On May 14, 2013, a University of Washington led team announced tht DNA analysis had unearthed the origins of the Minoans, who some 5,000 years ago established the first advanced Bronze Age civilization in present-day Crete. The findings suggested they arose from an ancestral Neolithic population that had arrived in the region about 4,000 years earlier.

The results were published in Nature. The findings indicated that these people probably were descendants of the first humans to reach Crete about 9,000 years ago, and that they have the greatest genetic similarity with modern European populations.