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Biologists Create Genetic Map of Europe
Posted by
Soulskill
on Sat Aug 16, 2008 09:19 AM
from the unique-and-special-snowballs dept.
from the unique-and-special-snowballs dept.
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.
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The Clash of Civilizations (Score:4, Interesting)
I recommend two books here:
The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, by Samuel Huntington [amazon.com]
The Great Human Diasporas: The History of Diversity and Evolution, by Luigi Cavalli-Sforza et al [amazon.com]
Once humans evolved from apes, they went through several stages to create modern humans.
After that, modern humans underwent more aggressive development. This differentiated population groups.
Much like different programming languages are optimized for different tasks, but you can create just about anything in just about any language, human populations are different based on the optimizations that came about through their branch divergence.
This creates ethnicities, nationalities, and clines as mapped by Cavalli-Sforza.
Huntington points out that most of our modern wars have been caused by the nation-state, or an "imperial" grouping by politics that crosses these optimization lines, and suggests that as the superpower age winds down, people will identify with their optimization more than abstract and often illusory political concepts.
This is especially useful in understanding the difference between Georgia, Ossetia and Russia. For those who live in nation-states of an imperial nature, like the United States, Canada, Russia or UK, it's hard to grasp this, but not every country views itself as composed of generic people.
They view themselves as an organic nation, a notion which we may quaintly call "tribalism" yet seems to unite people with values more solidly than financial or political motivations.
The future will be determined by the struggle for these organic nations to define themselves.
All IMHO.
Re: (Score:2)
neo tribalism (Score:3, Informative)
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 o
Re:neo tribalism (Score:4, Informative)
I disagree with your first claim. Huntington [wikipedia.org] 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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually it's more like the beginning of WWII only do a search and replace w/ the following changes. Germany==Russia, Czechoslovakia==Georgia and Britain/France==United States. Namely, there is little a distant power can do to stop the larger power in central/eastern Europe from gobbling up its smaller neighbors. As for the WWI analogies it is possible that Georgia(Austria-Hungary) believed it had a blank check to attack South Ossetia(Serbia
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Nice try, but you should have just said RAHOWA [rahowa.com] and gotten it over with.
Burnitdown made it up (Score:5, Interesting)
I never thought the race-war bozos would make it onto /. It's the usual propoganda: Name check someone prominent (who didn't say anything in support of your argument), add some bogus theory with no support (but imply that it comes from the famous names), through in a little kernel of plausibility (hey, there's racism right? Maybe we are all genetically pre-disposed to hate each other), and stir.
See? Hmmm ... seems plausible. But think: Maybe I'm different based on the country I was born in, the way my parents fed me, raised me (the fact that I had loving parents), their wealth and social connections, the forces and choices that formed my personality. My education, the books I read, what I chose to study, my teachers and role models, how hard I worked at it, how well I networked, the career and jobs I chose, the person I married, the city I live in ... Where does this genetic optimization come in?
I recommend the same books as burnitdown, only you should read them and not just name-check them. I read Huntington's Clash of Civilizations [foreignaffairs.org] when it was first published in Foreign Affairs. It says nothing at all about genetics or "optimization", only super-national cultural groups called 'civilizations', which are genetically diverse (see list here [wikipedia.org] ). You can read more here [wikipedia.org].
I haven't read Cavalli-Sforza, but The Economist seems to think [wikipedia.org] that his work challenges the assumption that there are significant genetic differences between human races, and indeed, the idea that 'race' has any useful biological meaning at all. Hmmm ... that seems opposite the ideas that burnitdown cited.
So Burnitdown is just talking out of his backside, start to finish. There is no outside support for it at all. I can't even imagine how it applies to Georgia, Russia, and North & South Ossetia. Does anyone know closely their populations correlate genetically? And why, on that basis, would South Ossetians want Russian more than Georgian citizenship? What the heck is 'Russian' genetically, anyway -- the country stretches from Europe to the Pacific; are they really genetically homogeneous?
Whenever I read something like this, I always try to remember: Think of the people who promolgate this theory of inevitable race-war hatred: From Milosovic to Bin Laden (who rails against Jewish people) to the Rwandan Hutu extremists to the KKK to, yes, Adolf Hitler. What have they accomplished? Then think of those who say that humans can integrate and live together regardless of supposed 'race', from Thomas Jefferson to Abraham Lincoln to Martin Luther King Jr., to Mahatma Gandhi and almost any current leader of prominence. Who has been more successful? Whose side would you rather be on?
