The modern Greeks are essentially a mix of Anatolian and Balkan peoples.
Yes and no. Greeks have like all Europeans three major ancestral compounds: European Hunter and Gatherers (the ostensibly blue eyed ones with dark skin), Early European Farmers (These are the Antaolians. Themselves a mixture of Anatolian and more Southern Middle Eastern/Levantine ancestry) and Yamnaya (The ones who probably domesticated horses quite early, were able to drink milk and spread the Indo-European languages). Greeks have high amounts of Early European Farmers ancestry. The amount of Yamnaya ancestry increased in the last 2000 years, as it did in the rest of the Balkan area (most strongly in places like Northern Croatia and Hungary etc.).
2000 years of interaction with various peoples across the world is going to have an impact
Sure, the impact was still not that big. Geneticists were rather surprised that the Roman Empire, for example, only had little impact on the genetic make-up of their provinces. The Ottoman Empire had barely any impact on Balkan demographics as well. The biggest shift was the slavic migration towards Southern Europe and Greece was impacted by this as well, no doubt. Greeks also incorporated some of their slaves' ancestry, as did the Turks. But at least according to archeogenetics (which is still quite young, I'm not denying that), it's not like modern Greeks would be extremely different from people living there 2000 years ago. Culture and language shift much faster than genes do. Modern Turks are mostly Muslim and speak a Turkic language. Genetically speaking they aren' extremely different from their Greek ancestor. And Anatolian Greeks themselves were people who have been hellinized.
Wanting more people with diverse backgrounds to enter the field of Sumerian studies is not a bad thing.
I didn't say it's a bad thing. It's not necessary. Furthermore which groups have to be more included depend highly on the hegemonic American culture. Nobody asks for more Moldovans in Sumeriology, because they're not part of what the American neoliberal left deems to be important. I'm all for more input from Non-American countries in fields like Sumeriology. The amount of your melanin can be important in certain fields, but it won't help you to decode the Sumerian language better. It's also strongly influenced by your culture. A country like Iraq, which is less influenced by American culture, won't necessarily think that gay people need to be more represented in movies. For them it's bad, for other cultures it's good. If we were honest, we could admit that it's morally neutral.
Something to remember about Sub Saharan Africa is that they didn't have horses. What they did have was cows, but cows were way more valuable for milk and meat and hide to even consider them as plow animals. They were reliant on agriculture in a climate that wasn't always the best for it, as semi-nomadic groups could better deal with the somewhat unpredictable weather cycles of Africa in many locations. They still built things like the Great Zimbabwe, and African metalworking produced iron and steel of very high quality and craftsmanship. When you consider what materials they had to work with, lack of a written language, and no great large unifying state or factors to encourage such unification, it's pretty impressive what the southern and western sub-saharan peoples were able to do, relatively isolated from the global trade networks that fueled the Mediterranean, India, and the like. East Africa has a long and rich history in states like Ethiopia, which were connected to the global network, and they did some impressive things too in architecture.
I don't disagree with that. The geographic problems of Africa are well known and it's clear that geography had a big impact how fast and wide civilizations developed. Nobody is surprised that agriculture flourished much earlier in Mesopotamia than in Sweden.
Part of the problem is the generalization of the African continent as one big mass of either ignorant savages or noble kings. Another part of the problem is compared to places Greece, not a lot of attempts were made to do large scale archeological work outside of a few areas of Africa, and that's not getting into the politics of the Great Zimbabwe and how Rhodesia tried to pretend White People Did It.
Such generalizations aren't unique to Africa. People think Europe is a rich continent, even though wealth is mostly concentrated in the West. Countries like Moldova and Ukraine aren't just poor, they're some of the poorest countries in the world. Large scale archeological work was even rarely/very lately done in other places of Europe/Asia as well.
Culturally, Sub-Saharan Africa is a linguistic and ethnic gold mine that anthropologists, historians, and archeologists have only very recently been getting into.
Yes, I agree. So is South America, for example. Regions that had large empires tend to get more boring. The Middle East and Europe were both home to much more language families, most of which died out without ever being written. Today the Middle East is dominated by almost just one semitic language, namely Arabic (Sure, the dialects might be considered languages) and most languages in Europe are Indo-European. The Chinese empire too costed the life of many different cultures and languages.
Edit: @
Techpriest
Maybe I sounded a bit too much like your typical alt-right racist. Sometimes people just make stupid claims (like the kangs) and I can't help making condescending remarks regarding ethnic group X. I think it's as stupid as when Germans claim that the ancient Greeks and Romans were pure Aryans that enslaved dumb Mediterraneans and over time the Mediterraneans took Greece over and fucked it up. I don't even deny that there are white kangz who claimed that the ancient Egyptians were Aryans from Denmark who conquered Egypt. It's as stupid, but you see it (nowadays) much rarer than, let's say 50 years ago.
