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Biologists Create Genetic Map of Europe
Death Metal Maniac brings us a story from the New York Times about a team of scientists who were able to relate genetic differences to geographical origins. Countries such as Germany, Austria, and France occupy the central area of the genetic map, with Italy, Finland, and the UK being relative outliers. Quoting:
"All the populations are quite similar, but the differences are sufficient that it should be possible to devise a forensic test to tell which country in Europe an individual probably comes from, said Manfred Kayser, a geneticist at the Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands. ... Genomic sites that carry the strongest signal of variation among populations may be those influenced by evolutionary change, Dr. Kayser said. Of the 100 strongest sites, 17 are found in the region of the genome that confers lactose tolerance, an adaptation that arose among a cattle herding culture in northern Europe some 5,000 years ago."
Update: 08/16 15:11 GMT: Reader iminplaya points out the source article, which contains the technical details behind the study.
Finnish is not related to Japanese. Finnish is a member of the Finno-Ugrian/Uralic language family, which does include Hungarian, Estonian and a number of minority languages spoken in Russia on either side of the Urals. Japanese is a language isolate, which some linguists have attempted to group under the Altaic umbrella (e.g. Turkic, Tungusic and Mongolian languages) but with little acceptance. No mainstream Uralicist believes in a genetic relationship between the Uralic and Altaic languages, though of course the Turkic languages influenced several Uralic languages somewhat in terms of lexicon and morphosyntax after Turkic expansion.
Linguists get rather sick of hearing language grouping identified with genes. The speakers of the Uralic languages are widely disparate in terms of "race", with the very Asian Samoyed peoples contrasting with the quite European Hungarians, and the Udmurts have both within the same nation.
Shall we?
What?
If this was the USA, it would be like making a map of the pacific states and some midwest states, and calling it a map of the USA. Where's the rest?
The country at the geographical centre of Europe (Ukraine) isn't even on there. Neither is Russia. Not to mention the dozens of smaller states. No wonder Finland is way out there... they're very similar to Russians who aren't on the map, like they weren't even part of Europe. This article is either very bad journalism or serious EU snobbery.
I think this one will be under debate for some time. Japanese inherits from multiple sources; whether it once had an Altaic root or contributing source is still under debate among some linguists, as far as I know.
A better explanation:
Apologies if I did not make that clear.
Anti-Globalism, Traditionalism, and FreeBSD.
I wasn't aware of significant, if any, influx of North Africans or Arabs into Italy (the really recent immigration from North Africa hasn't had time to impact the genetic makeup of the population as a whole). The only part of Italy that I'm aware has had a North African or Arab influence is Sicily, where the Sicilian language at least has Arab influences (as well as Latin, Spanish, Norman French and some German influences). There's also a dialect in Sicily that is strongly Albanian influenced, and unintelligible to other Sicilian language speakers, the result of a significant migration of Albanians a long time ago who then remained pretty much in one small region.
Great Britain might be part of Europe politically and in geological terms but there is the barrier of the English Channel which has kept us safe from French, Spanish and German invasion attempts for 900 years. The last 4 successful invasions of Britain were by the Normans in the 11th century, by the Angles, Saxons, Jutes et al in the 5th/6th century, by Vikings in the 9th/10th centuries and by the Romans in the 1st century. Probably not a lot changed in terms of the genetic profile of the population for many hundreds of years until the mass immigration in the 20th century of people from the West Indies, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Uganda (Ugandan Indians).
That's not really true. E.g. notice the overlap between Ireland, Norway and Denmark, due to some degree to Viking tribes pillaging and then settling in Ireland, in the 600s to 800s (I think - going out on a limb by not checking wikipaedia first). You could go and on in similar fashion.
You can go back further in time and find evidence of trade stretching across Europe and even beyond. Even as far as back as *neo-lithic* (ie late stone age, circa 4k years ago) times, there is evidence of trade routes as stone axe heads known to have been quarried in Northern Ireland have been found in the UK and even the continent.
I'm picking a bit of a nit, cause you're right that travel was less common, but it wasn't confined to rich people and there was still plenty of it thanks to trade and war (e.g. we havn't even mentioned the Romans).
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
Huntington is certainly an excellent scientist, but his socio-political theories about why wars are fought are better left to experts in that field
This argument is ridiculously reductive. First, what's the definition of 'war' in this context? I tried to imagine the different ways you can define 'war' and how they'd fit into this theory and none of them work.