Did you know that by the 3rd generation, most immigrants to the US marry across 'cultural' lines? Did you know that the rate of interracial marriage has increased ~700% in the US since 1970 [1] [wikipedia.org]?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Name check someone prominent (who didn't say anything in support of your argument), add some bogus theory with no support (but imply that it comes from the famous names),
You did the same thing below (only using Gandhi's name).
Maybe I'm different based on the country I was born in, the way my parents fed me, raised me (the fact that I had loving parents), their wealth and social connections, the forces and choices
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The truth is, human beings are remarkably interbred(As long as you are not from the Andaman islands, you likely have a much much closer common ancestor with a Chinese person than you think), and even without that, we branched off into respective continents very recently.
At the same time, intra-race variations
I can't stand lactose... (Score:2, Funny)
...and I won't tolerate it.
oh dear (Score:3, Interesting)
Good job Hitler never had this kind of info. I can't see that as having ended well.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:oh dear (Score:5, Insightful)
It's nice to think so, but it wouldn't have made any difference. A "great ideology" never lets facts get in the way.
Parent
Interesting (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Interesting (Score:5, Interesting)
The history of Hungarian migration is pretty clear, actually. The Hungarians were living with their closest Uralic brethren, the Khanty and Mansi tribes, in the south Russian steppes around the beginning of the Common Era. The expansion of the Turkic peoples brought a tribe, evidentally speaking a Chuvash-type language, into contact with some Hungarians, who then learnt horsemanship and began to move west. A number of Hungarians remained behind, and when the Friar Julianus visited the area eight hundred years ago, he was able to communicate with them.
The Hungarian migration to the Carpathian Basin happened fairly recently compared to the spread of Uralic languages to northwestern Russia, Finland and Scandinavia, which must have been complete a thousand years before the beginning of the Common Era.
Parent
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Lack of overlap (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm now kind of curious about how such a map of North America would look in comparison, because to me there are some pretty big areas here where there is no overlap (Great Britain, southern Italy, Poland, Sweden...). They've been on the same continent for how many centuries, and they're still so distinct?
Re: (Score:2)
Remember travelling was only for the rich until not so long ago. The first inter-city railway was only opened in 1830 (Liverpool to Manchester), before that most people couldn't afford the time or the money to travel further than to the nearest town.
Add to that the language barriers, probably cultural barriers and it's not so surprising.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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
Re:Lack of overlap (Score:4, Interesting)
"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."
And yet Ireland shows more overlap with with continent than Great Britain.
Parent
Accuracy of map? (Score:4, Insightful)
The map should have included Russia and other Eastern European areas. Also, one thing that makes me skeptical of the maps accuracy is there doesn't appear to be an overlap between EL and IT2.
Let's try to link to the source (Score:2, Informative)
Shall we [current-biology.com]?
Misleading title (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Europe versus Eurasia (Score:2)
Although people are always trying to redraw these boundaries for political reasons, many consider Russia, the Ukraine, et al, to be part of "Eurasia" and not "Europe." Your politics may differ and I doubt some God is going to descend and declare one right and not the other.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It also ignores the distinct ethnic groups (e.g. the different groupings of Sami) present in Norway, Sweden and Finland and apparently completely omits Iceland, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Ukraine and other countries that're at least as far east as Finland.
As an amateur with no competence in this stuff whatsoever, I'd say that Finland's outlier status on this diagram follows the sample. The not so nice part is of course that now the papers are going to pronounce Finns as some kind of freaks in Europe, when
Re:Misleading title (Score:4, Informative)
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 ;)
Parent
Italian (Score:5, Insightful)
The Iberian peninsula is also cut off by mountains but it sits in nicely with the rest of Europe. Of course Spain also had its Berbers and Arabs but kicked them - and the Jews - out rather successfully in 1492.
Re:Italian (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I remember reading that the native pre-Rome population of Italy was mainly of ancient Celtic roots and types, ie. the same as for most of central Europe. But the Romans imported both slaves and commerce partners from North Africa, and subsequent interbreeding is where what we think of as the "typical dark and often curly-haired Italian" came from.
The same applies to Spain -- until the Moors, who left behind a lot of their genes despite being kicked out as overlords, the average Spaniard was light-coloured j
What? No Belgians? (Score:4, Funny)
Belgium does apparently have no people or are such a rare breed that it would falsify the map.
The dairy board must be so happy! (Score:3, Interesting)
"...Most people switch off the lactose digesting gene after weaning, but the cattle herders evidently gained a great survival advantage by keeping the gene switched on through adulthood."
Behold the power of cheese!
