Moesia Superior was roughly rectangular in shape, with the Danube River forming a northern border between it and the ancient kingdom (and later, Roman Province) of Dacia (Mócsy, 1974, Fig. 60). The Moesi, a tribe for whom the province of Moesia was named, were conquered by Marcus Licinius Crassus in 29 BCE (Cary, 1917). The neighboring region of Dardania was subsequently conquered in 28 (Mócsy, 1974, p. 24). This Thracian-speaking region included the cities of Scupi (Skopje) and the Roman colonia of Ulpianum (immediately south of the modern city of Priština). The Roman province of Moesia was created out of these combined areas in CE 6 by Augustus. Domitian reorganized the province in CE 86 into Moesia Superior and Moesia Inferior (known also as Ripa Thracia). With regard to the tribal identity of the natives of Upper Moesia, Mócsy (1974) has stated, based largely on archaeological evidence:
. . . a general conclusion may be permitted, that the original inhabitants of Moesia Superior were in the main Thracian, but had been exposed to Illyrian influence from the west, with the result that the Dardanian area in particular emerges as the contact zone between the Illyrian and Thracian languages. The inhabitants of Scupi probably spoke Thracian, as a Roman soldier born there in the third century considered himself a Bessus. In late antiquity Bessus was the normal term applied to Thracian-speaking inhabitants of the empire; the lingua Bessica was Thracian.
The Dacian kingdom, immediately north of the Danube and Moesia Superior, was conquered partially by Trajan in CE 106, with the region conquered becoming the Roman province of Dacia Traiana. "Dacian" was a Roman ethnic label; previously known to the Greeks as the Getae, Wilcox (1982), Hoddinott (1981), and Webber (2001) have all identified the Geto-Dacians as people of proto-Thracian descent and relationship. Because of later difficulties with the Goths, Rome was forced to abandon Dacia Traiana and withdraw south of the Danube after CE 270, relocating many Romanized Geto-Dacians in the process. The region (within Upper Moesia) that was settled by these expatriate Dacians became known as Dacia Aureliani. Upper Moesia was reorganized further by Diocletian (after 284) into smaller provinces, being further divided into Dardania, Moesia Prima, Dacia Ripensis and Dacia Mediterranea. The administrative capital of Dacia Mediterranea was Serdica (Sofia, Bulgaria) (Mócsy, 1974, p. 275), and Dardania´s capital was Naissus (Niš, Serbia). "Dacians" (as a Roman-identified ethnic group) therefore presented special problems of identification, since the location of their homeland shifted over time.
The Russian linguist Georgiev (1960) stated that the modern Albanian people were descended from Daco-Mysian ancestors, who had occupied ancient homelands in western Dacia (north of the Danube) and Moesia Superior (south of the Danube). This conclusion, based on linguistic evidence and analysis, was in good agreement with the Y-DNA genetic evidence published by Perečić (2005) and Cruciani (2007) for the relevant regions of Southeastern Europe. Georgiev (1960) also stated that the modern Albanian language was most closely related to modern Romanian, and that both were linguistic descendants of Daco-Mysian. According to Georgiev, "Romanian represents a completely Romanised Daco-Mysian and Albanian a semi-Romanised Daco-Mysian [language]." These archaeological, historical and linguistic findings support the view that Thracians, Getae, Dacians, and Moesians (Mysians) were derived from a common, earlier proto-Thracian culture.
Two dating methods were employed by Cruciani (2007) to calculate the “time to most recent common ancestor” ("TMRCA"): that of Zhivotovsky et al. (2006) based on his “evolutionary effective” mutation rate for an average square distance ("ASD") calculation, and the second based on Forster et al. (1996) and Saillard et al. (2000) utilizing ρ ("rho") statistics, employed to “assay how robust the time obtained is to choice of method.” Cruciani et al. (2007) found that Forster’s method produced time estimates that were slightly younger than the ASD-based method but that the difference was significant only for the root of the entire haplogroup.
An important finding of this study was that E-V13 and J-M12 had essentially identical population coalescence times. They concluded that the E-V13 and J-M12 subclades expanded in Europe outside of the Balkans as the result of “a single evolutionary event at the basis of the distribution of haplogroups E-V13 and J-M12 within Europe, a finding never appreciated before.” Further, Cruciani, et al. (2007) wrote that
Our estimated coalescence age of about 4.5 ky for haplogroups E-V13 and J-M12 in Europe (and their C.I.s) would also exclude a demographic expansion associated with the introduction of agriculture from Anatolia and would place this event at the beginning of the Balkan Bronze Age, a period that saw strong demographic changes as clearly testified from archeological records.
These expansion times were calculated by Cruciani (2007) to have occurred between 4.0-4.7 kya for E-V13 and 4.1-4.7 kya for J2-M12, with the upper limit of the expansion time for E-V13 at 5.3 kya and for J2-M12 at 6.4 kya. Both expansion times therefore are centered at approximately 4.3-4.35 kya, a period of time corresponding to the EBA in the southern Balkans (Hoddinott, 1981).
Cruciani et al.’s E-V13 and J2-M12 coalescence times bear a striking similarity to carbon-14-based date calculations for certain archaeological sites in the Maritsa river valley and its tributaries, near the city of Nova Zagora, Bulgaria (Nilolova, 2002). These sites are associated directly with the proto-Thracian culture of the southern Balkans that came to dominate the region during the first millennium BCE. Sites surveyed included Ezero, Yunatsite, Dubene-Sarovka and Plovdiv-Nebet Tepe, all of which had deep associations with the developing EBA proto-Thracian culture of the region.