This is good though:
I don't agree that we're in a 'superpower age' that is 'winding down'...neither are accurate, HOWEVER, the idea that people (at least the younger Americans [felt right, geographically. It just fit. The climate affected everything about me in a positive way. When I moved back to Indiana, the humidity, allergens, etc. just wrecked me. I could feel my immune system changing, I swear. My friends would talk about similar feelings.
How this renewed understanding of geography and sub-species human differences will effect populations long term is a toss up. I feel that to say this genetic-based aspect of neo-tribalism (which itself has several components) will be THE guiding force in macro level human behavior is jumping the gun.
Thank you Dave Raggett
The Roman legions weren't necessarily Italians, the soldiers would have been from all over Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. I don't know enough about the history to know if there was any great mixing of populations but the Roman occupation was only about 350 years in Britain, compared to many times more in Europe, and there were numerous rebellions and even the complete destruction of Roman armies and cities, so perhaps it was more like a military occupation than a settlement and integration. From what I've read of Roman history all citizens of the empire could attain high position in the military and civil governments regardless of national/ethnic origin but we don't see many Brits making big careers :-)
The origin of the Britons in legend claims descent from those who fled Troy under the leadership of Brutus (no, not that one) after it was sacked by the Greeks. The Trojans arrived at Albion, which they conquered/colonised and renamed Britain. We all know that the legend of the founding of Rome is similar, fleeing Trojans in this case being led by Aeneas and arriving in Italy and Aeneas' descendents founding Rome.
But I'm sure little of this survives real scrutiny.
They don't even have a whole map of europe...
Oh... and Yugoslavia, actually there is no Yugoslavia for last 17 Years, it fell apart in 1991...
Things in a rear mirror might be behind you
Firstly, ochre means 'yellow' in Greek, not 'red.'
Secondly, 'homo' is Latin - the Greek word would be 'anthropos'
Thirdly: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_cognate
Inbreeding is a big part of it. Finland used to be a big forest with swamps and lakes everywhere (and still mostly is), which made moving around very difficult. So we (I'm from Finland also) were isolated not only from the rest of the world. But also our internal parts were isolated from other parts of the country.
As a proof of this, there are several genetic deceases that are more common in Finland than anywhere else. E.g. AGU decease, which is found from around 200 families in Finland and only in about 20 families outside Finland (population of Finland is about 1/1000 of the population of the Earth). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspartylglucosaminuria
But one should remember that it is estimated that the human race itself used to consist of a very few individuals, before it started spreading. So we all are distantly very close relatives.
Actually you can't ignore the structure of the language. Finnish basically doesn't have monosyllablic words except for common particles; two syllables is the minimum. This feature appears to be very old and integral to the language. So "two" has two syllables "kak-si" and "ten" is "kym-men-" (oblique form, "ten" alone is "kymmenen"). So when English goes twen-ty-two, Finnish has kak-si-kym-men-tä ("two of tens").
The second difference clearly exploited is the case agreement. In fact, "twenty two" is two words "kahdessa kymmenessä". Now because the last has the suffix -ssä, the rest of the entire expression also has the same -ssa, which is repeated for each word. So we get "kuudessa kymmenessä tuhannessa kahdessa sadassa viidessä" ("in 60205") for "kuusi kymmentä tuhatta kaksi sataa viisi" ("60205"). As you can see, this redundancy increases syllable count by 40-50%, without being really "complex" in the same sense of spelling bee words.
Another problem is that although it is not recommended to write together all possible compounds, for some reason all numerals are still faithfully written in long strings like that. You could write, in principle, all genitives together, like in German (think "Donaudampfschiff...").
While their research is certainly interesting it does suffer from them using PCA for creating the map. PCA is a linear transform that finds the axes of an ellipsoid that encompasses the data. This is an enormous simplification that seldom works well on real-world data. For an illustration of what PCA does and the problems with the simplification, see this. For the math, see this.
Now, the problem is that with such a simplification the resulting map is nearly meaningless. It only shows how things would have been distributed had the genetic data and the geographic data been neatly ordered in a form that could be described with a second degree n-dimensional body (i.e. an ellipsoid). There are much better non-linear methods, such as kernel PCA that most likely would have produced a much more accurate picture. PCA does have its uses and can indeed be used for mapping geo-genetic information, but the data needs to be statistically separated to a very large degree. This is an impossibility for Europe that has a limited genetic diversity and where the overlap between different groups is large.
I'd love to see their data analyzed with a bit more powerful algorithms.
Jared Diamond has studied the question extensively (using actual research methods instead of your ignorant "we all know" assumptions) and came to quite a different conclusion.
The answer has a lot more to do with values and luck than with intelligence.
Yes, yes I have .