@ Imperator Invictus
I don't want to sound impolite or anything but you touch on rather sensitive matters. My main disagreement with your post (if I understand you correctly) would be that you seem to accept the notion of an unbroken continuity of nations throughout large historical periods. According to which, societies divided by thousands of years, with different political structures, different codes of values, religions, even different genetic make-ups have something in common, something that survives unchanged, the national psyche or whatever. It is the same notion, expressed by (state-funded of course) nationalist historians in every little balkan country, that legitimizes in the eyes of the people territorial claims, claims of national ownership of symbols and names and paves the way for the power struggles between the countries of this area, struggles that are profitable only for the upper classes and certainly not for us, common people.

I say all this as a Greek citizen raised to believe, by the educational system, the church and other channels of propaganda, that the Greeks are the direct descendants of Leonidas and Socrates (no matter if most us have not read a single page of ancient literature), that the Turks are butchers because that's their national inclination , that all lands within the boundaries of the Byzantine Empire at the 9th century are enslaved national greek lands (it is beyond question of course that the Byzantine Empire was as greek as say the Athenian Hegemony) and of course that Macedonia was greek from the ancient times and it has remained so and that our Macedonian neighbours have no right to this name, because they are impostors who steal our history etc etc... I believe you will find some parallels to ideas spread in your own country.

That is not to say of course that modern societies are a product of parthenogenesis and they sure are the outcome of the evolution (most times gradual, sometimes precipitous) of the past ones. The Vlach minorities in Greece are definitely related to the Romanians and they have been slowly and not forcefully to my knowledge, hellenized. The same case with the Arvanites (Albanian) minority from which I am partially descended. Not the same case unfortunately with the (Slavo)Macedonian minority that was mostly integrated by force or expelled. You may ask, why am I typing all these OT things? It's because that I find highly alarming, that in a single post you discussed the origin of the ancient Macedonians, then moved on to talk about the Macedonian descend of 6th century AD figures and then about modern tribes/cultural/ethnic groups with (yet another) claim on Megas Alexandros. I am sorry, but I fail to find any connection between them apart that they lived in the same area. I may be overreacting but living nowadays in Greece or Macedonia/Fyrom/(insert name of choice here) can make you quite sensitive on this.

I understand that such a post is probably violating the rules of the Forum or/and it increases the possibility of this thread to degenerate into a nationalistic flame war, so if a mod thinks that it is me after all who touches on sensitive matters, please tell me and I will not discuss similar matters in the future. As for the original question, I am really interested in what the knowledgeable people around here have to say. I am under the impression that this is still a debated matter (as is the question whether the ancient Macedonian language was a Greek dialect or a distinct language) but that most probably the Makedones had a common ancestry with the Greeks but being geographically separated from one another, at least until the classical period, their societies developed differently. Now I don't know if that makes them a different nation (if such a thing could be precisely defined) and I don't know the extent of cultural/genetic exchange between the Makedones and their ''barbarian'' neighbours. I am looking forward to learn.