Topper wrote: ↑Tue Mar 25, 2025 5:04 pm
Anyone bothered getting DNA testing? Always seemed a weird idea to me. Who really gives a fuck?
DNA testing company, 23 and Me, has gone bankrupt, now concerns are what will become of their database and user info.
Bet your insurance company would be interested.
Yeah. Boring result. 93% Swedish, 7% Finnish. And when looking on a map, the Finnish part is from Pohjanmaa (Österbotten in Swedish, I think actually Ostrobothnia in official English).
Now, the map below shows Sweden in 1560. You basically recognise the modern outline, but as you can see Finland was mostly Swedish, the provinces of Jämtland, Härjedalen and Bohuslän that today are Swedish belonged to Norway and Halland and Skåne in the far south were Danish.
Now, in the upper part of the map you see Västerbotten and Österbotten facing eachother on opposite sides of the Gulf of Bothnia, which is the northernmost part of the Baltic Sea. There has always been vivid contacts between the two opposing coasts, and until the mid 15th century, these provinces were actually the same county! So this means that up till then the area that my Finnish genes suppsedly come from were not only within Sweden's borders, it was part of the county I grew up in!
How boring is that?
Same for my Swedish genes, they are all centred in northern Sweden.
And it makes sense. On my father's side I can trace my ancestors back to the 14th century, and they are almost all in Västerbotten. There are some from the provinces just noprth or south of it, but that's it. On my mother's side I can trace her family back to the 16th century in Ångermanland, th eprovince just south of Västerbotten, but one of the first in that lineage is a priest, who studied to become a priest at the Academy of Turku, in Finland, and his wife was Finnish. But almost certainly part of the Swedish speaking upper class there, because through her I can trace a lot of Finnish and German/Baltic nobility going back a few centuries further, ending up in the 13th century.
But yeah, for the last 500 years or so, everyone has been sitting put on the coastline of northern Sweden.
The only thing interesting is my Y-chromosome. More than 80% of Swedish men can trace their ancestry back in a straight line to three men that lived in Denmark or northern Germany in the bronze age. I don't.
Now, Scandinavia was originally populated by two groups of hunter gatherers. Western hunter gatherers came from the south as the ice retracted and eastern hunter gatherers followed the coastline from the Kola peninsula travelling west and then south along the Norwegian coast. When these groups met they became throroughly mixed within a few generations and created what we then call northern hunter gatherers. This group controlled all of the Nordic until neolithic farmers from Anatolia and the fertile crescent started to spread throughout Europe, the Middle East and northern Africa. In Denmark you had a complete population replacement, but on the Scandinavian peninsula the two groups, hunter-gatherers and farmers lived side by side in separate societies for millennia. Then in the late neolithic, just before the bronze age starts, two things happened. Most of the population in Europe was viped out by the plague, and the Yamnaya people arrived from the steppes of Russia and Ukraine. They brought the Indoeuropean languages with them and soon controlled all of Europe. Plus Persia and India etc.
Once again you have a complete population replacement in Denmark, but on the sparsely populated mostly forested Scandinavian peninsula there was more of a mixing with those that were already there. Then finally, in the late bronze age/early iron age nomades from Siberia and the Ural mountains entered Finland and also populated the northern part of the Scandinavian peninsula. They brought with them the Fenno-Ugric languages, such as Estonian, Finnish and Sami, but mixed with the population that was already there, so their descendants don't look much different from other Scandinavians.
Looking at the whole genome a typical Swede is roughly 40% Yamnaya, 40% neolithic farmer and 20% Nordic hunter gatherer (the Sami are a bit different, they are like 40% hunter gatherer and a quarter Siberian nomads, with a bit of neolithic farmer and Yamnaya thrown in for good measure).
But the Y chromosome haplogroups tell a different story. There are basically just three big haplogroups among Swedish men. just over 40% have I1d1, which is originally hunter-gatherer, but was picked up early on by the Yamnaya. Then there are some 20% that have R1a1a, which is Yamnaya, and R1a haplogroups totally dominate eastern Europe, and another 20% that have R1b1a2a1a1, also Yamnaya, and the R1b-groups totally dominate western Europe. Then there's just over 5% that have N1, mostly Finns and Sami, which is a haplogroup with Siberian roots. And then there is a scattering of others.
I have G2a, which is a neolithic farmer haplogroup, carried by less than 1% of Swedes, but it confirms that my genealogy back to an old seal hunter in northern Västerbotten in the 15th century is correct. It is the same haplogroup as Ötzi the ice man had and it i still fairly common in eg Sardinia, which is the place in Europe that the Yamnaya somehow missed. Their dna is still pretty much like that in neolithic Europe before the invasion from the steppes.
If you look at this map you can see how the Yamnaya R1b haplogroup completely dominates in eg Spain, Wales, Ireland and Scotland, and is more than 50% throughout Western Europe, while R1a (also from the Yamnaya) is dominant in eg Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Poland. The N1 haplogroup of Siberian origin is quite common in Finland, the Baltics and Russia.
And somehow the hunter-gatherer I1 Y chromosome stayed popular in Scandinavia and Germany and then through the vikings had a comeback elsewhere in Europe.
It is odd that more than 40% of Swedish men have a hunter-gatherer Y chromosome when only 20% of our entire genome comes from that group, but they speculate that when crops failed and maybe when the plague struck, hunter gatherers were less affected and that some men from that group became leaders of farming communities and took over. It may also have been that the Yamnaya killed all the male farmers, and that many of the women who were spared hooked up with hunter-gatherers, whose nomadic lifestyle in the forests saved them, rather then the invaders. But it is all speculation. We don't really know what happened. We don't even know for sure if the plague came before the Yamnaya, and they just took over empty territory, or if it came with them, and they were immune to it, but it helped them wipe out the neolithic farmers. Kind of like most Indians in North America dided from diseases the European settlers brought and not from bullets.