Who are Bosnians and what do you know about the history of the people?

[BosnianKnight]

Please don't let this thread turn out of be a you know what storm.

[hellheaven1987]

Bosnians are Slavs that converted to Islam because it would earn favor from their Ottoman master, right?

[BosnianKnight]

What I've learned we have the I2 haplogroup and slavs have R1A, and why we converted I have no idea why.

[Lord Oda Nobunaga]

So some Orthodox guys are hanging out in Bosnia and are being persecuted by their Catholic masters
Bam!
In comes Osmanli Sultanat says "you should be Muslim like me, but I'll give you the choice"
The Bosnians are all like " this Catholic , we'll join your empire"
Then the Bosnians are all like "I don't know man Orthodoxy is kind of outdated I think it's Islam for the win"
Boom boom bang, Muslims in Europe

[Cyclops]

AFAIK Bosna or Bosnia is a Balkan territory based around the Bosna river, and usually associated with Herzegovina for what reason I do not know.

Its inhabited by a mixture of people influenced by stone and bronze age settlers, and cultures including Thrakian, Illyrian, Keltic, Hellenic, Roman, East Roman, South Slavic, Ottoman and Western European. Plenty of people were converted to plenty of religions by fashionable/forceful outsiders, its the usual story.

The identity can be linked to Muslim Bosniaks but also Orthodox and Catholic slavs (and slavicised locals? and non slav locals? very few in number I think) as well as settlers in the region who tended to be lumped with the religious groups they adhered to: muslims were called Bosniaks, catholics were assumed into the Croat group and orthodox would be considered Serb. These are all labels and I would guess most people living in Bosnia would have plenty of shared ancestors and shared culture.

My Bosnian Croat friend didn't like to talk about home much and my Bosnian Muslim friend would break down in tears at the thought of the war in the 90's so I don't know too much about whaty Bosnians think themselves, its pretty much all from history books. Those two look alike and both are educated and broadminded women so my impression is of decent people divided by political and historical strife.

The Bosnian identity sits within the context of Balkan identity and thats a hotly contested field, so you will probably get a you-know-what storm in any case.

[sumskilz]

What I've learned we have the I2 haplogroup and slavs have R1A

Not exactly...

[Lord Oda Nobunaga]

So Bosnians make up the original inhabitants of Europe before the Bronze Age?

[sumskilz]

So Bosnians make up the original inhabitants of Europe before the Bronze Age?

Y haplogroups only represent male patrilineages, but yeah it seems that the most common patrilineage among Bosnians is from the earliest inhabitants of Europe. It's shown up in the ancient remains of Neolithic farmers who are pre-Indo-European, but it's distribution implies that it's even older.

EDIT: The autosomal DNA centered in that region of the Balkans also shows some degree of affinity to Sardinians and to a lesser extent Basques.

[white-wolf]

Not exactly...

Soo, Bosnians are more ancient people than the Basques? Oldest inhabitants of Europe?

[Sir Adrian]

Can't older than basques since basques were the original population of Europe, but it does prove that bosnians are slavicised Illyrians, Celts and Thraco-Dacians.

[Dromikaites]

If you're referring to the Muslim Bosniaks, I think they are Slavic-language Muslims.

Genetic makeup seems to indicate they have adopted the Slavic language from a relatively small elite who conquered the area after the 6th century, while in essence remaining the same population since the Stone Age.

In this respect their story is not different from the one of the other Slavic language populations of the Balkans: the more numerous population who at the time spoke Latin (and who before speaking Latin spoke Thracian or Illyrian) adopted the language of their less numerous overlords.

Then in the case of the Muslim Bosnians and of the Albanians, they also adopted the religion of another conqueror, the Ottoman Empire.

Seen through these lenses everything that happened in the Balkans, starting from late 19th century, is a monument dedicated to human stupidity: people who were closely related by blood killed each other with great enthusiasm.

[sumskilz]

Soo, Bosnians are more ancient people than the Basques? Oldest inhabitants of Europe?

Some of their ancestry seems to be from the same very early inhabitants of Europe. They are closer to Sardinians though. There were European hunter-gatherers, and then there were European farmers who spread out from the Balkans. There wasn't an extinction and replacement of the hunter-gathers, it seems they (but mostly their women) were integrated into the farmers society. The Sardinians and people from the Illyrian part of the Balkans seem to have a lot of the DNA from these farmers, but also the hunter-gatherers. The Basques seem to have more from the hunter-gatherers. Both populations were in Europe before the expansion of Near Eastern farmers who were Levantine/Cypriot-like and the arrival of Indo-European speaking people. All of what I'm saying matches the data we have now, but we don't yet have a lot of ancient DNA samples, so this hypothesis may have to be revised. I don't want to give the impression that they are completely distinct from their neighboring populations, just that people in that part of the Balkans like the Basques and Sardinians just have less admixture from more recently arrived populations. In the map I posted, you can see that it's pretty likely that the I2a1 haplogroup was common among Illyrians.

