Posted on 09/24/2009 10:18:52 AM PDT by decimon
Today's Scandinavians are not descended from the people who came to Scandinavia at the conclusion of the last ice age but, apparently, from a population that arrived later, concurrently with the introduction of agriculture. This is one conclusion of a new study straddling the borderline between genetics and archaeology, which involved Swedish researchers and which has now been published in the journal Current Biology.
"The hunter-gatherers who inhabited Scandinavia more than 4,000 years ago had a different gene pool than ours," explains Anders Götherström of the Department of Evolutionary Biology at Uppsala University, who headed the project together with Eske Willerslev of the Centre for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen.
The study, a collaboration among research groups in Sweden, Denmark and the UK, involved using DNA from Stone Age remains to investigate whether the practices of cultivating crops and keeping livestock were spread by immigrants or represented innovations on the part of hunter-gatherers.
"Obtaining reliable results from DNA from such ancient human remains involves very complicated work," says Helena Malmström of the Department of Evolutionary Biology at Uppsala University.
She carried out the initial DNA sequencings of Stone Age material three years ago. Significant time was then required for researchers to confirm that the material really was thousands of years old.
"This is a classic issue within archaeology," says Petra Molnar at the Osteoarchaeological Research Laboratory at Stockholm University. "Our findings show that today's Scandinavians are not the direct descendants of the hunter-gatherers who lived in the region during the Stone Age. This entails the conclusion that some form of migration to Scandinavia took place, probably at the onset of the agricultural Stone Age. The extent of this migration is as of yet impossible to determine."
Ping...
Immigrant ping.
Hogwash, it was the arrival of the Great Ice Ship on this planet that brought them here. ;^)
Nah. It is obviously too much lutefisk —— that is gene changing enough
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Definitely a hunter-gatherer.
I hate to nit pick...but they could have put that gal in some shoes that fit.
Makes sense - the redheads moved basically due north from present day northern Iraq to the Volga and into Scandanavia.
BTW, my mtDNA haplogroup is 'V' as are 52% of the Skolt Sa'ami (reindeer herders) of Finland.
It has long been PC dogma that hunter-gatherers around the world voluntarily adopted agriculture and became farmers.
This article is just one example of the general point that this appears to have only seldom been the case.
Most often, agriculturalists moved into an area and displaced the original inhabitants by virtue of their much greater potential population density. More fighters per square mile.
IOW, the American and Australian displacement of the natives was only repeating what had happended many times before in Indonesia, Africa (Bantus), and many other places. Now Scandinavia. This is not going to be popular with the PC types.
proving that in malmo
I thought you might find this of interest. ;)
Uff Da!
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Thanks decimon, Pharmboy & JennysCool. |
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Are the Lapps older or newer than the Germanic Nordics? If older, maybe they are the ones displaced.
Stone Age Skeletons Suggest Europe’s First Farmers Came From Southern Europe
An analysis of 5000-year-old DNA taken from the remains of four Stone Age humans excavated in Sweden is helping researchers understand how agriculture spread throughout Europe. According to Pontus Skoglund from Uppsala University in Sweden and colleagues, the practice of farming appears to have moved with migrants from southern to northern Europe.
Agricultural know-how wasn’t the only thing that early European farmers introduced to the region, though. Based on this ancient genetic data from Sweden, Skoglund and the other researchers suggest that Europe’s first farmers eventually mixed their genes with the hunter-gatherers who lived there—a relationship that set the stage for today’s modern European genome.
“We analyzed genetic data from two different cultures—one of hunter-gatherers and one of farmers—that existed around the same time, less than 400 kilometers (249 miles) away from each other,” said Skoglund. “After comparing our data to modern human populations in Europe, we found that the Stone Age hunter-gatherers were outside the genetic variation of modern populations but most similar to Finnish individuals, and that the farmer we analyzed closely matched Mediterranean populations.”
http://www.aaas.org/news/releases/2012/0426sp_agriculture.shtml
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