In an ancient DNA study published this week in the journal Nature, scientists and archaeologists from over 80 different institutions lift the veil on the genomic history of Southeastern Europe, a region from which very little ancient genetic data has been available until now. This is the second-largest ancient DNA study ever reported. (The largest, reported simultaneously in Nature by many of the same authors, focuses on the prehistory of Northwestern Europe.)

The burial fields of Varna, Bulgaria, is famous for its rich burial gifts. In one of the 6,500 year old graves more gold was found than in all other graves at this time. Genetic examinations show that the DNA of the man buried there had similiarities with the DNA of earlier European famers [Credit: © I, Yelkrokoyade, commons.wikimedia.org, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Starting around 8,500 years ago, agriculture spread into Europe from the southeast, accompanied by a movement of people from Anatolia. This study reports data from the genomes of 225 ancient people who lived both before and after this transition, and documents the interaction and mixing of these two genetically different groups of people. “Southeastern Europe was the beachhead in the spread of farming from Anatolia into Europe. This study is the first to provide a rich genetic characterization of this process by showing how the indigenous population interacted with incoming Asian immigrants at this extraordinary moment in the past,” says Songül Alpaslan-Roodenberg, a consulting anthropologist at Harvard Medical School, who identified and sampled many of the skeletons.

“In some places, hunter-gatherers and incoming farmers seem to have mixed very quickly,” says first author Iain Mathieson, a geneticist at the University of Pennsylvania, “but mostly the two groups remained isolated, at least for the first few hundred years. These hunter-gatherers had been living there for thousands of years, and it must have been quite a shock to have these new people show up—with a completely different lifestyle and appearance.”

“Three thousand years later, they were thoroughly mixed,” continues David Reich of Harvard Medical School, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, who co-directed the study. “Some populations derived up to a quarter of their ancestry from hunter-gatherers.” In other parts of Europe, this mixing was marked by a so-called sex bias, with most of the hunter-gatherer ancestry contributed by men. In the southeast, however, the pattern was different. “This shows that the mode of interaction between the two groups was different in different places, something we need to try to understand in the context of the archaeological evidence,” added Mathieson.

The new paper also dramatically increases the number of samples from the population of hunter-gatherers that inhabited Europe before the farmers. The study reports a particularly rich sampling of forty hunter-gatherers and early farmers from six archaeological sites from the Iron Gates region, which straddles the border of present-day Romania and Serbia. The genetic results show that the region witnessed intensive interaction between hunter-gatherers and farmers. Out of four individuals from the site of Lepenski Vir, for example, two had entirely Anatolian farmer-related ancestry, fitting with isotope evidence that they were migrants from outside the Iron Gates region, while a third individual had a mixture of ancestries and consumed aquatic resources, as expected if farmers were being integrated into hunter-gatherer groups or were adopting a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

“These results reveal the relationship between migrations, admixture and subsistence in the this key region and show that even within early European farmers, individuals differed in their ancestry, reflecting a dynamic mosaic of hunter-farmer interbreeding,” adds Ron Pinhasi, an anthropologist at the University for Vienna, who co-directed the study.

The new paper also reports ancient DNA from the people who lived at iconic archaeological sites such as Varna, one of the first places in the world where there is evidence of extreme wealth inequality, with one individual from whom the study obtained data buried with more gold than all other known burials of the period. “The DNA from the famous Varna burial is genetically similar to that of other early European farmers. However, we also find one individual from Varna and several individuals at neighboring sites in Bulgaria who had ancestry from the eastern European steppe. This is the earliest evidence of steppe ancestry this far west—two thousand years before the mass migration from the steppe that replaced more than half of the population of northern Europe,” says Johannes Krause, Director of the Department of Archaeogenetics at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, who led the work on Varna.

Adds Reich, “These very large ancient DNA studies, involving intense collaboration between geneticists and archaeologists, make it possible to build up a rich picture of key periods of the past that could only be weakly glimpsed before. Studies on this scale represent a coming of age for the field of ancient DNA—I look forward to what we will learn when similar approaches are applied elsewhere in the world.”

Source: Max-Planck-Gesellschaft [February 23, 2018]

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UFOs over Romania is a very convincing book loaded with both specific sighting reports and generalized ideas. It is thoroughly researched and a well-written account of UFOs that tries be fair minded and balanced.

UFOs over Romaniais a very convincing book loaded with both specific sighting reports and generalized ideas. Romania is noted the world over for its Dracula legends and some of its UFO events reflect a

By Irena Scott PhD 10-5-16

reality almost as incredible. For example, in one, “After visiting the ruins of the Poenari stronghold (from XIV century, rebuilt in 1459 by Prince Vlad Ţepeş of Walachia, “The Impaler”, who was the model for “Count Dracula”),” a couple had a UFO sighting. They saw a giant disc arise from a lake, which they could see perfectly as their eyes followed it in terror. First, they had the impression it would head in their direction, but instead it moved north toward Transylvania and disappeared over the mountains.

Many other such encounters are described often with several witnesses–often very credible technically trained ones, good descriptions of the objects, and even good physical evidence such as radar detections. Out-of-place artefacts are also described.

