The Iranian and/or the Iranian-Caucasian origin theory of Croats and Serbs date back to the 1797. It was the doctoral dissertation of Josip Mikoczy-Blumenthal. With this work he became the founder of Croatian Iranian origin theory. According to him Croats were people descending from the Sarmatians, an ancient Eastern Iranian people who started their westward migration around the 6th century BC, coming to dominate the closely related Scythians by the 2nd century BC.
The Sarmatians differed from the Scythians in their veneration of the GOD OF FIRE and women’s prominent role in warfare, which served as the inspiration for the Amazons.
At their greatest reported extent, Sarmatians tribes ranged from the Vistula River to the mouth of the Danube and eastward to the Volga, bordering the shores of the Black and Caspian seas as well as the Caucasus to the south.
The ancient Iranian origins theory of the people of the Dinaric Alps and the Sarmatian connection was of No real interest to Me until I got My own genetic results back from the National Geographic.
It turned out that My paternal haplogroup is I L41. Haplogroup I L41 is a very rare haplogroup shared by only 0.03 percent of the participants in the National Geographic project. L41 is a defining SNP for haplogroup I, which includes both I1 and I2. In other words it is proto Old Norse and Proto South Slavic. It is closer to South Slavic haplogoup I because from the refuge of the Dinaric Alps during the last Ice Age, haplogroup I branched out into Scandinavia.
The composite subclade I-M170 contains individuals directly descended from the earliest members of Haplogroup I, bearing none of the subsequent mutations which identify the remaining subclades.
Haplogroup I is found almost exclusively in Europe where it is represented in about 20% of the population. Hg I has a broad European distribution, but its strong geographic concentration in northwestern Europe has led Hg I to be nicknamed the “Viking” haplogroup (though some consider R1a to be the only true Viking haplogroup.)
It appears that Haplogroup I L41 appears in Iran in small frequencies among Kurds, Mazandaranis of the Caspian Region and among Iranian Zoroastrians. In fact, the Caspian Mountains and the province of Mazandaran were the last Zoroastrian strongholds.
It appears that the ancient Iranians and their direct descendants are closely related to original Indo European population groups living between the black and Caspian Seas and south of the Ural Mountains.
In my particular case the closest population groups to My overall genetic make up are the Georgians and populations of North Caucasus and Southern Russia.
Beside R1a (the ancient Indo European marker,) another haplogroup common among Iranian Zoroastrians is the haplogroup T. However the subclades of haplogroup T associated with the Iranian Zoroastrians belong to the branches of T that are found in Anatolia or Caucasus. These subclades probably represent one of the Neolithic migration from the Fertile Crescent to Southern Russia and Southeast Europe and have spread as far north as the eastern Baltic and has been found as far east as the Volga-Ural region of Russia and Xinjiang in north-west China.
The branch of haplogroup T associated with Iranian Zoroastrians probably penetrated into the Pontic-Caspian Steppe during the Neolithic and became integrated to the indigenous R1a Indo European peoples before their expansion to Central Asia during the Bronze Age (See R1a-Z93).
I like to conclude by the following sacred gathic verse:
Asking who are you and whose are you??? (Meaning from where do you originate?) Peresat.čá má ciš ahî kahyá ahî
ardeshir
