Why are they praising the Mycenaeans? The Mycenaeans practiced slavery (see Achilles and Briseis) and waged a war of choice over a Spartan hussy.
There is an interesting discussion of the Minoan and Mycenaean inhabitants of Greece in Jean Manco, Ancestral Journeys: The Peopling of Europe from the First Venturers to the Vikings (rev. ed., 2015). It appears that attempts to extract ancient DNA from Greece and Crete from the Neolithic and Bronze Ages have been largely unsuccessful, apart from some mitochondrial DNA from bones buried in Grave Circle B at Mycenae (they found haplogroups K and U5a1--which could come either from the Indo-European-speaking invaders of Bronze Age Greece or from groups there before the Proto-Greek speakers arrived).
Manco concludes that modern Greeks are, like all other European nations, a mixture of the three main components that contributed to the European genetic heritage: the Paleolithic/Mesoplithic hunter-gatherers, the Neolithic farmers (immigrants from the Near East--Taurus Mountains/Zagros Mountains areas of eastern Turkey and NW Iran), and what is called "Ancestral North Eurasian" which spread westwards from Siberia, bringing in the Y-DNA haplogroup R, which is very widespread in Europe today.
Don’t miss the Dr. Judith Curry thread from today re: Global Warming. We need to get her into a science policy post in the Trump Administration.
‘CRAZINESS’ in climate field leads dissenter Dr. Judith Curry (GA Tech) to resign
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3510595/posts
Sure, we don't need little political messages in articles on archaeology or movies that distort history.
There's been a long tradition of drawing a radical contrast between the Greeks and Asia or Africa -- "the West versus the rest."
There's something in that, but it can be taken too far.
The trend in academia recently has been to study the similarities between the ancient Greeks and the Asian and North African societies of their day.
That can also be taken too far, but it was inevitable that scholars would go down that path after decades of taking the other.
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What are the odds, though, that two scholars would spontaneously choose to hang a modern-day political message on their speculations? It's possible, of course, but maybe the author of the article was trawling for an anti-Trump (or anti-Brexit) message, setting her subjects up to give her the responses she wanted.
Many, many years ago I “trashed” national geographic when it became political and had nothing to do with actual geographical discoveries. Over the years I watched all “so-called” scientific journals and articles turn to absolute Political Correctness and the presentation of factual scientific and geographic articles became total political support for the environmentalists and liberal world of ignorant politically programmed robots.
The word “science” is now synonymous with propaganda.