With regard to the more recent genetic history of Bosnians, I agree with Sir Adrian and Dromikaites are saying

[BosnianKnight]

So some Orthodox guys are hanging out in Bosnia and are being persecuted by their Catholic masters
Bam!
In comes Osmanli Sultanat says "you should be Muslim like me, but I'll give you the choice"
The Bosnians are all like " this Catholic , we'll join your empire"
Then the Bosnians are all like "I don't know man Orthodoxy is kind of outdated I think it's Islam for the win"
Boom boom bang, Muslims in Europe

Shame to famiry.

[BosnianKnight]

So mostly old Illyrians?

[irontaino]

My knowledge of the Balkans is a bit meh, but what I gleaned is that Bosnians are pretty much the exact same thing as Serbs and Croatians, except they're Muslim .

[Roma_Victrix]

Very interesting that (using only haplogroup 12a1, which may or may not indicate terribly much) the Bosnians are so closely related to the Sardinians, with some relation to the Basques, peoples whose lineage in Europe goes back even before the Bronze Age.

[Euphoric]

Erm, well, I saw a picture of a red-haired Bosnian leader of an extremist jihadi group in Syria once. Other than that....nothing.

[sumskilz]

Very interesting that (using only haplogroup 12a1, which may or may not indicate terribly much) the Bosnians are so closely related to the Sardinians, with some relation to the Basques, peoples whose lineage in Europe goes back even before the Bronze Age.

Depending on your perspective, a haplogroup doesn't say a lot about an individuals because going back in time becomes one lineage out of hundreds, then thousands, then millions. Haplogroups are good for looking at populations though, especially when one haplogroup accounts for over half of the population. There is autosomal genetic affinity between the Balkans and Sardinia as well. All Europeans are descendants of these early groups, some populations just seem to have less admixture from successive immigrants. I said depending on your perspective before though, because there is another way to look at it. Which is that of all your ancestors who lived a thousand years ago, you have only a minuscule amount (if any) of their DNA which you directly inherited from them, with the one exception of the man you inherited your Y-chromosome from.

[Roma_Victrix]

@sumskils: Thanks for the very informative reply.

[Mortarion]

Well they are Southern Slavs like the Croats, Montenegrins, Slovenes, Serbs, Bulgarians and Macedonians.

Alot of them happened to convert to Islam between 1500 and 1800, duo to acouple of different reasons. Some did it because they agreed with the Islamic view of god etc, some because they where seen as heretics by the Catholic church and others because the Ottomans had a special tax for Christians and if you converted you wouldn't have to pay the tax.

Before that, as far as i know Bosnia got it's name from the river Bosna. It was a region that became a small kingdom around 1000, it ended up spreading into parts of Croatia and Serbia but later lost those regions because of the Ottomans and internal conflicts. Around the same time a smaller duchy appeared south of Bosnia, which has changed name acouple of times. First it was named Zahumlje, then Vojvodstvo Svetog Save (Duchy of Saint Sava) after that it was renamed into Hercegovina after Herceg Stjepan which means Duke Stephan and means the dukes land or land of the duke. They later joined into what is now Bosnia & Hercegovina.

A funny theory that i doubt is true, but still interesting. Bosnia was mostly following a religion called Bogumil. However, it originated in Bulgaria and the followers where persecuted. There is a small region in Bulgaria called Bosna, and some believe the bogumils in that region where persecuted, moved and settled in what is modern day Bosnia and that they kept calling themselves Bosnians from that region in Bulgaria. It's abit far fetched, but still a fun interesting theory

They are pretty much the same people as Croats and Serbs, yet they all killed each other because of their different religius views. They each hoped religion would save them, yet it ended up killing more of them than it ever did save. What is the difference between them if you took their religions away?

Also, some mountains named after Slavic gods that i always found interesting

Perunova Gora and Prenj are named after the god Perun
Velez is named after the god Veles
Troglav named after the god Triglav
There are some more but im to tired to look xD

Before im done, im not against anybody if you for some reason think that from my comment. But i love both Serbs, Bosniaks, Croats etc and hated the conflict in the 90's. I got lots of friends from all over the former Yugoslavia, and we're all the same people with different views. We should learn to live and respect each other