Denmark is homogeneous genetically

Angela

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See:
http://www.genetics.org/content/genetics/early/2016/08/15/genetics.116.189241.full.pdf


Denmark is homogeneous genetically.PNG

I think we sort of knew this. Small effective population size of the founding group and then a certain amount of breeding isolation since the last major migration is the cause?

DK_clusters_%2526_admix.jpg
 
I'd be inclined to believe it's genetic to a substantial degree. I've known quite a few people like that. From my perspective they don't have any more to be happy about than other people necessarily, and indeed they can be dealing with some major problems, yet they go on chirping merrily away. To be honest I always thought it showed lack of depth or intellect and found it extremely irritating until I met one of my dearest friends.

She's very bright indeed, but she definitely has this character trait. Even with her, I have to admit I can only take so much of it! Her ancestry goes against the trend, fwiw, as she is half Calabrese and half Abruzzese.

I also used to think that environmental factors like wealth affected it, but look at the Africans and many Latin Americans. They're poor as church mice, as the saying goes, and they're still happy.

I suppose in a way it's a benefit...the less stress you feel, the less ill you'll get, right?
 
It's a country of five millions inhabitans, kinda like the bigger Italian regions, so yes makes sense the genetically homogeneity.
 
I'd be inclined to believe it's genetic to a substantial degree. I've known quite a few people like that. From my perspective they don't have any more to be happy about than other people necessarily, and indeed they can be dealing with some major problems, yet they go on chirping merrily away. To be honest I always thought it showed lack of depth or intellect and found it extremely irritating until I met one of my dearest friends.

She's very bright indeed, but she definitely has this character trait. Even with her, I have to admit I can only take so much of it! Her ancestry goes against the trend, fwiw, as she is half Calabrese and half Abruzzese.

I also used to think that environmental factors like wealth affected it, but look at the Africans and many Latin Americans. They're poor as church mice, as the saying goes, and they're still happy.

I suppose in a way it's a benefit...the less stress you feel, the less ill you'll get, right?



Since you are Italian to my opinion some credit for Danes gene homogeneity goes to Romans. They had a strong army and kept anyone else out of Europe, and small ethnic groups like Danes, Swedish, English flourished. On the contrary south Europe because of geography had to face many invaders not always successfully.
 
Since you are Italian to my opinion some credit for Danes gene homogeneity goes to Romans. They had a strong army and kept anyone else out of Europe, and small ethnic groups like Danes, Swedish, English flourished. On the contrary south Europe because of geography had to face many invaders not always successfully.

I don't know what being Italian has to do with it. I probably have as much ancestry from the Ligures whom they enslaved as from the Romans.

The Romans didn't reach Denmark.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borde...a/File:Mapa_del_Confín_del_Imperio_Romano.gif

I'm sure they didn't give a damn who invaded Denmark or any other of the fringe northern countries. They were only interested in keeping the Danes, and the Germans, and anyone else from coming into the Empire.

It's sort of like the immigration crisis today. Europe doesn't really care if SSA people move into North Africa, or Afghanis and Syrians and Iraquis move to Turkey. They just don't want them in Europe.

At a certain point Rome also reached the limits of its resources and stopped expanding. There wasn't enough "treasure" in the Scotland of the time, or the northern German provinces, or wherever to justify the cost of conquering and pacifying them. They didn't know about all that North Sea oil and the coal in the Ruhr, nor did they have the technology to exploit them even had they known. :)

Imo, after years of studying it and continuing to read new papers and books as they come out, the biggest culprit in the fall of the Empire was climate change and the subsequent famine which put the Huns on the move and stampeded the Germans in front of them.

There were other factors, of course, but I think that was the "proximate" cause.

The death knell for the Eastern Empire was the plague which we've been discussing elsewhere. Everything else was just a mopping up exercise.

Sorry, I went a little off topic there.

I also don't know why you think no mass migrations reached northern Europe. First it was the Villabrunians, who created a massive shift in the genome (whether they came into Europe from the Near East or were a drifted population who formed in Greece or the Balkans, they weren't in northern Europe originally), almost wiping out the group which was the first to arrive. Then the farmers from the Near East arrived, which gave rise to the MN Cultures. Then you get the "Indo-Europeans", who were only a bit more than half EHG, and even the EHG arrived not long before the farmers. Much later the Slavs moved west quite a bit too.

I would say that's a rather remarkable series of mass migrations and population change.

In the south you have the same Villabruna and then farmer migrations. We got less affected by the Indo-Europeans, I think. The Balkans got hammered by the Slavs, but Italy and Spain didn't. Spain and southern Italy did experience some Moorish colonization, but that's miniscule in importance compared to the three major shifts we're talking about: Villabruna, Farmers, Indo-Europeans, and maybe even, for certain areas, the Slavic migrations.

It's a lot easier for migrants to walk or ride across nice flat plains than to brave the Mediterranean or mountains, you know. That's why to some degree mountains and seas are barriers to gene flow.
 

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