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Where Do Albanians Really Come From?
If we could stop a man who lived in ninth-century Albania and ask him who his ancestors were, we would have no answer. We do not know his name, we do not know what language he spoke, and we cannot ask him which people he felt he belonged to. What remains of him are bones, teeth, a burial. And inside those bones, tiny traces of a much older story.
That is where one of the most interesting studies to appear in recent years on the origins of the Albanians begins.
In May 2026, an international group of researchers published Ancient DNA evidence for the history of the Albanians in Nature Human Behaviour. The authors compared more than 6,000 ancient genomes from western Eurasia with 74 newly generated genomes from present-day Albanians. The central finding is striking precisely because it needs no dramatic embellishment: in early medieval Albania, the study identifies genetic continuity with the populations of the western Balkans from the Late Bronze Age and Iron Age, more pronounced than that observed in neighbouring Balkan regions. According to the study, present-day Albanians descend predominantly from that surviving Palaeo-Balkan ancestry, and by at least AD 800–900 a genetic profile appears that the authors consider ancestral to many modern Albanians.1
It sounds like the answer many have been waiting for across generations. But this is exactly where caution is needed: the evidence is strong, and so is the temptation to oversimplify it.
DNA can reconstruct relationships, admixture, continuity, and movement. It cannot read the name of a people on the forehead of a skeleton. It cannot tell us what language a person who died fifteen centuries ago spoke. And it cannot automatically turn biological continuity into a modern ethnic identity.
That is precisely why the study is so interesting. It does not close the mystery with a formula. It finally narrows it.
The Great Gap: Nearly a Thousand Years of Silence
The problem of Albanian origins begins with a paradox. Albanian is an independent branch of the Indo-European language family, deeply rooted in the Balkan world, yet it enters the written record late. The earliest surviving attestation is the baptismal formula of 1462 attributed to Archbishop Pal Engjëlli; the first substantial text is Gjon Buzuku's Meshari, printed in 1555.2
The people appear in medieval sources much earlier, generally from the eleventh century onward, but even here the evidence is not straightforward. Some well-known Byzantine references have been debated and reinterpreted: a 2024 study, for example, questioned the automatic identification of one of Michael Attaleiates' Albanoi with Albanians in the modern ethnic sense.3
And before the eleventh century? This is where the light fades.
For centuries, historians tried to fill that gap with what they had available: place names, linguistic borrowings, chronicles, archaeological finds, and descriptions by ancient authors. But the Palaeo-Balkan languages have almost all disappeared without leaving texts long enough to question in any meaningful way. Of Illyrian we have mainly personal names, toponyms, glosses, and fragments. Of Thracian and Daco-Moesian we know enough to formulate hypotheses, but not enough to reach a definitive answer.
There is, in short, no Rosetta Stone for Illyrian. No inscription allows us to place an ancient sentence beside an Albanian one and say: there it is, the genealogy of the language.
This is where the major hypotheses begin. One places Proto-Albanian in the Illyrian world of the western Balkans. Others have sought its origins farther east, in Daco-Moesian or Thracian settings. Still other scholars warn that labels such as 'Illyrian', 'Thracian', and 'Daco-Moesian' can make a linguistic landscape look more uniform than it probably was. Contemporary linguistics treats Albanian as an independent branch of Indo-European, and some recent work identifies a particularly close relationship with Greek within a broader Palaeo-Balkan framework. But even that, by itself, does not tell us where the Proto-Albanian homeland was.4
For a long time, the debate stopped at this wall. Then the dead entered the story.
When the Bones Begin to Speak
Archaeogenetics is not looking for some imaginary 'Albanian gene'. It does something far more useful: it compares hundreds of thousands of genetic variants, measures similarities and differences among people who lived in different periods, and tries to reconstruct which populations contributed to those that came later.
