The expansion of the polar people
The expansion of the polar peopleSami in the far north of EuropeSince the development of agriculture 12,000 years ago, the cultural and genetic landscape of our world has been transformed by the emergence of peasants as the dominant demographic. For mo…
The Finnic peoples emerged in Baltic after the Bronze Age
A reader in the comments reminds me there has been a preprint which is relevant to the population structure of Baltic Europe which came out a few months ago, Extensive farming in Estonia started through a sex-biased migration from the Steppe: …Here we present the analyses of low coverage whole genome sequence data from five […]
The origin of the Finnic peoples
One of the very first things I wrote about in relation to historical population genetics was in on the origins of the Finnic peoples. The reasons are two fold: – first, the Finns and Estonians speak language is rather peculiar in a Europe dominated by Indo-European tongues (I suspect one reason that Tolkien based […]
The men of the north: the Sami
Ole Magga, Norwegian politician
On this blog I regularly get questions about the Sami (Lapp*). That’s because I often talk about Finnish genetics, have readers such as Clark who are of part-Sami origin, and, the provenance and character of the Sami speak to broader questions about the emergence of the modern European gene pool. More precisely […]
The genetic heritage of Europe’s north
If you haven’t, you should keep an eye on Dienekes‘ Dodecad Ancestry Project (RSS). The pilot phase of data collection is over, and the first population level statistics are now coming out. Of particular interest to me is a new analysis of various northern European ethnicities just published.
The samples used in this analysis are:
– 25 […]
Finland, still going its own way
Dienekes points to a new paper which highlights genetic variation in Fenno-Scandinavia (or in this case, Finland, Sweden and Denmark). A two-dimensional plot with the variation is pretty illustrative of what you’d expect:
Finns are genetic outliers in Europe, to some extent even in comparison to Estonians, who speak a very similar language. But, I wonder […]