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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.
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.
I disagree with your first claim. Huntington has a well-established record of fabricating history to suit his ideas. The standard example is his claim that South Africa in the 1960s under Apartheid fit his definition of satisfied society. To back up his claim, he falsely asserted that there were no notable protests or uprisings during this time. Fortunately, there were ample news archives that contradicted him. Unfortunately, people still listen to his bold pseudoscientific pronouncements about societies and their interactions.
You can find the same flavor nonsense in pretty much anything written by his student Fareed Zakaria.
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I disagree with you on regards that samples make Finland separated on the map. To me the result of this study really doesn't come as an surprise. If we look at Finland's geographical location and it's history it would be a surprise if we would be genetically closer to our European neighbors. Geographically we have been isolated by other nations and people, yes other people have traded and had impact with Fins but that interaction have been very small compared as people have had to travel with boat to hear. Notable feature of Finland's geographical location in periferia of Europe was that Mongols didn't invade it. Also after Fins were converted to Catholicism the eastern regions of Finland were more or less in constant war/conflict with their eastern relatives that were converted to Orthodox faith. In addition we should also note the kingdom of Sweden had severe restrictions on who could come and locate to Finland. In example after the Lutheran reformation it was forbidden and punished by death for other than reformed to come or locate to the kingdom. Another example is that Jews were completely forbidden on locating to Finland, only after Finland became a part of Russia were Jews allowed to locate to Finland. In this sense its not a surprise that we are in the edge of the map separated from others.
I also don't think that Finnish position in the edge of the map wouldn't change even if there had been samples from Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Ukraine and Russia. The Baltic nations have been in constant touch with Germans, Polish and Russians, but not as much with Finnish or Swedish. It would be interesting to know how close related Fins are to Ukrainian and Russians, but I believe that both of them might be closer to central Europeans as Germanic tribes have originally come from east and more importantly all these nations have interacted quite much with each other, note in example Volga Germans, and of course have endured same invasions as in example Mongols.
It would be nice to have more data and more results from different areas, but then again in a big picture data about such a small populations like Sami people wouldn't really make difference. On a note about Sami people, I read from Helsingin Sanomat that Finland is divided to too genetically different populations, the genetic line goes from Oulu to Kotka. People living in western Finland are genetically more related to Swedish and people living in the eastern and northern section resemble more on original natives that came to Finland. This of course nicely proves that there is something different about those evil bastards from Savo ;)
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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...").