of the earlier population.

So as far as DNA goes, the modern Greeks probably have inherited DNA from people who were in Greece in Neolithic and Early Bronze Age times before the Greek language was brought into Greece.

[SunkenCiv]

• The Linear B Tablets and Mycenaean Social, Political, and Economic Organization [2004]
• Phaistos Disk: Greek or Luwian? [2009]
• The Birth of Bureaucracy (Where Long Lines, Red Tape & Arcane Rules Began; 1650 to 1100 B.C.) [2012]
• Rare Cuneiform Script Found on Island of Malta [2011]
• Ancient Tablet Found: Oldest Readable Writing in Europe [2011]
• Mycenaean and Hittite Diplomatic Correspondence: Fact and Fiction [ PDF file ] [2007]
• First Minoan Shipwreck: An unprecedented find off the coast of Crete [2010]

[SunkenCiv]

This is one of those times I wish TinyPic had survived. Had a nice map of -inthos place names I'd sort of scanned out of, I forget which book. The -inthos suffix is from Carian, which is related to other languages, possibly including Etruscan (which is related to Lemnian).