In the 2026 study, the researchers combine several tools. Some show how ancient and modern samples relate genetically to one another; others test whether a population can be explained as a mixture of particular source populations; analysis of IBD segments — stretches of DNA inherited from common ancestors — makes it possible to trace genealogical connections across time. No single method is sufficient on its own. The strength comes when different lines of evidence point in the same direction.5
This matters because, in genetics, a percentage is not a verdict, and proximity on a graph is not the same thing as a birth certificate. Models depend on the samples available and on the populations chosen as references. But when independent results converge, the likelihood that they are describing a real phenomenon increases.
And that is exactly what happens here.
A Line Running Through the Bronze Age, Iron Age, and Middle Ages
The most fascinating part of the study is not a haplogroup and not a percentage. It is continuity.
Samples from the Late Bronze Age and Iron Age found in present-day Albania fall within the broader genetic continuum of the western Balkans. Supplementary analyses connect them with neighbouring populations from an area that today includes Albania, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and parts of the Adriatic-Balkan hinterland.6
Then Rome arrives, and the picture becomes more complicated.
The Roman Empire was not a motionless world. Soldiers, merchants, slaves, officials, and entire communities moved across its provinces, and ancient DNA has shown how strongly the imperial Balkans were shaped by ancestry arriving from Anatolia and other regions as well. After the end of Roman control, between the sixth and eighth centuries, migrations involving groups genetically related to Slavic-associated populations of eastern Europe left a major imprint across much of the peninsula. A study published in Cell in 2023 estimated that this ancestry may account for roughly 30–60% of the ancestry of several modern Balkan populations considered in that analysis.7
And this is where Albania stands out.
In the two early medieval samples analysed from the territory of Albania, the models reconstruct a clearly predominant component related to the earlier western Balkan background. Depending on the source populations used, about 68–84% of the ancestry of those samples can be modelled from the local Late Bronze Age and Iron Age population; the remainder is compatible with additional Anatolian or eastern Balkan contributions. Even more strikingly, the individuals assigned by the authors to the eighth–ninth centuries show no eastern European ancestry associated with Slavic migrations in the models used by the study.8
That sentence must be read precisely: it refers to those samples, not to every inhabitant of medieval Albania. Two individuals cannot, by themselves, represent an entire country. But they are two pieces of evidence positioned exactly in the period when, elsewhere in the Balkans, the demographic landscape was changing profoundly.
And what about Albanians today? The study also finds in them a component associated with medieval migrations from eastern Europe, but with a lower average and substantial variation: around 10–20% in the analysed sample, depending on the genetic proxy used. Some individuals and regions show higher values, others much lower ones.9
This matters for two reasons. First, Albanians are not a population that remained unchanged for three thousand years. Second, their genetic history does not appear to be the result of a massive medieval population replacement either.
The right word, then, is not 'purity'. It is continuity through change.
The Question Everyone Will Ask: So, Were They Illyrians?
Sooner or later, we arrive here. It is inevitable.
If the principal ancestors of modern Albanians are connected to the Bronze Age and Iron Age populations of the western Balkans, and if ancient sources place groups we call Illyrians in that same broad area, the temptation to close the discussion in a single sentence is powerful: 'DNA has proved that Albanians are Illyrians.'
It is an effective sentence. And it is stronger than the evidence allows us to say.
The study shows significant demographic continuity with pre-Roman populations of the western Balkans. In the supplementary material, for example, the paternal haplogroup J2b-L283 appears at high frequency in the ancient record of the region during the Bronze and Iron Ages; other lineages, such as E-V13, follow different histories and distributions.10 But a haplogroup is not a people, just as a surname is not a language.
The authors themselves urge caution when mapping the Palaeo-Balkan languages. Maps of 'Illyrian', 'Dalmatian', 'Messapic', 'Daco-Moesian', and other ancient linguistic realities are reconstructions based on fragmentary material: archaeology, historical testimony, onomastics, and place names. The boundaries are not clear-cut and, in some cases, we do not even know whether certain labels referred to a single language or to groups of related varieties.11
What, then, can we say without forcing the evidence?
