Biologists Create Genetic Map of Europe 287
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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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.
Re:Italian (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Lack of overlap (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Lack of overlap (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 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).
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 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.
Re:Lack of overlap (Score:2, Informative)
Decades of research? (Score:2, Informative)
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...
Re:Turanian/Scandi/Baltic mix (Score:1, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org]
Re:Finland? (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 families outside Finland (population of Finland is about 1/1000 of the population of the Earth). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspartylglucosaminuria [wikipedia.org]
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.
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.
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 ;)
Re:My wife is Finnish (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 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..." [wikipedia.org]).
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.
Re:Burnitdown made it up (Score:1, Informative)
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.
Re:Lack of overlap (Score:1, Informative)
Yes, yes [google.com] I [google.com] have [google.com] . [google.com]