This book is a thoroughly researched and well-written account of UFOs that tries be fair minded and balanced. The author compared UFO phenomena to the six Blind Men exploring portions of the Elephant parable, and concluded that various fields such as science, religion, folklore, paranormal studies, ufology, and others each have their own means, but each also represent an extremely complex reality.
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As the famous castle of Dracula in Transylvania goes up for sale it is a a remarkable coincidence that featured in my new book is a medieval painting from a church in Transylvania that some researchers believe depicts a UFO (see below). In Romania, everyday people, especially in the countryside, always considered the heavenly apparitions not as something impossible but as "divine signs" that can happen normally, though rarely. There are countless testimonies in this regard. This belief was reinforced by the fact that the holy characters of the Christian religion, from the Old and the New Testament were seen on occasion coming down from heavens and returning whence they came.

Dan D. Farcas PhD The UFO Chronicles 9-27-16

In past centuries, when, in Romania, most of the population was illiterate, religious teachings were spread and reinforced by the use of frescoes, depicting biblical scenes, covering the walls of churches both indoors and often also outdoors as well. Even if these scenes evoke ancient events and distant lands, the painters painted men and buildings as they knew them in the environment they lived. Similarly, we can assume that they sometimes painted such holy characters in heavenly vehicles that resemble certain celestial objects that they saw themselves flying in the sky (Comets, meteors etc), or that were reported by witnesses of strange airborne apparitions. In areas with Orthodox religion there are many such representations in a variety of different churches.

The city of Târgovişte was the capital of Walachia for several centuries. The construction of the Princely Church in the city was completed in 1583. The frescoes inside have not been repainted but only retouched with all of the original figures and objects remaining exactly the same. As the Romanian journalist Gabriel Tudor noted, on the west wall of the nave, the fresco depicting the moment of receiving the tablets of the Law by Moses on Mount Sinai (the ten commandments), we see a character not mentioned in the Bible: depicted as an angel and placed between two concentric circles, looking as if it had just come out to watch the proceedings. What are those two circles? In any case, surely not clouds which are clearly represented in the nearby paintings in a completely different manner. Also they can not be stars or the moon, because on the same fresco the sun is seen, whose rays are prominently depicted to draw attention that the scene takes place in broad daylight. Could it be that the two circles are a graphic representation, in a primitive manner, of a disc-shaped UFO with a domed top, which the anonymous painter, having not a very good capacity to represent things in a three-dimensional perspective, drew as a circle inside another circle?

The writer and researcher of mythology Victor Kernbach (1923-1995), in his book “Enigmele miturilor astrale” (Riddles of astral myths), detailed that similar frescoes have been in churches from Bucharest as the (old) “Saint Spiridon” and “Bucur”. Unfortunately, the first was demolished under the communist regime, but the second exists today and the pictorial representations are of the same type as those at the Princely Church of Târgovişte.

As the Romania author Călin Turcu (1942-2006) noted in his book “Extratereștrii în România” (Aliens in Romania), “On the walls of the chapel Lainici (Gorj County) can be distinguished a picture quite different from the others. The drawing, done in the early seventeenth century and representing the “Annunciation”, depicts, above the Archangel Gabriel and the Virgin Mary, a heavenly “vehicle” with the shape of a double balloon which again can not be a cloud. The flying object ends with a narrow open tube, where red streaks appear to burst and absorbed behind by a red cloud.

On the walls of Tutana monastery (Argeş county), built in 1577, is depicted an “astronaut”, equipped for space flight. It is by no means an earthly character. Images such as those presented above are reported not only in Romania but also in other countries of the Orthodox faith, as in the Decani monastery in Kosovo and on a number of Russian religious icons.

But the paintings with UFOs are not restricted only to the Orthodox churches. One such painting exists also in a Protestant church, in the centre of Romania. Gili Schechter and Hannan Sabbath, from the Israeli Extraterrestrials and UFOs Research Association, commented in an article of a photo of a mural fresco in the Monastery Church, not far from the Clock Tower in the city of Sighişoara (Transylvania). The photo reproduced in the article was made by Cătălina Borta. Under the image is written in German, a passage from Psalm 130, 7: “Israel trust the Lord!” In the image is a large building, possibly a church, above which floats, slightly oblique, a large disc-shaped object, divided in to about 10 large sections. From the centre of the disc pointing down is a sort of spike. Above the bright object is a short column on which you see other objects that are hard to identify.


Are these paintings depictions of medieval UFO sightings or do they have a much more mundane and simpler explanation ? As an academic and a UFO researcher I must admit that the images on these paintings are certainly worth a second look and we should not rule out the possibility that they do depict something that today would be described as a UFO.

Dan D.Farcas Phd is the author of the brand new book UFOs OVER ROMANIA published by Flying Disk Press and is out now on Amazon.
Flying Disk Press

About the author: Dan D. Farcas Ph.D.

Born in 1940 in Reşiţa, Romania, he holds an MSc in mathematics and physics and a Ph.D. in mathematics and computers. Since 1968, he was a project manager for several countrywide information systems, mainly in health and science management. He was elected in 1993 a full member of the Academy of Medical Sciences of Romania. Since 2011 he has been the President of the Association for the Study of Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena (ASFAN) in Romania. He has published in Romania over 25 books (on IT, philosophy of science, Extraterrestrials, UFOs etc.), more than 1,200 articles and he also has participated in numerous radio and TV debates.

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