New preprint papers on Finland’s population history and disease, skin pigmentation in Africa, and genetic variation in Thailand hunter-gatherers

finland-genetics

New and interesting research these days in BioRxiv:

Haplotype sharing provides insights into fine-scale population history and disease in Finland, by Martín et al. (2017):

Finland provides unique opportunities to investigate population and medical genomics because of its adoption of unified national electronic health records, detailed historical and birth records, and serial population bottlenecks. We assemble a comprehensive view of recent population history (≤100 generations), the timespan during which most rare disease-causing alleles arose, by comparing pairwise haplotype sharing from 43,254 Finns to geographically and linguistically adjacent countries with different population histories, including 16,060 Swedes, Estonians, Russians, and Hungarians.

Read the rest “New preprint papers on Finland’s population history and disease, skin pigmentation in Africa, and genetic variation in Thailand hunter-gatherers”

Another hint at the role of Corded Ware peoples in spreading Uralic languages into north-eastern Europe, found in mtDNA analysis of the Finnish population

corded-ware-migration-yamna

Open article at Scientific Reports (Nature): Identification and analysis of mtDNA genomes attributed to Finns reveal long-stagnant demographic trends obscured in the total diversity, by Översti et al. (2017).

Of special interest is its depiction of Finland’s past as including the expansion of Corded Ware population of mtDNA U5b1b2 (and probably Y-DNA R1a-M417 subclades), most likely Uralic speakers of the Forest Zone, to the north of the Yamna culture (where Late Proto-Indo-European was spoken).

A later expansion of other subclades – particularly Y-DNA N1c -, was probably associated with the later western expansion of the Eurasian Seima-Turbino phenomenonRead the rest “Another hint at the role of Corded Ware peoples in spreading Uralic languages into north-eastern Europe, found in mtDNA analysis of the Finnish population”