We can say that a fundamental ancestral component of present-day Albanians has its roots in the western Balkan populations of the Late Bronze Age and Iron Age. We can say that a substantial part of that ancestry is still recognisable in early medieval Albania. We can say that this makes it very difficult to imagine a complete replacement of the local population before Albanians appear in the historical record.
We can also observe that this continuity lies within the same broad geographical space in which peoples described by classical sources and later historiography as Illyrian were active.
What DNA cannot do is take the next step: tell us which language each individual spoke or what ethnic name that person used for himself or herself. Demonstrating that Albanian descends from a specific variety of Illyrian requires linguistics, and the linguistic evidence available remains incomplete.
This is not a specialist's quibble. It is the boundary between a historical conclusion and an identity shortcut.
And What About the Daco-Thracian Hypothesis?
The new study does not erase it with a stroke of the pen. It puts it to the test.
In the supplementary analyses, the authors also introduce individuals from Roman Serbia whose genetic profile is close to populations of the southeastern Balkans, using them as a possible reference for Daco-Thracian scenarios. For the medieval samples from Albania, however, a model built entirely on a Roman western Balkan population also provides an adequate fit. The researchers therefore propose two possibilities: Daco-Thracian groups may not have contributed substantially to the ancestry of the analysed samples, or any groups that did contribute may have had an autosomal profile too similar to that of the central-western Balkans to be clearly distinguished with the available data.12
It is a less spectacular answer than a verdict. But scientifically it is more interesting, because it reveals the real limit of the method.
Two populations can be genetically close and still speak different languages. DNA can tell us that they shared ancestors; it cannot let us hear the words with which their descendants named bread, the mountain, or their own land.
For this reason, the 2026 study does not 'win' a war between Illyrians and Daco-Thracians. It shifts the ground of the debate: any future hypothesis about the origins of the Albanians must now explain a strong pattern of demographic continuity in the central-western Balkans.
Language: The One Piece of the Puzzle DNA Cannot Read
And perhaps this is precisely where the mystery remains most fascinating.
Albanian is not a variant of a neighbouring language: it forms an independent branch of Indo-European. A linguistic synthesis published by Cambridge University Press in 2022 identifies, on the basis of shared innovations, a particularly close relationship between Albanian and Greek within a broader Palaeo-Balkan group that may also have included Messapic, Phrygian, Armenian, and other poorly documented languages.13
This does not mean that Albanian descends from Greek, nor that the two languages were once the same language. It means that part of their deep history may have been shared long before the historical languages took the forms we know today.
The geographical question remains, however: where was Proto-Albanian spoken? The University of Basel's project The Albanian Language in Antiquity was created precisely to address this problem. The answer must be reconstructed indirectly through loanwords, place names, historical grammar, and comparison with other Indo-European languages, because we possess no Proto-Albanian texts from the Roman period or the Early Middle Ages.14
DNA does not replace this investigation. But it narrows the field.
If the main ancestral component of modern Albanians is already recognisable in early medieval Albania and derives to a large extent from pre-Roman western Balkan populations, then every linguistic reconstruction of the origins of Proto-Albanian will have to reckon with that geography. Genetics and linguistics do not become the same discipline, but they can no longer ignore one another.
Ghegs and Tosks: An Ancient Divide Written in the Genes as Well
There is another result capable of surprising anyone who knows Albania primarily through its language.
The two major dialect areas, Gheg in the north and Tosk in the south, traditionally divided by the Shkumbin River, also leave a trace in the genetic structure. In the supplementary material, the longer IBD segments — which indicate relatively recent genealogical links — show very little or virtually no sharing between the two major groups above certain thresholds. The authors interpret this pattern as compatible with long-term genetic isolation between Ghegs and Tosks.15
We cannot turn this result into a date for the birth of the dialects. But we can glimpse something very concrete: for centuries, geography, marriage networks, mobility, and language must have interacted, leaving parallel traces in culture and in chromosomes.