PCA limitations (Score:3, Informative)
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 [peltarion.com]. For the math, see this [wikipedia.org].
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.
Turanian/Scandi/Baltic mix (Score:4, Interesting)
Finland is an interesting convergence of east and west. Their language is most closely related to Japanese and Hungarian; their population seems to be halfway between Swedes, Baltics and an Asian precursor.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turan [wikipedia.org]
The language record does not mirror the genetic record, necessarily, but it provides a useful clue.
I'm not sure how this is related to their ability to create quality death metal bands like Amorphis, Demigod, Abhorrence, Demilich, Belial and Sentenced. However, all of Scandinavia is a death metal powerhouse, so it may be "cultural."
Parent
Re:Turanian/Scandi/Baltic mix (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
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.
The difference in race is only really marked when you compare the Hungarians to other Finno-Ugrians. As I point out in another comment, the Hungarians are so mixed genetically because they've lived in a crossroads between the Western European, Slavic and Turkic regions for so long. Their language r
Re: (Score:2)
Proto-Finno-Ugric is still mainly reconstructed based on Finnish on one hand and Proto-Samoyed on the other, and Finnish still preserves a huge number of lexemes in common with Mordvin and Mari. It hasn't diverged that much. Sure, one can point to signs of Germanic influence like some prepositions instead of only postpositions, but it's still squarely a Uralic language.
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Altaic to Japanese (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I speak some Turkish, and can understand a fair amount of languages all the way to Kazakhstan, since the Turkic languages seem to be fairly close to one another. I don't understand any Finnish or Hungarian, but I did meet a Japanese woman in Turkey who claimed that learning Turkish was much easier for her than learning English as the structure (not the vocabulary, though) of Turkish was much closer to Japanese.
What I do know, and is also probably the reason why numerous linguists have tried to group Finno-U
Re: (Score:2)
The metal thing is definitely cultural. Notice how Finland, Sweden and Norway are evangelic lutheran?
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not sure how this is related to their ability to create quality death metal bands like Amorphis, Demigod, Abhorrence, Demilich, Belial and Sentenced. However, all of Scandinavia is a death metal powerhouse, so it may be "cultural."
I have heard that the large popularity of the death metal in a region is a symptom of a "depressive" culture (along the huge alcohol consumption) brought by the little exposure to the Sun during the year - Winter Blues?
Can anyone comment?
I read in a music magazine that at some point the Swedish government financed youth clubs with musical instruments, to give non-sporty teens something to do. That explains why there's lots of good bands from Sweden.
I don't know if the number of bands in a genre is proportional to the number of fans of that genre (If you gave Japanese kids free instruments, would the ones who like metal be more likely to make a band?)
"Winter blues" is formally known as Seasonal Affective Disorder (looks like a backronym to m
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
I have heard that the large popularity of the death metal in a region is a symptom of a "depressive" culture (along the huge alcohol consumption) brought by the little exposure to the Sun during the year - Winter Blues?
Black clothes are also an evolutionary adaption to living in a snowy environment. In prehistoric times, humans who showed a preference for dark clothes were easier to find when they were lost in the snow. Evolution thus selected for this trait.
Moshing is also an efficient way for humans to stay warm in a confined environment like an igloo.
Humans who had the genes for moshing and wearing black clothes thus outbred those who did not.
Also, in most human societies with a harsh climate religion, in this case Sat
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
That doesn't really match. Canada is just as dark during the winter, yet they don't export piles of kill-your-dog-for-satan kind of music. It'd be offset by the bright summers too.
What I'd like to see explained is the amount of hip hop that comes from Sweden. Most of it's made by white people too.
Actually, Canada leads in metal music (Score:2)
Canada's produced quite a lot of influential metal music.
Probably the most common mentions would be Sacrifice, Voivod, Gorguts and Cryptopsy.
Gorguts helped define early technical death metal, along with Atheist, Pestilence, Obliveon, Demilich and others.
Interestingly, the French Canadian portion of Canada produces the best death metal, which is not mirrored in France itself, except through Massacra [anus.com] and Loudblast; however, the French band Supuration sounds similar to Voivod.
Shows what I know (Score:2)
Mea culpa.
Re: (Score:2)
To me it's pretty obvious that they are outside because they don't border to any of the countries except a very small part against Sweden, most of their borders is against russia and the baltics (estonia) so they probably have more in common with those.
From the looks of that genome map the borders of the genomes are quite similar to the borders of the countries, and why would Finland be any different?
Though one would expect them to be a little similar to us (swedes), but I guess it's only that we are even m
My wife is Finnish (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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 t
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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