Origin of the Albanians | Wikipedia audio article
Channel: wikipedia tts
Date: 2018-11-30

This is an audio version of the Wikipedia Article:
Origin of the Albanians

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SUMMARY
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The origin of the Albanians has long been a matter of dispute among historians. Little is known about the ancient Balkan people, and they blended into one another in Thraco-Illyrian and Daco-Thracian contact zones even in antiquity.
The Albanians first appear in the historical record in Byzantine sources of the 11th century. At this point, they were already fully Christianized.  Very little evidence of pre-Christian Albanian culture survives, although Albanian mythology and folklore are of Paleo-Balkanic origin and almost all of their elements are pagan, in particular showing Greek influence.The Albanian language forms a separate branch of Indo-European, first attested in the 15th century, and is considered to have evolved from one of the Paleo-Balkan languages of antiquity.Contemporary historians conclude that, like all Balkan peoples, the Albanians are not descendants of a single ancient population; apart from the main ancestor, prehistoric Balkan populations such as the Illyrians, Dacians or Thracians, there is an additional admixture from Slavic, Greek, Vlach, Romano-Italian, Celtic and Germanic elements. Studies in genetic anthropology show that the Albanians share similar ancestry to many other Europeans, and especially other peoples of the Balkans. The Albanians are also one of Europe's populations that has most common ancestors within their own ethnic group even though they share ancestors with other ethnic groups.