What Really Changes
For a long time, the origins of the Albanians were a puzzle made of pieces that never quite fitted together.
History showed a people appearing late in the written sources. Linguistics pointed to an ancient and independent language, but without a documented 'mother'. Archaeology could trace cultural continuity and transformation, but not tell us what language the dead spoke. Modern-population genetics, finally, described the present without being able, on its own, to fill the missing centuries.
Archaeogenetics changes the problem because it brings real people who lived in the past into the story. No longer only modern frequencies projected backwards, but individuals from the Bronze Age, Iron Age, Roman period, and Middle Ages who can be compared with one another.
The sequence that emerges does not tell the story of a people who suddenly appeared in the Balkans during the Middle Ages. Instead, it points to a principal ancestral component rooted in the pre-Roman western Balkans and still recognisable in eighth- to ninth-century Albania. Later migrations and admixture are real and measurable; they do not, however, erase that thread.
At the same time, the study also dismantles the opposite image: no European population remained motionless, isolated, and 'pure' for millennia. Rome, Anatolia, medieval migrations from eastern Europe, and continual contacts across the Balkans all left traces.
The genetic history of the Albanians does not resemble a straight line. It resembles a stratigraphy: different layers accumulated over time, with an older foundation repeatedly re-emerging beneath them.
The Mystery Is Not Over. It Has Become Better
Today we can say with greater confidence that the principal ancestors of present-day Albanians were present in the central-western Balkans long before the first medieval attestations of their name. We can trace a significant part of that continuity from the Bronze and Iron Age world into the Early Middle Ages. We can also measure the contribution of later migrations and see that it was not uniform.
The question with the greatest fascination, however, remains open: what did those men and women call themselves? And what language did they speak?
'Illyrians' is one possible answer within part of the historical and linguistic tradition. Other reconstructions invoke different regions and populations. DNA has narrowed the space in which these hypotheses can move, but it has not carved an ethnonym into the bones.
And perhaps that is precisely what makes the 2026 study so important. It does not offer a more elegant legend. It offers something much harder to obtain: a limit to legends.
With this study, the long silence between the Palaeo-Balkan world and medieval Albania appears less empty. Within that silence, we can glimpse a population that changes, absorbs new contributions, passes through empires and migrations, yet retains a substantial part of its biological continuity.
Where, then, do Albanians come from? Not from a single day, not from a single tribe, not from a formula constructed after the fact. The evidence currently available places them primarily within the long history of the Palaeo-Balkan populations of the western Balkans, populations that survived the transformations of the Roman period and remain genetically recognisable in early medieval Albania.
DNA has not given Albanians a myth of origins.
It has given them something rarer: a chronology.
Notes and Sources
- 1. L.-R. Davranoglou et al., “Ancient DNA evidence for the history of the Albanians”, Nature Human Behaviour, 10 (2026), pp. 1371–1391, published online 4 May 2026, DOI: 10.1038/s41562-026-02462-z. The abstract reports the analysis of more than 6,000 ancient genomes from western Eurasia and 74 newly generated genomes from present-day Albanians; it identifies continuity of western Balkan Late Bronze Age and Iron Age ancestry in early medieval Albania and a profile already ancestral to many modern Albanians by at least AD 800–900.
- 2. A. Hyllested, B. D. Joseph, “Albanian”, in T. Olander (ed.), The Indo-European Language Family: A Phylogenetic Perspective, Cambridge University Press, 2022, pp. 223–245, DOI: 10.1017/9781108758666.013. The authors identify the baptismal formula of 1462 as the earliest surviving attestation and Gjon Buzuku's Meshari of 1555 as the first substantial text.
- 3. The 2026 Nature study takes the appearance of Albanians in eleventh-century sources as the general historical framework. For a critical discussion of a famous occurrence in Michael Attaleiates: G. Welte Bernardo, “Michael Attaleiates’ Ἀλβανοὶ and Λατῖνοι: the southern Italian rebels and the changing perception of the Normans in Byzantium”, Byzantina Symmeikta, 34 (2024), pp. 39–70, DOI: 10.12681/byzsym.33970.
- 4. Hyllested and Joseph, cited above. The chapter treats Albanian as an independent branch of Indo-European and argues for a particularly close relationship with Greek within a broader Palaeo-Balkan framework. This is a proposal for linguistic classification and does not, by itself, constitute geographical proof of the Proto-Albanian homeland.
- 5. Davranoglou et al., cited above; Supplementary Information to the same article, sections 1.1–1.9 and supplementary figures. The study combines PCA, qpAdm, IBD/ancIBD analyses, uniparental data, and other population-genetic tools; the results depend on the models and proxy populations employed.
- 6. Davranoglou et al., Supplementary Information, sections 1.3–1.4. Middle and Late Bronze Age and Iron Age samples from present-day Albania are modelled in relation to neighbouring populations of the western and central Balkans; such models are not equivalent to ethnic identities.
- 7. I. Olalde et al., “A genetic history of the Balkans from Roman frontier to Slavic migrations”, Cell, 186 (2023), pp. 5472–5485.e9, DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2023.10.018. The study documents a major post-Roman influx of ancestry related to Slavic-associated eastern European populations and estimates a contribution of 30–60% to the ancestry of the modern Balkan populations considered in the study.
- 8. Davranoglou et al., Supplementary Information, section 1.7. In qpAdm models, Albania_Medieval (the samples analysed in this category) receives most of its ancestry, about 68–84%, from Albania_BA_IA, with additional contributions depending on the proxy used. The authors also report an absence of eastern European ancestry in the early medieval samples considered. The number of individuals is limited and does not justify absolute generalisations about the entire territory of Albania.
- 9. Davranoglou et al., Nature Human Behaviour, abstract; Supplementary Information, section 1.7. The average share of medieval eastern European ancestry in present-day individuals varies according to the proxy, with mean values on the order of 10–20% and substantial geographical and individual variation.
- 10. Davranoglou et al., Supplementary Information, section 1.9 and Figs. S14–S17. J2b-L283 is strongly represented in the ancient Bronze–Iron Age record of the western and central Balkans; E-V13 has a distinct history and more complex associations. Haplogroups cannot automatically be equated with ethnic groups or languages.
- 11. Davranoglou et al., Supplementary Information, Fig. S16. The authors explicitly caution that the distribution of Palaeo-Balkan languages is approximate, based on fragmentary archaeological, historical, onomastic, and toponymic evidence; the internal relationships among several linguistic labels also remain uncertain.
- 12. Davranoglou et al., Supplementary Information, section 1.7. A one-source model using Montenegro_Doclea_Roman provides an adequate fit for Albania_Medieval; the authors note that Daco-Thracian populations may either not have contributed or may have had a central-western Balkan autosomal profile that cannot be distinguished with the available data.
- 13. Hyllested and Joseph, cited above. On the basis of shared innovations, the authors propose a particularly close relationship between Albanian and Greek within a broader Palaeo-Balkan subgroup; this is a linguistic reconstruction and does not imply that one language descends from the other.
- 14. University of Basel, Department of Ancient Civilizations, project “The Albanian Language in Antiquity” (2022–2026). The project states that its aims are to reconstruct what the precursor of Albanian may have looked like in antiquity and to identify the area in which it may have been spoken, questions to be approached indirectly through historical-comparative linguistics. Project page: https://daw.philhist.unibas.ch/en/hcl/research/research-projects/snsf-project-the-albanian-language-in-antiquity-en/
- 15. Davranoglou et al., Supplementary Information, Fig. S13. Long IBD segments (>12–16 cM) show virtually no inter-dialect sharing between Ghegs and Tosks at the thresholds considered, a result interpreted by the authors as indicating long-term genetic isolation; the finding does not, by itself, date the linguistic split.
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